Wall Street wellness programmes are now being used to drive sales
new york — When Lance Hulack calls his first client on Monday morning, they spend 15 minutes talking about their fitness trackers. “I’ll say ‘Hey, I saw you crushed it on Saturday! 25-k steps!,’” Hulack, the director of corporate sales at ING Group, says. “Then we talk about what we need to do work-wise: ‘What are you looking to hedge? What levels are you looking at?’ It’s a really good icebreaker rather than talking business all the time.”
This kind of health-awareness is clearly good for Hulack, and certainly not new to the corporate landscape. What’s new is that he’s also convincing his clients to do the same.
Most companies use wellness programmes to lower health insurance costs; ING wants employees to get healthy in a bid to drive sales. Not only do 350 members of the sales team obsessively track their fitness, the financial services firm has signed up 35 clients to participate, too. The idea isn’t just that healthier employees will perform better, but that wellness can build customer loyalty, too.
“This is embedded in our business strategy,” said Mark Pieter de Boer, global head of financial markets sales at ING. “Our programme is focused on one thing, which is achieving growth. I’m not interested in cost savings.”
The sales people at ING no longer have individual revenue targets. Instead, each person wearing a tracker gets a “wellness quotient,” a number between zero and 1,000 that claims to measure the participant’s current state of wellbeing. The healthier a person gets, the higher the number climbs, and in theory, the better a worker they become. Hulack’s WQ has gone from 560 to 588 in just a few weeks, but he still trails his boss: De Boer is up to 655. (The programme isn’t mandatory, ING says, adding that it doesn’t collect individual data.)
Many wellness programmes, an umbrella term for a variety of workplace health initiatives, don’t have a good return on investment, studies have found. Nevertheless, health and productivity are linked, which can result in cost savings. Sick employees don’t come to work, and when they do, they don’t perform very well — phenomena known as absenteeism and presenteeism, respectively. One 2009 study of 50,000 workers at 10 companies found that lost productivity due to absenteeism and presenteeism cost 2.3 times more than medical and pharmacy costs for sick workers.