Health Wellness ProgramHealth and Wellness Programs and Wellness Program Consulting

Program assessment may be The last step, but it should be planned at the onset of your efforts!  Assessment helps you identify what parts of the program are working well and what parts could use improvement.  Then, based on the assessment data, adjustments have the potential to be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the program based on assessment data is vital to its continued success.  

Analyzing your program need not be terribly complex.  However, it is significant 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 you already established during your planning process.  

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

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

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

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

Summarize and Report Workplace Health Promotion Program Results

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

It is important to communicate the wellness program results to both senior staff and workers.  Consider how senior staff usually receives reports on operations and work rate problems and include the annual wellness program report in the same format.  At some employers the reports are made during senior staff meetings using presentation styles such as authority point slides.  At other employers, graphs and bar charts are the norm or a list of the objectives and the summary outcomes announced.  

No matter the format, it’s important 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 company mission and bottom line whenever possible.

Employees want to receive the same information!  You might use the same communication channels used when informing workers of the wellness program:

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

• Posting pictures from events
• Highlighting effectiveness stories
• Posting pictures of successes
• Having a celebration
• Recognizing champions