|
Working on Wellness Newsletter
|
|
|
Measuring Success and Impact: Incorporating Evaluation into Worksite Wellness Initiatives
|
As with any aspect of your business, you need to have a means of determining what's working, what's not working and what needs to be changed. Evaluation efforts are critical to ensuring and measuring the success of the worksite wellness initiative. This process is the primary way to determine whether
goals and objectives
are being met, to identify areas that need improvement, and to assess value and participation in wellness
interventions
. This process helps to ensure that the interventions are continuing to meet the needs and interests of employees and helps to monitor progress, effectiveness, and impact. This is important to help establish credibility for the wellness initiative and to build the business case to continue. For greatest impact, evaluation should not be an afterthought. Rather, evaluation strategies should be incorporated into the planning process and should be repeated on an ongoing basis.
Commonly used examples of evaluation strategies include pre and post surveys, satisfaction surveys, attendance numbers, informal feedback, observation, biometric changes, and organizational changes. These strategies can be grouped into three categories.
- Process data (e.g., number of classes held, types of resources used, survey response rates)
- Output and impact data (e.g., participation rates, satisfaction surveys, website hits, how many people stopped smoking)
- Outcomes (e.g., changes in absenteeism, employee retention, workers' compensation costs)
Use evaluation data to provide feedback to employees,
share successes
, provide periodic reports to senior management and to publish annual summary reports and publications. In addition, use the data to look at quality improvement, building supports for organizational change, and to ensure program sustainability. Program evaluation is a great way of improving your worksite wellness efforts along the way as it helps to focus the work you are doing.
|
The Healthy Workplaces Toolbox: Toolbox Highlight
|
|
To help you begin the process of assessing your organization's employees and environment, Working on Wellness
offers
a number of tools and resources available to you.
Website designed by UMass Lowell with several tools to help the evaluation of worksite wellness programs.
The Worksite Health ScoreCard by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers information on how to evaluate health promotion programs specifically at worksites.
Helpful information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to design frameworks for evaluating wellness programs.
|
Participant Highlight -
Judge Baker Children's Center and Brockton Public Schools
|
Judge Baker Children's Center (JBCC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting children's mental health through research, training, and practice. Interested in better promoting the wellness of their employees, Judge Baker's newly established wellness committee set a goal to support employees in eating healthy foods and beverages.
One of JBCC's interventions was to partner with
Fresh Truck to organize an onsite visit for staff to purchase affordably priced fruits and vegetables. About 50 employees took part in the Fresh Truck event; those who attended provided overwhelmingly positive feedback through an online survey and informal polling. As a result, JBCC plans to contract with Fresh Truck to come back.
Similarly, Brockton Public Schools (BPS) began a voucher program for staff to use at a local farmer's market, as well as organized a five-week exercise challenge and healthy eating cooking demonstrations during lunch hours. Of the 63% of staff who picked up the farmer's market vouchers, 60% of those vouchers were eventually used. Survey results from staff indicated that long lines and not enough help at the farmer's market were reasons why people left without using their vouchers. After documenting these results, the wellness committee at BPS recognized that while the voucher program was a promising idea on paper, in practice, staff were not able to take advantage of it.
Through surveying and collecting informal feedback on their wellness events, JBCC and BPS discovered that their employees are motivated by group activities and incentives. At BPS, staff are requesting another worksite-wide exercise challenge while many employees continue to perfect their form in newly learned workouts. At JBCC, the wellness committee champions learned from their evaluation surveys that their staff respond positively to group incentives, and plan to use them in other areas to increase staff engagement and participation.
The evaluation efforts from these two organizations provided critical information from employees to improve wellness activities, and, more importantly, to better support staff in achieving their health and wellness goals.
|
|
|
New Course Alert!
From reduced medical care costs to increased ability to attract and retain top talent, promoting employee safety and health in the workplace has many business incentives. In this program you will learn from the leading experts in the industry how to effectively integrate occupational health, health promotion, and health protection programs, ultimately improving employee health and saving money.
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Date: April 18-20, 2018
|
|
|
The Health Champion designation recognizes companies and organizations that integrate and champion a culture of wellness within the
workplace.
|
|
|
|
Help us spread the word about Working on Wellness!
To share this email with your networks,
use the social media buttons at the very top of this email.
|
|
|
|
|
