Employee Health Promotion Program evaluation is critical for effective Wellness and will help you get Upper Management support.
Why evaluate your Employee Health Promotion Program?
Employee Health Promotion Program evaluation answers these questions:
• What change(s) occurred in the target population?
• ‘What’s in it’ for Upper Management?
• Are the resources that are being used worth the outcomes that are reached?
• Were Employee Health Promotion Program outcomes expected? (Unexpected outcomes may have occurred.)
• What Employee Health Promotion Program areas need improvement?
Employee Health Promotion Program Fact of Life:
Employee Health Promotion Program evaluation left to “chance” or until “there is time” will never happen.
• Employee Health Promotion Program evaluation should be considered as an essential part of the whole plan for Wellness and not as something extra.
Where do you start?
Keep it simple. Employee Health Promotion Program evaluation does not have to be complicated.
• Get baseline data.
• Baseline data is the health status of the target population at the beginning of the Employee Health Promotion Program.
• Begin by collecting just 3 or 4 primary items as the baseline. You will have better success collecting follow-up information later if you only need to get a few pieces of data.
• Don’t rely only on health indicators that require lab evaluation. Also use self-report information and health indicators that are measurable without lab tests.
• Collect data that relates to readiness.
• You should always be ready to communicate to leadership the ways that your Employee Health Promotion Program impacts readiness. Plan ahead to collect data that will demonstrate this connection.
• Think like Upper Management: what Employee Health Promotion Program outcomes will be important from Upper Management point of view?
• It’s never too late to incorporate Employee Health Promotion Program evaluation into Employee Health Promotion Programs.
• If your Employee Health Promotion Program is already up and running and you didn’t plan for data collection ahead of time, start collecting data NOW.
• If you don’t have baseline data, then collect interim data and compare that to end-of-program data.
• Or, you can compare final Employee Health Promotion Program outcomes to similar initiatives elsewhere.
If you can’t make any comparisons to other data, use resources like The Community Guide (http://www.thecommunityguide.org/ ) that have already evaluated the effectiveness of Employee Health Promotion Program components. Compare the components of your Employee Health Promotion Program to those that have been proven effective elsewhere.