Corporate Wellness Plan Data on your staff member population

Health Risk Assessments

Some health plans offer employers free web-based Health Risk Assessments, 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 participating in an HRA, assure staff members of confidentiality and consider providing rewards 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.

Corporate Wellness Plan 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.

Corporate Wellness Plan 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 increase your business’s Corporate Wellness Program. Corporate Wellness Plan focus groups are especially useful for securing information from hard-to-reach staff member populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.

Keep Corporate Wellness Plan focus groups small (8-19 staff members, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer rewards 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 Corporate Wellness Plan focus groups. The Corporate Wellness Plan coordinator of your health improvement Procedures or selected members of the Health and Wellness 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 worksite policies, environments 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.