Health Fairs

The Employee Wellness Committee should set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing objectives and goals, as well as provides 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 significant to plan your wellness activities based on your objectives and goals, as well as the budget since different strategies will yield different outcomes.  For example, if your objective is to expand awareness on a topic, then distributing handouts or scheduling a one-time class may be appropriate.  However, if your objective is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly sessions and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Employee Wellness  Marketing

Now 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 frequently, keep it fresh, and remind employees repeatedly!  Consider having an overall kickoff exercise to let everyone know about the wellness program.  Upper Management should support the introduction or invitation so that all employees are knowledgeable about their reinforcement and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Distributing email messages, including reminders
• Create flyers,
• Putting up bulletin board postings,
• Composing articles,
• Mailing letters or
• Distributing special invitations.

Other Employee Wellness  Considerations:

• Is the Employee Wellness  promoted to all employees or to a specific target audience?
• Do you have a Employee Wellness champion (someone who is associated with different groups in the organization, and well respected) who can help in your promotion efforts?
• If your marketing efforts aren’t working, do you have a way to revisit and adjust your strategy?
• How will you determine performance and evaluate your program?  And how will you gather the information required to evaluate your program?

Topics most frequently included in Employee Wellness :

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

The topics and type of Employee Wellness  planned depend on the needs and interest, overall objective and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as handouts and/or education sessions, behavior modification programs such as tobacco cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or business reinforcement 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 employees 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 employees well, identifying disease early, or returning employees to work who already have a chronic conditions.

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