Health and Wellness Leads : Workplace Wellness Program: Monitor and Assess Your Workplace Wellness Program  

Program evaluation may be The previous step, but it ought to 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 evaluation data, adjustments are able to be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the program based on evaluation data is vital to its continued performance.  

Evaluating your program need not be terribly complex.  However, it is valuable 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 you already identified 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 offered, 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 issues
• The number of participants in a behavior modification program and how many met their 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 and objectives, gather desired data and compare it to previous data gathered during the initial assessment to determine if the goals and objectives were met.  Such data might include

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

Summarize and Report Workplace 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 adjustments as well as to plan for next year and is valuable to include in your report.  

It is valuable to communicate the wellness program results to both upper management and employees.  Consider how upper management usually receives reports on operations and productiveness concerns and include the yearly wellness program report in the same format.  At some organizations the reports are made during upper management 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 employer mission and bottom line whenever possible.

Employees want to receive the same information!  Consider using the same communication channels used when informing workers of the wellness program:

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

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