Company Health and Wellness Program Data on your employee population

Health Risk Assessments / Health Risk Appraisals

Some health plans offer businesses free online Health Risk Assessments / Health Risk Appraisals, complete with summary aggregate reports. If your healthcare plan does not offer a free HRA, you could pay for an HRA either through your healthcare plan or through a third party vendor.

To encourage participating in an HRA, assure employees 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 employee population.

Company Health and 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.

Company Health and 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 obstacles related to health provides a wealth of information on which to base decisions on how to improve your organization’s Corporate Health Promotion Program. Company Health and Wellness Program focus groups are especially useful for obtaining information from hard-to-reach employee populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.

Keep Company Health and Wellness Program focus groups small (8-19 employees, 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 Company Health and Wellness Program focus groups. The Company Health and Wellness Program coordinator of your health improvement Procedures or selected members of the Health Promotion Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with employees in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and obstacles 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 employees.

Tool #1: Establish effective goals
 • Focus on areas that can impact the overall goal.
  • For example, if the overall goal is to lose weight, the most productive areas to focus on are the dietary and activity changes that will lead to long-term weight loss.
  • For example, stress management and improving self-esteem may also impact weight loss; however, improving relationships, while a worthwhile topic, will not necessarily impact weight loss.
 • Make the goals specific, attainable, and forgiving. For example:
  • “Exercise more” is too general.
  • “Walk five miles everyday” is specific, but may not be attainable.
  • “Walk 30 minutes everyday” is specific and more attainable, but is not very flexible.
  • “Walk 30 minutes, five days a week” is specific, attainable, and forgiving.
 • Use a series of short-term goals to achieve the ultimate goal.
  • Short-term goals break big challenges into more easily attained pieces.
  • Smaller steps also provide Company Health and Wellness Program participants with encouragement and success. These small successes are essential for maintaining motivation towards a long-term goal.

Tool #2: Increase self-awareness
 • Self-monitoring is useful for tracking behavioral and environmental cues that trigger a particular behavior.
 • Keeping track of behavior status is also useful for times when progress towards a goal is difficult to measure, or when an individual is in a maintenance stage.

Tool #3: Offer rewards and motivation
 • Encourage participants to reward themselves for achieving small successes on the way to their ultimate goal.
 • Remember that rewards don’t always have to be “things.” Words of encouragement and praise can provide powerful motivation when spoken by a teacher, instructor, parent, friend, etc.

Tool #4: Respond effectively to set-backs
 • behavior change is conceptually a continuum. However, movement along that continuum is not just in one direction. People can move backwards or forwards or sometimes just stay put. Communicate to participants that set-backs, lapses and even staying the same (i.e., maintenance) are common for individuals trying to change behavior.
 • Stress is often a factor in lapses and relapses. Offer a variety of stress management resources to help participants better handle the stress which could trigger a set-back.
 • Brain storm to create a list of potential (and probable) obstacles to member behavior change. Then formulate strategies to meet each of those challenges.
 • Enhanced time management and decision-making skills can be effective ways to overcome behavior change relapses.
 • Offer participants with information regarding the behavior change process so that they will be better prepared for the challenges they will face. A brief overview of the Stages of Change may be helpful.