Corporate Health and Wellness Program Data on your worker population

Health Risk Assessments

Some health plans offer companies 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 participating in an HRA, assure workers of confidentiality and consider offering rewards 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.

Corporate 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.

Corporate 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 organization’s Corporate Health and Wellness Program. Corporate 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 Corporate Health and Wellness Program focus groups small (8-19 workers, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer rewards 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 Corporate Health and Wellness Program focus groups. The Corporate Health and Wellness Program coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Wellness 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 workplace 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.

———————- Article #10 ———————————-28/10/2008

How to Write Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals and Objectives

Why have Corporate Health and Wellness Program objectives?

Corporate Health and Wellness Program objectives take your organization’s priorities for employee health improvement and make them specific and measurable. Well-defined Corporate Health and Wellness Program objectives provide direction for determining Strategies and a basis for which to measure progress.

Writing Corporate Health and Wellness Program objectives

Writing Corporate Health and Wellness Program objectives is not complicated or difficult. It does require some thought, about your organization’s Corporate Health and Wellness Program vision for a culture of wellness and they should be:

            Specific Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals

            Measurable Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals

            Attainable Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals

            Realistic Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals

            Timely Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals

Specific Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals: What is the specific outcome your organization is looking for? “Reduce tobacco use among workers” is more specific than “Improve the health of workers.” You may wish to write some objectives about specific outcomes (reducing smoking among workers) and other objectives about specific progress (implementing a tobacco-free campus policy or lowering the price of fresh fruit in the cafeteria to 25 cents a piece).

Measurable Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals: Making your objectives measurable provides a means of evaluating your progress and success. There is a saying: “what gets measured, gets done.” Goals which are measurable can be powerful motivators for your organization. “Provide more time for workers to be physically active” is much less measurable than “implement a daily 15-minute walking break into the schedule of all workers.” “Increase the number of workers who want to quit smoking” is less measurable than “increase enrollments in the stop-using tobacco program to 120 workers per year.”

Attainable Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals: Establish objectives that challenge your organization to change and that will demonstrate a real commitment to the health of the employees. At the same time, set objectives that are achievable. Goals that are set too far out of reach can be overwhelming and may become a barrier rather than a motivator.

Realistic Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals: Write objectives that are do-able, given the skills, time, finances and overall strategy of the organization. A realistic project may push the skills and knowledge of the people working on it but it shouldn’t break them.

Timely Corporate Health and Wellness Program Goals: When do you hope to achieve the goal? Next week? Next year? Without a timeframe, the goal is still vague and is much less likely to galvanize resources and energy within your organization.

“Reduce the percent of workers who use tobacco from 20 percent to 10 percent” is much less of a challenge than “By the end of 2010, reduce the percent of workers who use tobacco from 20 percent to 15 percent”.