Company Health and Wellness : Employee Health Promotion Program: Monitor and Review Your Employee Health Promotion Program  

Program assessment may be The last step, but it ought to be planned at the beginning 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 essential to its continued performance.  

Analyzing your program need not be complicated.  However, it is significant to plan how you will oversee your wellness efforts and determine effectiveness during the planning phase or Step 5.  Also remember to evaluate the program based on the goals and objectives you already established during your organizing 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 topics
• The number of participants in a behavior modification program and how many met their goals/objectives 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 goals, gather desired data and compare it to previous data gathered during the initial assessment to determine if the goals were met.  Such data might include

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

Summarize and Report Worksite Wellness Program Results

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

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

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 corporation mission and bottom line whenever possible.

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

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

• Posting pictures from activities
• Highlighting performance stories
• Posting pictures of successes
• Scheduling a celebration
• Recognizing champions