Corporate Wellness Incentive Plans

Program evaluation may be The previous step, but it should be planned at the beginning of your efforts!  Evaluation 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 critical to its continued performance.  

Evaluating your program does not have to be be terribly complex.  However, it is important to plan how you will oversee your wellness efforts and determine success during the planning phase or Step 5.  Also remember to evaluate the program based on the objectives you already identified during your planning process.  

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

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

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

Summarize and Report Workplace Wellness Program Results

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

It is significant to communicate the wellness program outcome to both upper management and workers.  Consider how upper management usually receives reports on operations and work rate concerns and include the annual wellness program report in the same format.  At some companies the reports are made during upper management meetings using presentation styles such as authority point slides.  At other companies, 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 corporation mission and bottom line whenever possible.

Staff Members want to receive the same information!  You might use the same communication channels used when informing workers of the wellness program:

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

Also consider celebrating successes and recognizing achievements by:

• Posting pictures from activities
• Highlighting effectiveness stories
• Posting pictures of successes
• Having a celebration
• Recognizing champions