Magic Wand Survey Results

During this round of our Incentive Program challenges, we conducted a simple survey with the following single question:

“If you could wave a magic wand and improve one specific aspect of your personal health and/or well-being, what would it be?”

Thus far, we’ve received over a thousand responses to this question! If you provided one of those responses, thank you for contributing! We thought we would share some of the initial results during this post, and follow that up with some insights later.

After reading through all your answers, Cristin and I each took a separate sample of 100 responses, and grouped them into categories. The following chart shows the Top 10 categories that emerged, and the number of times each was reported. Keep in mind this is a sample size of 200.

For us, there were no real shockers as far as the emerging themes. Nearly 1 in 4 people wanted to wave a magic wand and either lose weight or lose fat. Wishes for more consistent exercise and better eating habits landed at 2 and 3, respectively.

At number 4, we were a little surprised, and perhaps pleasantly so, to see so many people focusing on their overall attitude or mental outlook, and wanting to keep their thoughts positive. Hopefully, with the onset of daylight savings time, more sun, and warmer temps, we can all get a little boost from Mother Nature in this category.

There were a couple of things we were surprised did not come up more often, especially stress, although stress can be related to work/life balance, which was the 6th most mentioned category in our sample.

Another way we looked at the aggregate data was with the word cloud function that Survey Monkey provides. This word cloud represents the most commonly used words in all the responses, with the size of the word representing the frequency with which a word was mentioned. 

These visuals are a couple of tools to better understand what our Montana University System employee population is “wishing” for when it comes to better overall health and well-being. For now, and for the sake of brevity, we’ll let these results speak for themselves. Next week, look for a follow-up post where we offer some insights on how to utilize this question, and share some anonymous individual responses that we liked!

Be Well!

Neal & Cristin