Health Handouts : Company Health Promotion Program: create a Detailed Action Plan  

The Employee Wellness Program Committee must set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals, as well as supports 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 important to plan your wellness activities based on your goals, as well as the budget since different strategies will provide different outcomes.  For example, if your intention is to broaden awareness on a topic, then distributing handouts or scheduling a one-time education session may be appropriate.  Nonetheless, if your goal is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly meetings and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Workplace Wellness Program Marketing

This is the time to plan 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 workers repeatedly!  Consider having an overall kickoff activity to let everyone know about the wellness program.  Upper Management ought to provide the introduction or invitation so that all workers are cognizant of their support and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Sending email messages, including reminders
• Establish bulletins,
• Putting up bulletin board postings,
• Writing articles,
• Sending letters or
• Mailing special invitations.  

Other Employee Health Promotion Program Considerations:

• Is the Employee Wellness Program promoted to all workers or to a specific group?
• Do you have a Corporate Wellness Program 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 change your strategy?
• How will you determine success and evaluate your program?  And how will you collect the information needed to evaluate your program?  

Topics most often included in Corporate Wellness Programs:

• Nutrition
• Physical Activity/Exercise
• Tobacco Use Cessation
• Bone Health
• Heart Health
• The Spine
• Stress Reduction
• Chronic Disease Awareness & Prevention
• Self-care; Wise Medical Care Consumer
• Screening Services (BMI, Blood Pressure, bone density, cholesterol, glucose, posture, vision, and other…)
• Ergonomic Assessments
• Health Fairs
• Kids/family Events
• Others subject matters that employees have interest in  

The subject matters and type of Company Health Promotion Program planned depend on the needs and interest, overriding objective and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as pamphlets and/or education sessions, behavior modification programs such as tobacco cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or organization backing such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in vending machines.  

The programs planned also hinge upon 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 good diet to prevent the start 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 valuable to consider, and plan how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your wellness program.  The system needs to be established for tracking certain data and recording activities depending on the program goals/objectives.  Step 7 discusses program assessment in more detail.   And Step 6 will launch your program!