Why Your Wellness Survey Isn't Working: A Landmark JAMA Study
By FairShare Team · · 3 min read
If your department has run a wellness survey, distributed a wellness app subscription, or hosted a wellness lunch-and-learn and wondered why burnout numbers didn't budge, there's a specific, rigorous study that explains why — and it's worth reading before commissioning the next one.
Published in JAMA in 2019, this study is the first large-scale, multisite, peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial of a modern workplace wellness program. Researchers implemented an eight-module program (covering nutrition, physical activity, and stress reduction) across 160 worksites at a U.S. retail company, comparing 20 treatment worksites (over 4,000 employees) against 140 control worksites (nearly 29,000 employees) over 18 months.
The result
Employees at wellness-program worksites did report healthier self-described behaviors — more exercise, better self-reported weight management. But on every measured clinical and economic outcome — blood pressure, cholesterol, absenteeism, job performance, healthcare spending — there was no statistically significant difference between the treatment and control groups after 18 months.
This wasn't a fringe or poorly designed study. It's widely cited precisely because it was the first study of its kind rigorous enough to actually test the claim, rather than rely on the kind of self-selected, before-and-after comparisons that inflated earlier wellness-industry ROI figures (a related finding noted that employees who voluntarily joined similar programs were already, on average, cheaper to insure before the program even started — a selection effect, not a program effect).
None of this means wellness efforts are worthless. It means a program built around individual behavior modules — the pizza-and-a-pamphlet model — is not well-supported by the best available evidence as a way to move the underlying numbers that actually matter to a department: burnout, retention, and cost. The research consistently points at structural conditions — schedules, fairness, staffing, autonomy — instead.
Source
- Song Z, Baicker K. Effect of a Workplace Wellness Program on Employee Health and Economic Outcomes: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2019;321(15):1491–1501.