Health Wellness ProgramHealth and Wellness Programs and Wellness Program Consulting

The Worksite Wellness Program Committee should set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals, as well as provides details for marketing and evaluating the program. The plan is the detailed map of what types of programs will be offered, when and where they will be scheduled, how they will be marketed and evaluated, and what the budget is.  It is important to plan your wellness activities based on your goals, as well as the budget since different strategies will provide different outcomes.  By way of example, if your mission is to increase awareness on a topic, then distributing handouts or scheduling a one-time education session may be appropriate.  However, if your objective is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly sessions and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Workplace Wellness Program Marketing

This 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 workers repeatedly!  Consider having an overall kickoff exercise to inform everyone of the wellness program.  Senior Management must offer the introduction or invitation so that all workers are aware of their reinforcement and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Distributing email messages, including reminders
• Develop flyers,
• Hanging bulletin board postings,
• Writing articles,
• Mailing letters or
• Distributing special invitations.  

Other Employee Wellness Program Considerations:

• Is the Worksite Health Promotion Program promoted to all employees or to a specific group?
• Do you have a Workplace Wellness Program champion (someone who is joined 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 strategy?
• How will you determine effectiveness and evaluate your program?  And how will you collect the information necessitated to evaluate your program?  

Topics most frequently included in Corporate Health Promotion Programs:

• Nutrition
• Physical Activity/Exercise
• Tobacco Use Cessation
• Bone Health
• Cardiovascular Health
• The Spine
• Stress Reduction
• Chronic Disease Awareness & Prevention
• Self-care; Wise Health Care Consumer
• Screening Services (BMI, Blood Pressure, bone density, blood lipids, glucose, posture, vision, and other…)
• Ergonomic Assessments
• Health Fairs
• Kids/family Events
• Others topics that workers have interest in  

The topics and type of Company Health Promotion Program planned hinge upon the needs and interest, overall intention and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as handouts and/or education sessions, behavior change programs such as tobacco cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or organization support such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in snack machines.  

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

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