Company Health and Wellness Program Evaluation Basics
Company Health and Wellness Program evaluation is critical for effective Wellness and will help you get Senior Management support.
Why evaluate your Employee Wellness Program?
Company Health and Wellness Program evaluation answers these questions:
• What change(s) occurred in the target population?
• ‘What’s in it’ for Senior Management?
• Are the resources that are being used worth the outcomes that are achieved?
• Were Company Health and Wellness Program outcomes expected? (Unexpected outcomes may have occurred.)
• What Company Health and Wellness Program areas need improvement?
Company Health and Wellness Program Fact of Life:
Company Health and Wellness Program evaluation left to “chance” or until “there is time” will never happen.
• Company Health and Wellness Program evaluation should be considered as an essential part of the whole plan for Wellness and not as something extra.
Where do you start?
Make it Simple. Company Health and Wellness 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 Wellness Program.
• Start 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 Company Health and Wellness Program impacts readiness. Plan ahead to collect data that will demonstrate this connection.
• Think like Senior Management: what Company Health and Wellness Program outcomes will be important from Senior Management point of view?
• It’s never too late to incorporate Company Health and Wellness Program evaluation into Employee Wellness Programs.
• If your Company Health and Wellness 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 Company Health and Wellness 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 Company Health and Wellness Program components. Compare the components of your Company Health and Wellness Program to those that have been proven effective elsewhere.
