Health Handouts : Company Wellness Program: Monitor and Evaluate Your Company Wellness Program  

Program evaluation may be The previous step, but it ought to 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 can be made to fine-tune your wellness program.   Adjusting the program based on evaluation data is essential to its continued effectiveness.  

Analyzing your program need not be complicated.  However, it is significant to plan how you will monitor your wellness efforts and determine success during the planning phase or Step 5.  Also keep in mind to evaluate the program based on the objectives you already established 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 issues
• The number of participants in a behavior modification program and how many met their goals and objectives 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 gathered 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 Health Promotion Program Results

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

It is important to communicate the wellness program results to both upper management and employees.  Consider how upper management usually receives reports on operations and productiveness problems and include the yearly wellness program report in the same format.  At some corporations the reports are made during upper management gatherings 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 announced.  

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 company mission and bottom line whenever possible.

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

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

• Posting pictures from programs
• Highlighting performance stories
• Posting pictures of successes
• Scheduling a celebration
• Recognizing champions