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Virgin Motivates 'Miles' of Healthy Behaviors
August 13, 2008
By Alex Palmer
Though a voyage on Virgin's new luxury spaceship would certainly be a nice incentive, the company's wellness incentive program, Virgin HealthMiles offers something slightly more useful to the average employer. That's not to say HealthMiles, which awards "miles" and discounts to participants for healthy behavior, is lacking in ambition. As with most things Virgin, this program aims to be a little sleeker and a little grander than typical wellness incentive offerings.
"Most of the health incentives in the market are transactional incentives: 'Do your Health Risk Assessment and get this, do your coaching, get that," says Chris Boyce, CEO of Virgin HealthMiles. "What's important to me is building out more ways of earning because then it’s a richer program."
Using everything from pedometers to heart monitors to flash drives, participants track how often, how long and how intense they exercise, racking up miles into their account as they become more active. Employers that sponsor the program in their office can put in kiosks where employees can weigh themselves or check biometrics like heart rate and body mass index (BMI). Boyce emphasizes that the company tries to keep things as scientific as possible, to help Virgin's corporate clients to better assess the impact the HealthMiles program is having, but also because seeing quantifiable improvements is more fun for the individual participant.
"If you can get somebody active, you've got them playing the game," says Boyce. "So instead of just 'I did my HRA once this year, I do it again next year,' the real credit is the things I do everyday to maintain my health. We have multiple ways of giving incentives to them and multiple partners in giving those incentives to them, and both of them touch the consumers, which equals a more active person in this process."
Corporations can decide which behaviors they want to reward and can even extend membership to employees' family members. In addition to the basic measure-and-reward interface, HealthMiles can incorporate sweepstakes where participants are entered to win a large reward, as well as challenges where teams or individuals within the company can compete with one another.
Shands Jacksonville Medical Center, with 3,500 employees located in Jacksonville, FL, recently embraced Virgin HealthMiles as a way to bring several of its health incentive offerings under one program. They found them to be progressive and particularly promising for bringing employees onboard that weren’t participating in existing programs. Emory Cook, the director of human resources programs for Shands Jacksonville, describes the program as providing a lot of energy to the staff and he believes it looks likely to have strong staying power.
"It's kind of a benchmark of everything that we're doing, and everything seems to pivot off this opportunity to provide an incentive for employees to get engaged, get active and work toward getting better," says Cook.
Employees who use their company-issued pedometer and use one of the three in-office kiosks to measure their progress each month have the opportunity to earn HealthMiles and redeem them for up to $400 a year in gift cards at about 50 different merchants. The company has 63 percent participation since beginning the program in January 2007 and has seen a distinct improvement in the biometrics ratings, including a decrease in the portion of employees in the "obese" BMI category. According to Virgin’s report, every dollar the company invested in the program, they received $5.97 in savings from medical and productive improvements.
In addition to the gift card and cash rewards for redeeming their health miles, Virgin has gotten 400 retailers including Target, Expedia and Hotels.com involved as sponsors offering things like 6 percent cash-back for a purchase. With a wide range of ways to earn miles, and a wide range of ways to redeem them, Virgin is aiming for a bigger and better wellness incentive program.
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