This week on T3 I take a look at wearable technology Fitbit, but not from the actual wearable tech perspective, but from their health wellness tech solution. Fitbit Group Health was developed specifically to support organizations that have decided to use the power of wearable tech to help their employees reach their wellness goals.

I was drawn to this tech because seemingly everyone knows the brand Fitbit. As an experienced HR pro, I’ve learned that the path of least resistance is critical when getting employee adoption of any HR program! Meaning, if my employees are already Fitbit fans, why would I fight the momentum!?

Fitbit has been around for a while now and because of this they’ve been able to do some long term studies with large organizations using their wearable tech and run side by side control groups to find out what impact this wearable tech has on wellness from a cost perspective, and it’s quite stunning!

Fitbit Group Health recently released a study that shows year over year results can reduce your overall healthcare spend by almost 25%! The study compared one group of employees with the Dayton Transit Authority (bus drivers who sit almost all day) with a control group of the same employees not wearing the Fitbit tech. For one year they followed this group and the group wearing the Fitbit incurred 24.5% less per person average overall healthcare cost as compared to the control group.

Fitbit’s own data amongst all their corporate users is showing similar great reductions across 2.6 million users in 70 of the Fortune 500. Wearing the tech leads to more active lifestyles and better health outcomes. Makes sense, right? Get your employees moving more and crazy enough they get healthier.

What I really like about Fitbit Group Health:

• Employees already like Fitbit and are wearing Fitbit. This makes is super easy to gain adoption.

• Fitbit Group Health makes it easy for you as an employer to supplement the cost of buying individual Fitbits and setting up a site just for your organization for employees to purchase the technology.

• The Fitbit Group Health technology gives you a dashboard to track employee usage, set up contests and message individuals and groups of employees. The metrics you receive in HR allows you to track your own results and tie it back to cost savings.

• It’s proven outcomes and reduction of cost over many industries, blue collar and white collar, fully supplemented, partial supplemented and non-supplemented. It doesn’t matter, it works!

• It’s scalable and can easily be tested in an organization at the department level, location, etc.

What you’ll find is you already have Fitbit fans in your organization and you’ll easily be able to make some new fans, but you’ll also be able to drive a culture of wellness with employees supporting each other.

We all know the struggle of getting high adoption of wellness in our organizations. I think Fitbit Group Health is providing a great model of getting your employees moving and supporting each other. The fact is, that small thing, can give every organization huge positive results!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great HR, recruiting, and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.