Corporate Wellness Plan Evaluation Basics
Corporate Wellness Plan evaluation is critical for effective Wellness and will help you get Upper Management support.
Why evaluate your Corporate Wellness Program?
Corporate Wellness Plan evaluation answers these questions:
• What change(s) occurred in the target population?
• ‘What’s in it’ for Upper Management?
• Are the resources that are being used worth the outcomes that are reached?
• Were Corporate Wellness Plan outcomes expected? (Unexpected outcomes may have occurred.)
• What Corporate Wellness Plan areas need improvement?
Corporate Wellness Plan Fact of Life:
Corporate Wellness Plan evaluation left to “chance” or until “there is time” will never happen.
• Corporate Wellness Plan evaluation should be considered as an essential part of the whole plan for Wellness and not as something extra.
Where do you start?
Make it Simple. Corporate Wellness Plan evaluation does not have to be complicated.
• Get baseline data.
• Baseline data is the health status of the target population at the beginning of the Corporate Wellness Program.
• Start by collecting just 3 or 4 primary items as the baseline. You will have better success collecting follow-up information later if you only need to get a few pieces of data.
• Don’t rely only on health indicators that require lab evaluation. Also use self-report information and health indicators that are measurable without lab tests.
• Collect data that relates to readiness.
• You should always be ready to communicate to leadership the ways that your Corporate Wellness Plan impacts readiness. Plan ahead to collect data that will demonstrate this connection.
• Think like Upper Management: what Corporate Wellness Plan outcomes will be important from Upper Management point of view?
• It’s never too late to incorporate Corporate Wellness Plan evaluation into Corporate Wellness Programs.
• If your Corporate Wellness Plan is already up and running and you didn’t plan for data collection ahead of time, start collecting data NOW.
• If you don’t have baseline data, then collect interim data and compare that to end-of-program data.
• Or, you can compare final Corporate Wellness Plan outcomes to similar initiatives elsewhere.
If you can’t make any comparisons to other data, use resources like The Community Guide (http://www.thecommunityguide.org/ ) that have already evaluated the effectiveness of Corporate Wellness Plan components. Compare the components of your Corporate Wellness Plan to those that have been proven effective elsewhere.
