Employee Health Promotion

Why have Employee Health Promotion Program objectives?

Employee Health Promotion Program objectives take your organization’s priorities for employee health improvement and make them specific and measurable. Well-defined Employee Health Promotion Program objectives provide direction for deciding on Strategies and a basis for which to measure progress.

Writing Employee Health Promotion Program objectives

Writing Employee Health Promotion Program objectives is not complicated or difficult. It does require some thought, about your organization’s Employee Health Promotion Program vision for a culture of wellness and they should be:

Specific Employee Health Promotion Program Goals
Measurable Employee Health Promotion Program Goals
Attainable Employee Health Promotion Program Goals
Realistic Employee Health Promotion Program Goals
Timely Employee Health Promotion Program Goals

Specific Employee Health Promotion Program Goals: What is the specific outcome your organization is looking for? “Reduce smoking among employees” is more specific than “Improve the health of employees.” You may wish to write some objectives about specific outcomes (reducing smoking among employees) and other objectives about specific progress (implementing a tobacco-free campus policy or reducing the price of fresh fruit in the cafeteria to 25 cents a piece).

Measurable Employee Health Promotion Program Goals: Making your objectives measurable provides a means of evaluating your progress and success. There is an adage: “what gets measured, gets done.” Measurable objectives can be powerful motivators for your organization. “Provide more time for employees to be physically active” is much less measurable than “implement a daily 15-minute walking break into the schedule of all employees.” “Increase the number of employees who want to quit smoking” is less measurable than “increase enrollments in the stop-smoking program to 120 employees per year.”

Attainable Employee Health Promotion Program Goals: Set objectives that challenge your organization to change and that will demonstrate a real commitment to employee health. At the same time, set objectives that are achievable. Goals that are set too far out of reach can be overwhelming and may become a barrier rather than a motivator.

Realistic Employee Health Promotion Program Goals: Write objectives that are do-able, given the skills, time, finances and overall strategy of the organization. A realistic project may push the skills and knowledge of the people working on it but it shouldn’t break them.

Timely Employee Health Promotion Program Goals: When do you hope to achieve the goal? Next week? Next year? Without a timeframe, the goal is still vague and is much less likely to galvanize resources and energy within your organization.

“Reduce the percent of employees who use tobacco from 20% to 10%” is much less of a challenge than “By the end of 2010, reduce the percent of employees who use tobacco from 20% to 15%”.

If your organization is interested in measuring the impact of your Employee Health Promotion Program efforts in future years, you’ll want to gather relevant baseline data on the health and health behaviors of your employee population.

Employee Health Promotion Program Data on your employee population

Health Risk Assessments

Some health plans offer employers free online health risk assessments (HRA), complete with summary aggregate reports. If your health plan does not offer a free HRA, you could pay for an HRA either through your health plan or through a third party vendor.

To encourage taking part in an HRA, assure employees of confidentiality and consider providing incentives and rewards for completing the assessment. The higher the participation rate, the more likely that the aggregate data will accurately represent the behaviors and risks of your employee population.

Employee Health Promotion Program Health Surveys

You can get a general sense of employees’ health-related attitudes and behaviors using a “lowtech” paper survey. As with a health risk assessment, employees will be more likely to respond to a survey if there is an incentive and if they are confident that their responses are confidential. Remember that without widespread participation you’ll only get a “feel” for employee behaviors rather than a statistically accurate picture.

Employee Health Promotion Program Focus Groups and Informational Interviews

The information you can collect from focus groups or informational interviews with employees is an important supplement to the anonymous survey or HRA data. Listening to employees discuss their attitudes, values, receptivity and barriers related to health provides a wealth of information on which to base decisions on how to improve your organization’s Employee Health Promotion Program. Employee Health Promotion Program focus groups are especially useful for capturing information from hard-to-reach employee populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.

Keep Employee Health Promotion Program focus groups small (8-19 employees, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer incentives and rewards such as movie tickets or lunch, to recruit participants. Develop a list of open-ended questions in advance and allow 60-90 minutes for the discussion.

Informational interviews are an alternative to Employee Health Promotion Program focus groups. The Employee Health Promotion Program coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Health and Wellness Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with employees in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and barriers related to a) health behaviors and b) the workplace policies, environments and practices.

Population data

If data on the employee population are not available, you can use state or national data to estimate the prevalence of risk behaviors among employees.