Collecting information on worker health behaviors
If your company is interested in measuring the impact of your Worksite Health and Wellness Program efforts in future years, you’ll want to gather relevant baseline data on the health and health behaviors of your worker population.
Worksite Health and Wellness Program Data on your worker population
Health Risk Assessments
Some health plans offer businesses free internet-based health risk assessments (HRA), complete with summary aggregate reports. If your health plan does not offer a free HRA, you could pay for an HRA either through your health plan or through a third party vendor.
To encourage taking part in an HRA, assure workers of confidentiality and consider offering incentives for completing the assessment. The higher the participation rate, the more likely that the aggregate data will accurately represent the behaviors and risks of your worker population.
Worksite Health and Wellness Program Health Surveys
You can get a general sense of workers’ health-related attitudes and behaviors using a “lowtech” paper survey. As with a health risk assessment, workers will be more likely to respond to a survey if there is an incentive and if they are confident that their responses are confidential. Remember that without widespread participation you’ll only get a “feel” for worker behaviors rather than a statistically accurate picture.
Worksite Health and Wellness Program Focus Groups and Informational Interviews
The information you can collect from focus groups or informational interviews with workers is an important supplement to the anonymous survey or HRA data. Listening to workers discuss their attitudes, values, receptivity and barriers related to health provides a wealth of information on which to base decisions on how to improve your company’s Worksite Health and Wellness Program. Worksite Health and Wellness Program focus groups are especially useful for gaining information from hard-to-reach worker populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.
Keep Worksite Health and Wellness Program focus groups small (8-19 workers, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer incentives such as movie tickets or lunch, to recruit participants. Develop a list of open-ended questions in advance and allow 60-90 minutes for the discussion.
Informational interviews are an alternative to Worksite Health and Wellness Program focus groups. The Worksite Health and Wellness Program coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Health Promotion Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with workers in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and barriers related to a) health behaviors and b) the worksite policies, environments and practices.
Population data
If data on the employee population are not available, you can use state or national data to estimate the prevalence of risk behaviors among workers.
