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

Corporate Wellness Program Data on your employee population

Health Risk Assessments

Some health plans offer companies free online 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 employees of confidentiality and consider providing incentives and 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 employee population.

Corporate Wellness Program Health Surveys

You can get a general sense of employees’ health-related attitudes and behaviors using a “lowtech” paper survey. As with a health risk assessment, employees 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 employee behaviors rather than a statistically accurate picture.

Corporate Wellness Program Focus Groups and Informational Interviews

The information you can collect from focus groups or informational interviews with employees is an important supplement to the anonymous survey or HRA data. Listening to employees 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 corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program. Corporate Wellness Program focus groups are especially useful for capturing information from hard-to-reach employee populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.

Keep Corporate Wellness Program focus groups small (8-19 employees, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer incentives and 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 Program focus groups. The Corporate Wellness Program coordinator of your health improvement Procedures or selected members of the Corporate Wellness Program Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with employees in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and barriers related to a) health behaviors and b) the workplace 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 employees.