Health And Wellness In The WorkplaceHealth And Wellness In The Workplace

The Employee Health Promotion Program Committee must set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals/objectives, as well as provides details for marketing and evaluating the program. The plan is the detailed map of what types of programs will be available, when and where they will be scheduled, how they will be marketed and evaluated, and what the budget is.  It is valuable to plan your wellness activities based on your goals/objectives, as well as the budget since different strategies will provide different outcomes.  For example, if your intention is to increase awareness on a topic, then distributing pamphlets or scheduling a one-time education session may be appropriate.  However, if your intention is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly meetings and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Employee Wellness Program Marketing

Now is the time to plan your marketing strategies!  How can you market the wellness program and ongoing activities?  No matter how you decide to, market often, keep it fresh, and remind employees again and again!  Consider having an overall kickoff exercise to inform everyone of the wellness program.  Upper Management should provide the introduction or invitation so that all employees are alert to their support and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Distributing email messages, including reminders
• Develop bulletins,
• Putting up bulletin board postings,
• Writing articles,
• Sending letters or
• Sending special invitations.  

Other Company Health Promotion Program Considerations:

• Is the Corporate Health Promotion Program promoted to all staff members or to a specific target audience?
• Do you have a Corporate Health Promotion Program champion (someone who is connected with different groups in the organization, and well respected) who can help in your promotion efforts?
• If your marketing efforts do not seem to be working, do you have a way to revisit and adjust your plan?
• How will you determine success and evaluate your program?  And how will you collect the information required to evaluate your program?  

Topics most frequently included in Workplace Health Promotion Programs:

• Nutrition
• Physical Activity/Exercise
• Tobacco Use Cessation
• Bone Health
• Heart Health
• Healthy Back
• Stress Reduction
• Chronic Disease Awareness & Prevention
• Self-care; Wise Health Care Consumer
• Screening Services (BMI, Blood Pressure, bone density, cholesterol, glucose, posture, vision, and other…)
• Ergonomic Assessments
• Health Fairs
• Kids/family Events
• Others issues that staff members have interest in  

The issues and type of Worksite Wellness Program planned hinge upon the needs and interest, overall intention and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as brochures and/or education sessions, behavior modification programs such as tobacco cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or organization reinforcement such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in snack machines.  

The programs planned also hinge upon the demographics of your workforce.  If you have a young, healthy workforce, you may want to focus the wellness attention on keeping employees healthy and not need to screen for disease.  Instead you might want to focus on healthy lifestyle behavior such as exercise and great diet to prevent the on-set of disease.  Click here for more information on strategies for keeping employees well, identifying disease early, or returning employees to work who already have a chronic conditions.

It is also valuable to consider, and plan how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your wellness program.  The system needs to be shown for tracking certain data and recording activities depending on the program goals/objectives.  Step 7 discusses program evaluation in more detail.   And Step 6 will launch your program!