It’s official: No new EEOC rules in place by January.

Prior to a few days ago, there were competing visions about whether the EEOC would publish new rules by January, preserving the “safe harbor” to prevent employee lawsuits, or whether they were going to miss the deadline or pass altogether. As is invariably the case when we say the opposite of what a wellness vendor says, our vision won the competition. We predicted this would happen, while Bravo Wellness, taking the lead in attempting to protect the forced-wellness revenue stream, accused us of spreading “rumors, chatter and fiction,” by accurately predicting this would happen.

The EEOC are a smart and committed group. Knowing what they know now about the outcomes and harms of wellness, there is no way they would rush into writing rules forcing employees to submit to unregulated programs run by unlicensed vendors on unwilling subjects, given the tremendous failure rate of these programs, especially following the expose of deceptive and harmful industry practices.

The implications will be covered in Quizzify’s webinar Wednesday May 16: The Pending EEOC Wellness Rule Changes: How Quizzify turns Lemons into Lemonade 

To cut to the chase, the only — and it looks like we do mean only — safe harbor available come January will be Quizzify’s. Otherwise, if you have a “pry, poke and prod” program with high penalties or incentives, you will be open to employee lawsuits because there will be no new rules by then.

The only thing the EEOC will have by January is the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.  It will then take a while after that before the rules are actually proposed, and then commented upon, and then implemented.

Or, you could solve everything, right now, by offering Quizzify’s employee health education curriculum side by side with your existing wellness program. You’ve taken health risk assessments. Now play some Quizzify questions right on the home page. How can an employee learn more from the former than the latter? (Plus as noted, advice on HRAs is often if not usually wrong.)

Register at the link above for more information.