Wellness Assessments

If your organization is interested in measuring the impact of your Workplace Wellness Program efforts in future years, you’ll want to gather relevant baseline data on the health and health behaviors of your staff member population. 

Workplace Wellness Program Data on your staff member population 

Health Risk Assessments 

Some health plans offer employers free internet-based health risk assessments (HRA), complete with summary aggregate reports. If your health plan does not offer a free HRA, you could pay for an HRA either through your health plan or through a third party vendor. 

To encourage taking part in an HRA, assure staff members of confidentiality and consider providing incentives for completing the assessment. The higher the participation rate, the more likely that the aggregate data will accurately represent the behaviors and risks of your staff member population.

Workplace Wellness Program Health Surveys 

You can get a general sense of staff members’ health-related attitudes and behaviors using a “lowtech” paper survey. As with a health risk assessment, staff members will be more likely to respond to a survey if there is an incentive and if they are confident that their responses are confidential. Remember that without widespread participation you’ll only get a “feel” for staff member behaviors rather than a statistically accurate picture.

Workplace Wellness Program Focus Groups and Informational Interviews 

The information you can collect from focus groups or informational interviews with staff members is an important supplement to the anonymous survey or HRA data. Listening to staff members discuss their attitudes, values, receptivity and barriers related to health provides a wealth of information on which to base decisions on how to improve your organization’s Workplace Wellness Program. Workplace Wellness Program focus groups are especially useful for gaining information from hard-to-reach staff member populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language. 

Keep Workplace Wellness Program focus groups small (8-19 staff members, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer incentives such as movie tickets or lunch, to recruit participants. Develop a list of open-ended questions in advance and allow 60-90 minutes for the discussion. 

Informational interviews are an alternative to Workplace Wellness Program focus groups. The Workplace Wellness Program coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Health Promotion Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with staff members in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and barriers related to a) health behaviors and b) the workplace policies, settings and practices. 

Population data 

If data on the employee population are not available, you can use state or national data to estimate the prevalence of risk behaviors among staff members.