Corporate Wellness Blog

The Workplace Wellness Program Committee must set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals, as well as supports details for marketing and evaluating the program. The plan is the detailed map of what types of programs will be provided, when and where they will be scheduled, how they will be marketed and evaluated, and what the budget is.  It is valuable to plan your wellness activities based on your goals, as well as the budget since different strategies will provide different outcomes.  By way of example, if your intention is to increase awareness on a topic, then distributing handouts or scheduling a one-time education session may be appropriate.  However, if your goal is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly meetings and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Employee Health Promotion Program Marketing

This is the time to coordinate your marketing strategies!  How can you market the wellness program and ongoing activities?  No matter how you decide to, market often, keep it fresh, and remind employees again and again!  Consider having an overall kickoff activity to inform everyone of the wellness program.  Senior Leadership ought to provide the introduction or invitation so that all employees are aware of their reinforcement and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Sending email messages, including reminders
• Design flyers,
• Displaying bulletin board postings,
• Composing articles,
• Sending letters or
• Sending special invitations.  

Other Worksite Wellness Program Considerations:

• Is the Workplace Health Promotion Program promoted to all employees or to a specific target audience?
• Do you have a Workplace Health Promotion Program champion (someone who is coupled with different groups in the organization, and well respected) who can help in your promotion efforts?
• If your marketing efforts do not seem to be working, do you have a way to revisit and adjust your plan?
• How will you determine performance and evaluate your program?  And how will you gather the information needed to evaluate your program?  

Topics most often included in Workplace Wellness Programs:

• Nutrition
• Physical Activity/Exercise
• Tobacco Use Cessation
• Bone Health
• Heart Health
• The Spine
• Stress Reduction
• Chronic Disease Awareness & Prevention
• Self-care; Wise Healthcare Consumer
• Screening Services (BMI, Blood Pressure, bone density, blood lipids, glucose, posture, vision, and other…)
• Ergonomic Assessments
• Health Fairs
• Kids/family Events
• Others topics that employees have interest in  

The subject matters and type of Worksite Health Promotion Program planned hinge upon the needs and interest, central intention and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as pamphlets and/or education sessions, behavior change programs such as smoking cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or organization support such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in snack machines.  

The programs planned also depend on the demographics of your workforce.  If you have a young, healthy workforce, you may want to focus the wellness attention on keeping workers healthy and not need to screen for disease.  Instead you might want to focus on healthy lifestyle behavior such as exercise and great nutrition to prevent the on-set of disease.  Click here for more information on strategies for keeping workers well, identifying disease early, or returning workers to work who already have a chronic disease.

It is also significant to consider, and plan how you will evaluate the performance of your wellness program.  The system needs to be established for tracking certain data and recording events depending on the program goals.  Step 7 discusses program assessment in more detail.   And Step 6 will launch your program!