Would a free water bottle convince you to get a COVID vaccine?

Good afternoon, readers.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t start off our missive today with a shoutout to our upcoming virtual Brainstorm Health conference. Upcoming, as in tomorrow and Wednesday.

A typically star-studded lineup of business executives and health care experts will be participating in our conversations. We’re talking the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the heads of CVS Health and Abbott, the chiefs of Cardinal Health, Gilead Sciences, and Amgen. And a whole lot more. Yeah, it’s not too shabby.

We’ll have plenty of coverage of what’re bound to be fascinating conversations and panels over the next few days. But I want to focus on a slightly different kind of enticement today: How to incentivize workers to get immunized against COVID-19.

This is a bit of a tease because I’ll have a more in-depth piece on this soon. But I spoke with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), one of the largest human resources organizations around, on the state of employer incentives for getting a COVID vaccine. As it turns out, some companies are relying on, well, gift cards, free shirts, and water bottles.

“You know, someone had said to me, T-shirts and water bottles, I don’t know that I’d be motivated to get a vaccine if I didn’t want one” with those particular incentives, says Amber Clayton, director of SHRM’s Knowledge Center. “It’s basically going to be gifting those who really were already thinking about getting the vaccine and they are planning to get the vaccine. It may not be a large enough incentive for someone who is on the fence.”

The federal government is expected to issue renewed guidance on vaccination incentives in the next week or two. It’s a tricky subject given the need to balance workplace safety and employee privacy, as I’ll detail in my upcoming piece. But it’s going to be critical for businesses across the country to know what’s appropriate, what’s effective, and what crosses the regulatory line.

Read on for the day’s news, and tune in for Brainstorm Health coverage tomorrow and Wednesday. And while you’re at it, make sure to check out our new Fortune Education platform and its inaugural ranking of online MBA programs.

Sy Mukherjee
sy.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

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