Achieving and measuring positive returns on an investment made in a wellness program requires a delicate balancing act, benefit managers and wellness experts said.

During the planning stages and periodically over the life of a wellness program, benefit managers must ensure their senior-level executives understand and are willing accommodate the level of strategic flexibility necessary to realize a sustained financial benefit from a wellness program.

At the same time, benefit managers must also factor their financial officers' need to justify the company's investment to directors and shareholders — often on an annual basis — into their wellness program's design and reporting structures.

“Too often, you have companies saying yay or nay after only a year, when it really is a three-year-plus investment if you want to see any real financial benefits,” said Merry DeMartino, executive vice president of talent development at San Diego-based Event Network Inc., an operator of museum gift stores.

In the first place, experts said benefit managers should take care to temper expectations when advocating for an investment in wellness programming based on its potential to generate financial value for the company. Specifically, benefit managers must be clear with senior executives about the time it takes — three to five years in most cases, experts said — to effect meaningful changes in an employee population's health outcomes or behavior.

Additionally, experts said, senior executives should know from the outset that the program will need to be tweaked and adjusted along the way to better suit the unique needs of an employer's individual workforce, which could drive up the total cost of the program well before its value potential is fully realized.

Absent that level of clarity, and given the considerable amount of money companies often invest in comprehensive wellness programming, experts said it is not uncommon for benefit managers to find themselves under immense pressure to provide evidence of a demonstrable effect on their company's bottom line.

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“You need to think of yourself as a strategic partner in helping the company manage a major cost,” said Bruce Elliott, compensation and benefits manager for the Alexandria, Va.-based Society for Human Resources Management. “When a company makes an investment in wellness, there's always that pressure to demonstrate an immediate return on investment in order to justify the investment. The finance guys are going to say, 'We'll give you $10,000 for this program, what are we going to get back?' If all you can say is, 'A healthier workforce,' they're going to say, 'So what?'”

One way benefit managers can bridge the gap between the onset of a wellness program and the point at which the program begins to generate a measurable impact on their company's health care costs, experts said, is to establish intermediate benchmarks using employee engagement surveys conducted at the beginning of each program year.

“Success and return on investment can be defined a lot of different ways, depending on the specific company,” said Laurel Pickering, president and CEO of the New York-based Northeast Business Group on Health. With the right program design, benefit managers should be able to demonstrate year-over-year improvements on indirect cost drivers such as employee turnover, presenteeism and disputes between co-workers, she said.

“Obviously, there are hard-dollar measurements tied to employee health outcomes, which are hard to measure, but it can be done over time,” Ms. Pickering said. “But some companies might feel like they've gotten a return on their investment in the first couple of years if morale is better, job satisfaction increases, or even if they got good participation results.”

After the initial rollout, benefit managers can further expand their ability to meet their financial officer's needs for proof of its value by correlating engagement data with business-relevant production and/or operational metrics highlighting direct and indirect effects on the company's overall profitability. In doing so, experts said, benefit managers can obtain a greater working knowledge of their company's strategic goals, increasing their wellness program's chances of sustaining executive-level commitment as well as its ability to assist in the pursuit of broader corporate objectives.

Designing a wellness program that focuses not only on improving health outcomes but also productivity outcomes, Mr. Elliott, of the human resources management trade group, said, “forces the benefits executive and the HR executive to really understand the business and understand what makes the business tick. It's another way for you to transition yourself from being a transactional partner to being a strategic partner.”