Employee Health Promotion

Program assessment may be The previous step, but it must be planned at the
beginning of your efforts! Evaluation helps you identify what parts of the program
are working well and what parts could use improvement. Then, based on the assessment
data, adjustments can be made to fine-tune your wellness program. Adjusting
the program based on assessment data is essential to its continued effectiveness.

Reviewing your program need not be complicated. However, it is important 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/objectives you already established during your creating process.

In order to evaluate your program you need to have a system to document specifics
as you go along. 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 employees who participated
• The numbers of pamphlets taken by employees or distributed and on what
  subject matters
• 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 modification 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 costs

Summarize and Report Employee Health Promotion Results

Once you have collected all of the assessment information it needs to be reviewed
with the Employee Health Promotion 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 adjustments as well as to plan for next year
and is important to include in your report.

It is important to communicate the wellness program outcome to both senior
staff and employees. Consider how senior staff usually receives reports on operations
and work rate problems and include the yearly wellness program report in the
same format. At some organizations the reports are made during senior staff
gatherings using presentation styles such as power point slides. At other organizations,
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 organization mission and bottom line whenever
possible.

Employees want to receive the same information! You might use the same
communication channels used when informing employees 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
• Hosting a celebration
• Recognizing champions