The impact of a wellness program on burnout, commitment, turnover, and life satisfaction

While wellness programs have been shown to reduce health care costs and absenteeism, there has been little research on how wellness programs impact work attitudes. The author predicted that the employees at an organization with a wellness programs would experience less burnout, greater life satisfaction, greater affective organizational commitment and less turnover intention. Participants were from two Midwestern manufacturing companies, one with a wellness program and one without a wellness program. The author surveyed 152 employees at the former company and 44 employees at the latter company. The author did not find any significant differences between the two companies on any of the four dependent variables. These initial results suggested that there are organizational factors other than having a wellness program that have a greater impact on employees' affective organizational commitment, life satisfaction, burnout and turnover intention. However, a significant difference in life satisfaction was found at the company with a wellness program between the employees participating in the wellness program and the employees not participating in the wellness program. For companies that care, it is an added benefit that wellness programs may also enhance employees' life satisfaction. However, because these findings are correlational, the author cannot make any causal conclusions.