Health Fairs

Program evaluation may be The last step, but it should be planned at the beginning of your efforts!  Assessment helps you identify what parts of the program are working well and what parts need improvement.  Then, based on the evaluation data, adjustments have the potential to be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the program based on evaluation data is vital to its continued performance.

Evaluating your program need not be terribly complex.  However, it is significant to plan how you will oversee your wellness efforts and determine performance during the planning phase or Step 5.  Also be sure to to evaluate the program based on the objectives and goals you already identified during your creating process.

In order to evaluate your program you need to 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 employees who participated
• The numbers of handouts taken by employees or distributed and on what topics
• The number of participants in a behavior change program and how many met their objectives and goals as well as how many attended all of the sessions
• Numbers of employees who continued the healthy behavior change following the program?
• Overall employee satisfaction with the program or each topic.

Depending on your objectives and goals, gather desired data and compare it to previous data collected during the initial assessment to determine if the objectives and goals were met.  Such data might include

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

Summarize and Report Employee Wellness  Results

Once you have collected all of the evaluation information it needs to be reviewed with the Employee Wellness  Committee and summarized.  You will probably have positive results and some areas where a change is required or additional focus required for continuous improvement.  This not-so positive information can be used to make any required adjustments as well as to plan for next year and is significant to include in your report.

It is significant to communicate the wellness program results to both management and employees.  Consider how management usually receives reports on operations and work rate concerns and include the annual wellness program report in the same format.  At some corporations the reports are made during management meetings using presentation styles such as authority point slides.  At other corporations, graphs and bar charts are the norm or a list of the objectives and the summary outcomes published.

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 business mission and bottom line whenever possible.

Workers desire to receive the same information!  You might use the same communication channels used when informing employees of the wellness program:

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

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