Hy-Vee Inc. expected to have about 200 teams across its seven-state marketing area sign up to participate in a companywide wellness program, but instead, it has 700 teams with a total of 5,000 participants. It just might have something to do with the $10,000 prize the supermarket chain is offering the winning team.

Hy-Vee is one of many companies across Iowa participating in Lighten Up Iowa, a program sponsored by the Iowa Games, Iowa State University Extension and the Iowa Department of Public Health. Lately, several companies based in Greater Des Moines have shifted more attention to promoting employee wellness, partly because having a healthier workforce helps reduce health-insurance costs.

“We do think that having employees adopt healthier lifestyles and lose weight will contribute to a reduction in costs to our benefit plan,” said Ruth Comer, Hy-Vee’s assistant vice president of communications. “We are self-insured, so whatever costs we incur, those are the costs that our rates are based on. Down the road, everyone can see the benefits of improving health in the workforce by lower costs to our benefits plan.”

For several years, Hy-Vee battled double-digit health-insurance premium increases, Comer said. Last year, the company asked employees to take a close look at their use of medical services and what each person could do to improve his or her health. As a result, Hy-Vee’s health-insurance costs stayed level this year. Now the company wants to build on its recent success with more cost-containment efforts, and the Lighten Up Iowa program fits well with this goal, Comer said.

“The employees have the recent experience of knowing that their choices have an effect on what they pay and what the company pays,” Comer said. “We have had many people thank us for the opportunity to get on a program that encourages weight loss and healthy habits.”

Now in its third year, Lighten Up Iowa added a Company Leader Board for 2005 to encourage employers across the state to host workplace wellness competitions with teams of two to 10 people participating in weight-loss or cumulative-activity categories. Kim Nanke, the Iowa Games’ special-events coordinator, said corporate involvement this year has “skyrocketed” participation in Lighten Up Iowa, which started in January and runs until June.

“Last year, we had about 11,000 people involved in the program, and this year we have more than 19,000,” Nanke said. “We recruited companies to get involved this year because there are great opportunities for team building and increased likelihood of success when wellness is promoted where people spend the majority of their day.”

Like Hy-Vee, Communications Data Services Inc. wanted to offer more employee-wellness opportunities, but struggled with how to serve its six Iowa facilities along with its two out-of-state locations. Last year, the company, which is also self-insured, initiated a walking program called Club Ped, and this month, it launched a yearlong version of that program called “To the Moon.” The overall goal for CDS participants is to collectively walk the distance of two round-trips to the moon, according to Meg Zierke, a communications specialist for CDS. That adds up to 1 million miles or 2 billion steps.

“It’s a flexible program that works for virtually anybody, requires little equipment and can be done anyplace,” Zierke said. “Even though it’s a walking program, we realize that there are other activities that people do – like playing basketball, doing yoga and swimming – that can’t be counted on a pedometer. Our wellness committee has assigned step values to about any activity you can think of so that this program recognizes different people’s exercise choices.”

So far, more than a third of CDS’s 3,000 employees have signed up for the To the Moon program. The company’s employees in Des Moines will soon have on-site fitness areas to help them meet their exercise goals, first with a room where they can do aerobics from fitness videos, followed by an equipment area, according to CDS President Chris Holt.

“An investment in wellness programs pays off in the long run if we can identify those at-risk people and help them change their lifestyle, exercise and eating habits to promote a healthier way of life,” Holt said. “By reducing those major claims and hopefully saving lives, it’s a win-win for the company and the employee.”

CDS and Hy-Vee are offering incentives to employees who participate in the wellness programs, each with a grand prize and smaller awards along the way. Each member of Hy-Vee’s top Lighten Up Iowa team will receive a $1,000 shopping spree, and the company will refund each employee’s $10 registration cost if he or she completes the program. At CDS, each employee who meets a minimum requirement of 200,000 steps will be eligible for entry into a grand-prize drawing for a trip for two to Walt Disney World.

Companies that work with health benefits are also beefing up their wellness programs. Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which already had a number of wellness initiatives throughout the year, has 34 teams signed up for Lighten Up Iowa, according to Angela Feig, a spokeswoman for the company. Employees can earn company “Wellbucks” – points that accumulate for prizes and special Well for Life (fitness center) classes –based on how much exercising they do, Feig said.

“We do a lot with wellness, and a few years ago, we compared 1,000 Wellmark staff members in our wellness program to a statistically matched group of non-participants, and we found that our staff members who were more fit and ate right had lower medical costs related to chronic lifestyle conditions and used less sick leave,” Feig said. “It all ties back to your corporate bottom line.”

Holmes Murphy & Associates Inc. also wants its employees to channel what they’ve learned about health insurance and wellness into practicing healthy behaviors.

Holmes Murphy has 19 teams from its West Des Moines headquarters signed up for Lighten Up Iowa, as well as teams at each of its other eight offices. The company’s CEO, Doug Reichardt, is encouraging competition by offering a “big prize,” according to Michele Hanna, the vice president of marketing for Holmes Murphy.

“The competition has been really well-received by our employees, and part of that is a top-down effect from our CEO being a big proponent of wellness and fitness in the workplace,” Hanna said.

Because they work for a benefits provider, Holmes Murphy’s employees are keyed in to companies’ struggles with managing health-care costs, as demonstrated by a buzz right now for new tools such as health savings accounts, which pass on more responsibility to employees, Hanna said.

“As a company, we promote taking personal responsibility for your health and well-being, as things are changing in the insurance industry to shift more responsibility to the employee,” Hanna said. “The Lighten Up Iowa program gets employees thinking about their role in taking charge of their health.”

Regardless of the effect on these companies’ bottom lines, having employees feel better about themselves makes programs such as these a success, according to Amanda Van Ommen, one of Hy-Vee’s registered dietitians and food technologists in the quality control department.

“I’ve had employees e-mail me and say that they look and feel 100 percent better,” she said. “We’ve heard good stories about people eating fruit and yogurt during breaks, instead of doughnuts. They might take part of their lunch break to walk.

“The atmosphere of support and encouragement has been great in the workplace,” she said, “and even though there’s only one grand prize winner, everybody who takes on the program is a winner.”

Winning by losing

When 2005’s Lighten Up Iowa program began in January, the 19,319 participants weighed in at a total of 2.66 million pounds. At the halfway point, they’ve lost 46,306 pounds – a modest 1.7 percent. Last year’s statewide winning team from Davenport finished the entire program with a collective 17 percent loss.

In the cumulative activity division, Lighten Up competitors have recorded 1.28 million miles through running, walking and other activities.

Lighten Up Iowa began as a statewide program in 2003. In its first two years, 20,000 participants logged 4.8 million miles of activity and lost 65,000 pounds.

Another program, Go the Distance, is a four-month competition for students. In 2004, the first year the program was offered, 2,837 Iowa youths on 1,150 teams logged more than 600,000 miles.