Health And Wellness In The WorkplaceHealth And Wellness In The Workplace

Program evaluation may be The previous step, but it must be planned at the beginning of your efforts!  Evaluation helps you identify what parts of the program are working well and what parts could use improvement.  Then, based on the evaluation data, adjustments are able to be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the program based on evaluation data is vital to its continued performance.  

Evaluating your program need not be terribly complex.  However, it is important to plan how you will oversee your wellness efforts and determine effectiveness during the planning phase or Step 5.  Also keep in mind to evaluate the program based on the goals/objectives you already identified during your drafting process.  

In order to evaluate your program you need to have a system to document specifics as you progress.  This can be as simple as maintaining file folders on programs that are offered, or a computer document with a table or spreadsheet summarizing information collecting.  Consider:

• Program topic and numbers of workers who participated
• The numbers of pamphlets taken by workers or distributed and on what subject matters
• The number of participants in a behavior change program and how many met their objectives and goals as well as how many attended all of the sessions
• Numbers of employees who continued the healthy behavior change following the program?
• Overall employee satisfaction with the program or each topic.  

Depending on your objectives and goals, gather desired data and compare it to previous data collected during the initial assessment to determine if the objectives and goals were met.  Such data might include

• Absentee rates
• Injury rates
• Health risk factors Insurance expenditures  

Summarize and Report Worksite Health Promotion Program Results

Once you have collected all of the evaluation information it needs to be reviewed with the Worksite Health Promotion Program Committee and summarized.  You will probably have positive results and some areas where a change is necessitated or additional focus necessitated for continuous improvement.  This not-so positive information can be used to make any necessitated adjustments as well as to plan for next year and is significant to include in your report.  

It is important to communicate the wellness program outcome to both senior staff and workers.  Consider how senior staff usually receives reports on operations and productivity concerns and include the annual wellness program report in the same format.  At some companies the reports are made during senior staff gatherings using presentation styles such as power point slides.  At other companies, graphs and bar charts are the norm or a list of the objectives and the summary outcomes published.  

No matter the format, it’s valuable to convey the outcomes and successes achieved, including any anecdotal stories, as well as areas for improvement.  Be sure to link the outcomes to the organization mission and bottom line whenever possible.

Employees desire to receive the same information!  You might use the same communication channels used when informing staff members of the wellness program:

• Company newsletters,
• Bulletin boards,
• E-mails  

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

• Posting pictures from activities
• Highlighting success stories
• Posting pictures of successes
• Hosting a celebration
• Recognizing champions