How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Health and Wellness Program
Good company wellbeing also means employers can get more out of their current workforce—and this is especially true of smaller organizations. “If we didn’t create an environment in which our employees prioritize their wellbeing and look out for each other during busy times, we would need to compensate by increasing our workforce, with no added value for the customer
Workplace wellness programs are effective, but only if they’re managed effectively. To get the most out of them, businesses need to measure, monitor, and improve programs to keep employees engaged.
No employee wellness program is effective without individualization and evaluation. It starts with a company vision that everyone works towards by measuring progress and adjusting along the way. Here are three important program outcomes:
Identify program accomplishments
Ensure the organization’s resources are spent in meaningful ways
Achieve employee health and wellness
It’s important to work out a simple evaluation plan that your employees, management, wellness staff, and HR can get behind. For that to happen, your plan needs to be focused, actionable, and aligned with your organisation’s goals.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Workplace Wellness Program
Measuring effectiveness is vital. Here’s how to get started.
1. Start with Your Main Goal
Why do you want to implement a wellness program, or if you already have one, what do you want it to achieve? Keeping this front of mind will help you ensure every aspect feeds back into your overarching goal. Here are some popular reasons:
Improve employee productivity
Reduce employee health risks
Reduce company healthcare costs
Higher employee retention
Attract a higher caliber of talent
Boost the efficiency of your existing workforce
If you think all of these are important that’s fine, but to maintain focus, work out which one is the top priority.
2. Choose the Metrics You’re Going to Measure
Your metrics selection will be directly related to your priority. For example, if you want to reduce employee health risks, your metrics might include the following:
Absenteeism due to workplace injury
Number of workplace injury incidents
How satisfied employees are with workplace safety initiatives
How engaged employees are with workplace wellness initiatives
3. Analyse your Data
Measuring leading indicators is easy. To use the example above, you can measure the following:
How many sick days have been taken off due to injury
Reported incidents of workplace injury
How many employees have completed safety training programs
How many people have signed up to program activities and coaching
What employees are engaging with
Percentage of employees who rate safety within the company as being good
Once your data has been analysed, you can take steps to improve your wellness program. Depending on the metrics you’re looking to improve, this could include additional training, a better onboarding procedure, or investing in a comprehensive wellness program package that’s more effective at meeting your organisation’s needs.
WELLBEING AT EVERY LEVEL OF YOUR ORGANISATION
Our aim is to help you with a strategy that will have the most impact in your workplace, and this could be at any level (organisational, managers & their teams, or individual).
We have therefore come to believe that happy and healthy people will make any business thrive. So we focus on improving the wellbeing of individuals, performance of teams, and culture of organisations. We take the greatest of pleasures in what we do, and therefore, we do it well.
As an extension of your team, we work closely with you to develop and execute a wellbeing strategy built for the way your employees experience work today. Together, we help shape the culture that brings you innovation, and elevates you beyond your competition.