Corporate Wellness Blog

Program evaluation may be The last step, but it should 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 can be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the program based on evaluation data is critical to its continued effectiveness.  

Reviewing your program need not be complicated.  However, it is important to plan how you will monitor your wellness efforts and determine success during the planning phase or Step 5.  Also remember to evaluate the program based on the goals/objectives you already established during your drafting process.  

In order to evaluate your program you must 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 staff members who participated
• The numbers of handouts taken by staff members or distributed and on what subject matters
• 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, gather desired data and compare it to previous data collected during the initial assessment to determine if the goals were met.  Such data might include

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

Summarize and Report Company Wellness Program Results

Once you have collected all of the assessment information it needs to be reviewed with the Workplace Health Promotion Program Committee and summarized.  You will probably have beneficial results and some areas where a change is necessitated or additional focus necessitated for continuous improvement.  This not-so beneficial information can be used to make any necessitated 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 outcome to both upper management and staff members.  Consider how upper management usually receives reports on operations and productiveness concerns and include the annual wellness program report in the same format.  At some corporations the reports are made during upper management gatherings using presentation styles such as power point slides.  At other corporations, graphs and bar charts are the norm or a list of the objectives and the summary outcomes reported.  

No matter the format, it’s significant 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.

Staff Members wish to receive the same information!  You might use the same communication channels used when informing staff members of the wellness program:

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

• Posting pictures from events
• Highlighting success stories
• Posting pictures of successes
• Hosting a celebration
• Recognizing champions