Helping New Jersey small businesses engage employees in wellness programs

The Foundation's program, New Jersey Health Initiatives, was designed to support projects in New Jersey that develop new approaches to resolving the state's health care needs, focusing on the Foundation's goal areas.This grant provides partial support to the Employers Association of New Jersey (EANJ) to develop a free toolkit to help its 800 small-business members provide on-site employee health and wellness programs. Collectively, small businesses are the largest employer in New Jersey, but individual companies lack sufficient staff size to potentially mitigate high increases in health insurance premiums by engaging their employees in wellness programs. Legal questions concerning employee privacy and concerns about the potential discrimination claims--in collecting employee health information required to develop workplace health and wellness programs--are also major obstacles. The EANJ online toolkit will help identify wellness programs by size of employer and will contain information on best practices, e-mail access to experts, model policies, suggestions on engaging employees, and survey data. A return-on-investment calculator in the toolkit will permit an employer to input basic data on workforce demographics; chose a suitable wellness program; estimate the cost of the strategy, minus any tax incentives; and calculate return on investment (e.g., lower insurance premiums). The toolkit will also contain a Legal Compliance Guidance feature (capable of providing real-time legal advice from the EANJ staff) and an Employer Community feature (dedicated to employee engagement and the exchange of best practices).

Grant Details

Amount Awarded $20,000.00

Awarded on: 8/9/2011

Time frame: 9/1/2011 - 8/31/2012

Grant Number: 69257