In our previous lessons, we discussed the history of corporate wellness. We also discussed program development. Then, we showed you how to promote and launch employee health incentive programs.
Now, it is time to take the next step.
A large part of wellness involves successfully creating programs that improve the health of the workforce. Your goal in corporate wellness coaching is in some ways to bring greater revenue for the company’s investment, but in many ways, it is also to create an environment where employees are improving their health, living longer, and enjoying their lifestyle much more.
Yet health promotion is not an exact science. Although there are studies that show that certain programs work better than others, there are circumstances that make it hard to know exactly what is going to benefit the employee the most:
- Are the employees creating a wellness environment within their own homes?
- Are the employees doing only the minimum to improve on their wellness?
- Are other things going on that affect how effective the programs are?
There are hundreds of different factors that can affect the success of your worksite promotion efforts. As a corporate wellness coach, it is your job to continue to ensure that every program you put into place is working, that employees and the company are receiving the maximum benefit, and that they will continue to receive those benefits as time goes on.
The Key to Success: Evaluation
It is with that in mind that you should consider an evaluation to be a vital aspect of being an effective corporate wellness coach. Rather than trust that your programs are working subjectively, use evaluations to find out how well the programs are working, what changes can or need to be made, what employees are thinking of the process and how much value your programs are truly bringing the company. This is how personal trainers evaluate clients.
Other reasons to evaluate include:
- Gauging employee interest in more programs and wellness support.
- Finding out how marketing has worked and if there is room for growth.
- Discovering if wellness is truly a part of the workplace in good times and bad.
- Measuring benefits for getting your program budget.
- Keeping up to date with the latest health concerns in the workplace.
A formal, substantive, quantitative evaluation campaign is the only way you can accurately and actively judge the success of your programs. It is one of the most important tools you have as a corporate wellness coach for succeeding at that specific company and others.
Before You Begin – Figuring Out How to Evaluate
You should come up with an evaluation plan before you even begin your wellness programs. Creating a plan in the beginning will make sure that:
- Evaluations are included in your budget if there are any costs
- Evaluations are completed on time because it is on schedule
- Evaluation tactics are not changed to provide better results
- Evaluation plans can be organized long in advance of the evaluation date to ensure no errors
- Evaluation plans cannot be changed by executives looking for numbers that may not be there
Evaluations can be kind of tricky. As mentioned earlier, you have two goals as a corporate wellness coach: To improve the company’s ROI, and to improve the health of the employees. That latter point means that your evaluation tactics should not necessarily mean that your programs are bad if they don’t produce financially measurable results. If they produce individual health results, that is important as well.
Therefore, when you are evaluating your programs, you should try to AVOID evaluating programs that are either too difficult to mathematically interpret, will not have clear and concise results, or that are not of interest to the executives in charge of budgeting (except in the case of measuring employee health). There is no reason to waste time and resources measuring programs that cannot give you any information of value. Limit your evaluation scope to only the programs you need to evaluate.
WELCOA listed ten important points about setting up program evaluations.
These include:
- Select only those issues to evaluate that are critical to key decision-makers and that you will need to refine the program.
- Recognize that extremely valid evaluation research is very expensive.
Don’t accept responsibility for extensive evaluation without the resources to accomplish it.
- Don’t collect information about the program that does not have a clearly defined use up front.
- Recognize that even the best evaluation will not necessarily silence program critics.
- Look for ways of using already existing methods to collect information.
- Don’t do evaluations unless you plan to use the results.
- Find out ahead of time what key decision-makers expect regarding evaluation methods and results.
- Look for ways to maximize the validity of your evaluation efforts.
- Keep asking others for suggestions on how to improve your evaluation efforts.
Good evaluation data can be costly and can produce results that are unimportant for your campaign but that executives can point to as reasons to cut your budget. When you start your planning as a corporate wellness coach, always remember that to receive funding for your budget, you need to do whatever it takes to avoid giving ammunition for those that do not believe in your programs. That is why while evaluations are important for finding out how your programs are doing, it should also be used as a tool to win senior executives over, not give them a reason to dislike your work.
Possible Difficulty: Coming Up with Defined Goals to Measure
One of the issues you will have, however, is coming up with what goals can even be measurable. According to a study of Fortune 500 companies, the three most common program objectives were:
- Promote Better Health.
- Improve Cardiovascular Fitness
- Reduce Coronary Risk Factors
As you can see, none of these is a defined goal. Rather it is simply a category that has subjective components that may be hard to measure, especially in terms of ROI. Long before you have even launched your corporate wellness programs you will need to decide what outcomes are both measurable and realistic within the needs of the company, and which of those measurements are going to show successes.
Ideally you will need to select numbers that are easier to measure and will show your successes to the company. Examples of this include:
- Average number of sick days used by employees on average over the course of the year.
- Number of employees participating in 1 or more wellness programs.
- Number of employees participating in a specific wellness program.
- Number of employees completing class trainings.
- Outcome of re-evaluation from previously collected data.
These are examples of items that can show a clear number from which to generate conclusions. You can use this data to show executives and the wellness committee the results of your programs and help yourself gain support for additional programs.
Re-Testing Health Risk Assessments
One of the clearest points of data you can use is to have employees re-take the health risk assessment. Assuming employees have engaged in your corporate wellness programs, your data should show a drastic cut in the challenges that were affecting the workforce.
Based on previous research completed on corporate wellness, it will be easy to infer success from successful completion of a retaking HRA. It will also give you a starting point to see where any problem areas may be that aren’t being addressed by your current programs.
Approving Measurable Objectives
You should be thinking about evaluations before you have launched your programs, during the initial planning phase. As you come up with your goals and objectives, take the time to discuss what objectives can be evaluated and measured. You can also create separate goals and objectives that are measurable for the purposes of evaluation.
Once you have those objectives planned, the next step is to gain their approval. One of the best reasons for figuring out how you are going to evaluate the program is because once you have come up with measurable goals that you think you can reach, you can bring those goals to the executive team and your wellness team and get them approved.
Consider this a leverage tool. When you hand over your objectives for approval, you are ensuring that you address any concerns before they have become a concern. Once approved, you will not have to worry as much that the company will not come up with some measurement request that they will not be able to reach.
If you wait and bring what you are evaluating up for review from the budgetary committee, they may make an evaluation request that you know to be impossible. However, when you try to convince a company that it is not something worth measuring, they may wind up thinking that you are reacting defensively because you do not believe your programs to be working.
By taking up the objectives beforehand, you reduce the appearance of defensiveness. Your programs have not started, so it is impossible for you to be hiding a perceived failure. Then, by proving you have reached the defined goals you started with, you are able to show that the project has been a success. That is the benefit of coming up with measurable objectives for evaluation beforehand.
Testing for Your Plan vs. Testing for Others
There are going to be two types of evaluation. Evaluations that you complete to continue to receive support from the company and evaluations that you need to make sure that your programs are on the right track.
Both you must plan in during the planning phase, long before your programs have been launched. One is so that you can show management that your programs are doing well. The other, however, is so that you can find out if there are any areas that you should still be addressing. Evaluations are beneficial for your planning as a corporate wellness coach as it is for getting funding, so you should use evaluative techniques to discover areas of concern and possible new programs that you can initiate.
Questions to Ask Yourself with Your Evaluation
When you are evaluating for your own benefit to find out how well your programs should be working, your evaluation techniques should be answering the following questions:
- How are your programs affecting wellness in the company individually?
- How are your programs affecting wellness in the company as a whole?
- Are you achieving your desired ROI results?
- Are you achieving your desired individual health results?
- What problems appear to be arising with your initial program model?
- What appears to be producing better than expected gains?
- Are there areas that should be receiving fewer resources?
- Are there areas that are particularly successful that could use greater resources?
- What is employee interest level in continuing with each program?
- Are there any new program ideas that could benefit the company?
- Are employees making good decisions at home as well as the office?
- Are families getting involved?
- Do you still have management support? Has that support increased?
This is just a small sample of the types of questions you should be asking with evaluations.
How to Get Answers
Polling and questionnaires based on these questions are the best ways to get the data you want. Much of the data you will collect to show your gains to executives are going to be found in numbers they already collect. Sick days, number of employees using the programs, etc. – all of this is data that you should be collecting over the course of your programs.
You will collect the other data from other sources:
- HRA – You should continue to complete a health risk assessment for the company every year. That will allow you to judge how well your employees are able to reduce their health risks over time, which will indicate how well your programs have been able to address each area. That kind of data will be invaluable towards driving your programs further.
- Employee Interest Surveys – You should also continue to ask employee interest surveys. These surveys will let you know how much the employee’s interests have changed since you started the programs. In some cases, you are going to find that employees may be more interested in a different type of program, or have greater interest in one of the programs you already put into place.
- Outside Company Polling and Studies – There are several companies that offer various evaluation services that may help you with your data collection. These companies do physical health assessments and other measurements to determine where your programs are working and not working. These can be expensive but are still an option.
- Qualitative Polling – You can also be asking for opinions and thoughts from the employees and see if you notice any trends or information within those responses. Simply talking to employees individually can tell you a lot about what they are thinking about wellness and can give you a lot of insight into how to continue your programs moving forward.
Keeping yourself informed of what is working and what isn’t working in the workplace is important for helping you to both reflect and evaluate your future success.
Costs of Evaluations
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that all evaluation techniques can be time consuming and expensive. Look for shortcuts that will allow you to gain insight without straining your budget (42). Many of the numbers you will need are going to be logged by HR or by the companies you work with, so be sure and use cheaper/free evaluation methods whenever possible.
What To Do with This Information
It’s clear why evaluations are important. Without evaluations, there is no way to learn what is working, what isn’t working, and what areas may still need to be addressed. Evaluations are also your ammunition for convincing management to continue funding your wellness programs. Without evaluations, there would be no way to assess the effectiveness of everything that you have put into place.
Your next step is deciding what to do with the evaluation. – Presenting data to the company
Presenting data to the company is going to be the most compelling step as a corporate wellness coach. Find a way to present the data that shows how well your programs are working and any of the measurable financial accomplishments it can make. It is usually a good idea to re-display how much the company spent per employee, and compare that number to the dollar value that you have been able to measurably increase in your numbers.
If you discover that some of your data isn’t meeting your objectives, you should also display data that indicates what went wrong (if anything), where you can expect better results, and where improvements will be made. If your programs vastly under-performed expectations, show them where the most changes are going to be made and give them a timeline that they can expect more noticeable results.
Presenting data to employees
Another option you have is to present an employee report card. You can use this as a marketing tool as well. Use the report card as a marketing tool to show the employees all of the amazing gains that have been made. For work that can be improved, highlight many of the positive gains that have been made and what can be done to bring the grade up to an “A.” Be sure to provide as much information as possible – knowing their progress is important to employees, too.
Redesigning the program
When your data tells you that there are improvements to be made, redesigning your program should be part of your priority. How you distribute your resources may need to change – you may want to add more funding to programs that are working well or add more resources to programs that show potential but could use more funding.
When you redesign a program, remember that you may want to adjust your program based on the measurable goals that you have already created, or you may want to create new goals. New goals come with new discussions with management, however, so be careful about what you choose. Also, always remember to work with your wellness committee to make sure that the choices you make are approved by those within the company.
Final Thoughts on Evaluation
As a coach, evaluations become one of your most important tools. It has several benefits for the entire company, including:
- Employee Awareness – Showing the employees how they are doing is an effective way to help encourage their long-term success in the program.
- Executive Approval – You will need to be consistently justifying your program if you hope to continue your efforts within a corporate client. Quantitative analysis is the best way to do that.
- Program Design – No matter how effective your programs have been shown to be in the past, it is always possible that they will not work as well at this current workplace. Evaluations give you the opportunity to find out what can be improved and what is working perfectly.
- Program Additions – Finally, evaluations give you a chance to see if employee insight gives you any good ideas about how to continue your programs, add new ideas, change your marketing plan, etc.
Evaluations should be considered a part of your program. If you cannot create any measurable or even subjective results/benefits, then your programs may not be working as you had planned.
Leading professional training courses for this career path:
Certified Corporate Wellness Coach
Certified Master Health and Wellness Coach
Certified Wellness Coach
Certified Integrative Health Coach
