Hiring employees used to mean you just had to find the best talent. Now, for a growing number of employers, hiring and managing staff also means monitoring health behaviors. Beginning in 2010, for example, the State of Alabama will charge overweight state employees an extra $25 per month for health insurance. In Indiana, Clarian Health System this year will charge its employees $30 every two weeks if they fail to meet guidelines for weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

You can hardly blame these organizations for trying to do something to control healthcare costs, but we wonder about the implications of this strategy both from a marketing/PR viewpoint, as well as a broader business perspective.

In marketing and PR, we like to talk about the credibility of your messages, which supports the credibility of your overall brand. You rarely achieve credibility with negative reinforcement, such as penalizing overweight employees with higher costs. Questions of fairness abound: is the ten-pound-overweight employee charged the same $25 as the 100-pound overweight employee? Staffers might also reasonably ask: "if my boss thinks my weight is costing the company, where does he or she tip the scales?" This is a PR embarrassment waiting to happen.

From a broader perspective, we wonder about programs that focus just on the "end product" (in this case, an overweight employee). When a manufacturer produces a defective unit, it looks at the entire process from raw material to final product to see what went wrong. When a medical error occurs, hospital administrators don't look just at the nurse who might have given the wrong medication, they look at the entire series of events, decisions, and personnel that might have contributed.

People don't wake up fat one day. Obesity is often the end result of many external factors over a multitude of years: schools without gym class; the lure of sedentary entertainment like video games, computers, and television; desk-bound jobs; communities that practically require using a car to get anywhere; and the constant bombardment of millions of dollars of advertising for high-fat, instant gratification foods. Personal responsibility is part of it, of course, but we suspect that earlier generations weren't necessarily more virtuous—they just didn't have all the opportunities for obesity we have, nor were the forces of "anti-fitness" as strong as they are today.

In marketing, you sell the benefits. We think a better strategy for employers would be to reward those employees who maintain healthy physical standards, or who enroll in programs to slim down or quit smoking. Don't charge the overweight employee more—charge the fit employee less, and make it easy for all employees to get fit.

In fact, such a strategy was included in the Healthy Workforce Act, a bill introduced in the last Congress and expected to be reintroduced this year. The bill would offer tax credits to employers offering fitness programs for workers. It's easy to understand the frustration of employers over healthcare costs. A "fat tax" on employees might feel like an easy fix, but we would encourage taking a more positive approach.