Diet, Exercise, and Logging Off? Rethinking Employee Wellness

Almost every large organization is trying to get employees to adopt healthful habits. Managers have long known that healthier employees are more productive, loyal, and, frankly, less expensive, given that healthy behaviors can lead to lower health care costs. Given the steeply rising cost of providing health insurance benefits, more companies have experimented with paying employees to start healthy habits. Adobe’s wellness reimbursement program compensates employees up to $360 each year for gym memberships, bike-share programs, fitness classes, massages, nutritional counseling, and more. Google has gone so far as to build out most of these amenities directly onsite at its main campuses.

These organizations have a promising opportunity to broaden the types of wellness efforts in which they’re investing. Existing programs’ definitions of “healthy habits” are generally woefully limited to “diet and exercise.” While physical activity and nutrition are surely two significant factors affecting health (and insurance-related expenses to self-funded employers), such a narrow view misses myriad lifestyle choices we make every day that drastically affect our health. Social media use continues to be an ever more salient example.

A growing body of research confirms that the joys of social media come with drawbacks directly related to well-being, including disrupted sleep patterns, heightened anxiety, and increased depression. Managers can’t shove this aside by categorizing employees’ online activity as starkly unrelated to work. Depression is the leading cause of disability inside and outside of the workplace, and rising generations of employees are particularly susceptible to health issues fueled by social media use.

New Research on Social Media Deactivation

To see the value of nudging employees to think carefully about how they use social media, consider a recent experiment conducted by researchers at Stanford and New York University, which found that paying participants about $100 to deactivate Facebook for four weeks reduced their overall online activities, increased their offline activities, and increased mental health measurements.

The research team recruited over 2,000 participants through Facebook ads, asking them baseline questions about their well-being, and had half of them deactivate their profiles. When the researchers checked back in with the participants about their well-being and their time use after a month, the results were striking: There were significant improvements in well-being, in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety, among the deactivators.

Overall, deactivation improved participants’ social well-being scores by 0.09 standard deviations, which is equivalent to the subjective well-being increase produced by $30,000 in additional income. Deactivating Facebook freed up 60 minutes per day for the average person in the experimental group. They actually spent less time on non-Facebook social media and other online activities overall. They also started devoting more time to offline activities such as spending time with friends and family.

The researchers checked back in with participants several weeks after the experiment had ended. Even though they were no longer being financially compensated, the participants who had deactivated their Facebook accounts were using the Facebook mobile app about 25% less than the control group, were more likely to have uninstalled the app from their phones, generally used the platform more judiciously, and were more open to information about tools to limit social media usage. Nine weeks after the experiment ended, some participants had yet to reactivate their accounts.

In short, people learned that they enjoyed life without Facebook more than they had anticipated, even after they were no longer being compensated for deactivation. This suggests that people don’t need continual compensation to stop a detrimental behavior; however long it takes for them to gain awareness of their behavior — and experience the benefits of changing it — is sufficient.

Rethinking Workplace Wellness

Managers who choose or influence their organization’s health insurance plans should look beyond traditional plan elements to assess which insurers are taking a holistic view of health and the multifaceted behaviors that affect it, beyond diet and exercise. Employers and managers can play a critical role in influencing our social media use. Compensating social media deactivation would be the most obvious implementation; if that’s financially infeasible, consider a campaign like “Social-Media-Free February” to mirror “Dry January.”

Similarly, managers should not overlook their own role in the macro forces making social media deactivation so effective. British economist and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton’s work on the root causes of “deaths of despair” — mortality resulting from suicide or substance abuse — highlights a slow but crushing erosion of traditional social fabrics. Deaton highlights how people have lost the sense of meaning and belonging that used to be found in institutions of church, family, and unsurprisingly, work. Managers should keep in mind that for many, the workplace is a key source of offline human connection; how they foster or discourage that connection can affect employee well-being.

Of course, for many organizations, thinking at all beyond diet and exercise, or premiums and copays, will be a big leap. Still, managers concerned about the future of employee well-being should adopt a broader and more accurate definition of health. Recent research suggests that health and its associated costs are multifaceted. How organizations approach employee health should be too.