Measuring Wellness Outcomes
When designing your comprehensive workplace wellness program, it is essential that you are measuring wellness outcomes. Have you built evaluation into the process? If it is not considered right at the beginning, it will be hard to measure whether or not your initiatives are truly effective and worthwhile.
Step One – Determine Benchmarks
Before launching any wellness program, it’s vital to establish clear benchmarks. This initial research should focus on:
- Employee Activity Levels: Assess the current physical activity levels of employees.
- Employee Health: Gather baseline health data.
- Costs of Illness: Evaluate the current costs associated with employee illness.
- Stress Levels: Identify existing stress patterns among employees.
- Absenteeism Patterns: Analyze absenteeism data.
- Employee Satisfaction: Measure overall job satisfaction.
- Retention Rates: Determine the current turnover rates.
- Productivity and Performance: Review productivity metrics.
These benchmarks can be collected through Employee Health Assessment Surveys and existing HR data. Establishing these baselines will help you measure the impact of your wellness program accurately.
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Step Two – Measurement
To gauge the effectiveness of your wellness program, it’s essential to conduct regular evaluations:
- Short-Term Evaluations: After the first year, assess the initial impact of your wellness initiatives.
- Long-Term Evaluations: Conduct follow-up evaluations at the five and ten-year marks to measure sustained outcomes.
Regular measurement allows you to make data-driven decisions and adjust your program as needed to ensure it continues to meet the needs of your employees.
Measuring outcomes
Ideally, performance measurement enables an organization to:
- Determine if a program has been implemented as planned (process measurement);
- Determine if a program has met its quality assurance criteria (process measurement);
- Assess if a program is attracting the volume of participants that it intended (process measurement);
- Document the individual employee health impacts of a program (impact measurement);
- Identify the health outcomes of a program as it relates to disability management and absenteeism rates (outcome measurement);
- Determine the cost benefit of a program (outcome measurement); and
- Establish whether an ongoing commitment to the program is justified.
Process measurements
Process measurements help determine if the program is being implemented as planned and meeting its immediate objectives.
Typical process measurements include:
- Participation Rates: Track how many employees are engaging with the program.
- Adherence Levels: Measure long-term participation and commitment.
- Participant Satisfaction: Collect feedback on employee satisfaction with the program.
- Perceived Value: Assess employees’ perception of the program’s value.
- Management Commitment: Evaluate the level of support from leadership.
Impact measurements
Impact measurements review medium-term outcomes at the individual level. They help determine if the program is achieving the desired health improvements among employees..
Typical impact measurements may include:
- Decreased Health Risks: Use health-risk assessments to track reductions in health risks.
- Improved Health Beliefs and Attitudes: Conduct surveys to gauge changes in health attitudes.
- Enhanced Perceived Health Status: Measure employees’ perceived health improvements.
- Readiness for Change: Assess employees’ readiness to adopt healthier behaviors.
- Increased Employee Satisfaction: Use questionnaires to measure job satisfaction.
- Greater Personal Control: Evaluate employees’ sense of control over their work environment.
- Reduced Incidence of Health Issues: Track new cases of cardiovascular and musculoskeletal conditions.
These metrics help demonstrate the personal health benefits of your wellness program.
Outcome measurements
Outcome measurements are longer term, organization-oriented results that indicate whether or not a program is generating the intended economic outcomes for the organization.
Typical outcome measures include:
- Reduced Illness and Injury Rates: Monitor decreases in stress-related, cardiovascular, and musculoskeletal disorders.
- Shorter Disability Duration: Track reductions in the length of disabilities.
- Cost Savings: Evaluate savings in health benefits, such as long-term and short-term disability costs, workers’ compensation, and drug utilization.
- Financial Metrics: Conduct cost/benefit analyses and calculate Return on Investment (ROI).
A survey from the Workplace Health Research Unit, found that managers typically do not see a clear link between the corporate health program and the overall corporate strategy and they don’t see the impact of the program in their reality. These measurements need to be tied with the overall business outcomes and need to make sense to the individual business unit managers.
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Step Three – Review and Redirection“What gets measured is what gets done.”
Once the data is tracked from employee wellness questionnaires, programs evaluations and HR data the wellness committee needs to review the progress of their initiatives. The data ensures that the current programs are operating satisfactorily and that the employee needs are being met. They may also show the way to new initiatives and the need for new action plans.
This data will also ensure that all stakeholders will see the bottom line impact of creating a healthy workplace. Without this data, leaders may make decisions that do not consider the health of their most valuable asset – their employees.
As solid research in workplace health programs increases there may be a change to anchoring the programs to broad organizational goals that then decreases the need to prove the benefits of each individual program.
“Many leading organizations are moving away from a focus on return on investment measures and are aligning workplace health programs to the their human capital management, ’employer of choice’, or triple bottom-line reporting strategies.” Conference Board Of Canada
*Source Health Canada
Questions
Does your company measure the success of its wellness programs?Is it important to your decision makers?
Are you measuring ROI?
Contact Beverly about hosting a health and wellness workshop for your leaders on how to build a supportive culture, prevent burnout in the workplace and other mental health training. Discover tips to deal with stress and encourage an engaging, safe working environment!
If you have some strategies to share – comment on this posting!
Additional Resources
Building A Well Workplace – Four Reasons Why Health Promotion Makes Good Business Sense
Corporate Wellness Programs – A Business Case
Workplace Wellness: 12 Steps To Setting Up Your Wellness Plan
Workplace Wellness: Critical Questions In Putting Wellness Programs Together
Workplace Wellness: 5 Reasons Why Excellent Programs Fail
Workplace Wellness: Moving From Health Promotion To A Healthy Organization