Corporate Wellness Incentive Plans

The Corporate Health Promotion Program Committee must set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals, as well as supplies details for marketing and evaluating the program. The plan is the detailed map of what types of programs will be available, when and where they will be scheduled, how they will be marketed and evaluated, and what the budget is.  It is significant to plan your wellness activities based on your goals, as well as the budget since different strategies will yield different outcomes.  By way of example, if your mission is to expand awareness on a topic, then distributing pamphlets or scheduling a one-time class may be appropriate.  However, if your intention is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly sessions and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Corporate Health Promotion Program Marketing

This is the time to coordinate your marketing strategies!  How can you market the wellness program and ongoing activities?  No matter how you decide to, market often, keep it fresh, and remind employees again and again!  Consider having an overall kickoff activity to let everyone know about the wellness program.  Upper Management should support the introduction or invitation so that all employees are alert to their support and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Distributing email messages, including reminders
• Develop bulletins,
• Hanging bulletin board postings,
• Composing articles,
• Mailing letters or
• Distributing special invitations.  

Other Worksite Health Promotion Program Considerations:

• Is the Worksite Wellness Program promoted to all workers or to a specific group?
• Do you have a Company Health Promotion Program champion (someone who is joined with different groups in the organization, and well respected) who can help in your promotion efforts?
• If your marketing efforts don’t seem to be working, do you have a way to revisit and adjust your plan?
• How will you determine performance and evaluate your program?  And how will you collect the information needed to evaluate your program?  

Topics most often included in Workplace Health Promotion Programs:

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

The issues and type of Corporate Wellness Program planned hinge upon the needs and interest, overriding objective and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as brochures and/or education sessions, behavior change programs such as tobacco cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or corporation support such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in snack machines.  

The programs planned also depend on the demographics of your workforce.  If you have a young, healthy workforce, you may want to focus the wellness attention on keeping workers healthy and not need to screen for disease.  Instead you might want to focus on healthy lifestyle behavior such as exercise and good nourishment to prevent the on-set of disease.  Click here for more information on strategies for keeping workers well, identifying disease early, or returning workers to work who already have a chronic disease.

It is also important 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 and objectives.  Step 7 discusses program evaluation in more detail.   And Step 6 will launch your program!