Employee Wellness Plans : Worksite Health Promotion Program: create a Detailed Action Plan  

The Workplace Health Promotion Program Committee must set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals/objectives, as well as supports details for marketing and evaluating the program. The plan is the detailed map of what types of programs will be offered, when and where they will be scheduled, how they will be marketed and evaluated, and what the budget is.  It is significant to plan your wellness activities based on your goals/objectives, as well as the budget since different strategies will yield different outcomes.  By way of example, if your mission is to broaden awareness on a topic, then distributing handouts or scheduling a one-time education session may be appropriate.  However, if your intention is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly meetings and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Company Wellness Program Marketing

Now is the time to plan your marketing strategies!  How can you market the wellness program and ongoing activities?  No matter how you decide to, market often, keep it fresh, and remind employees repeatedly!  Consider having an overall kickoff activity to inform everyone of the wellness program.  Senior Leadership should offer the introduction or invitation so that all employees are aware of their support and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

• Sending email messages, including reminders
• Design flyers,
• Hanging bulletin board postings,
• Composing articles,
• Mailing letters or
• Mailing special invitations.  

Other Company Health Promotion Program Considerations:

• Is the Company Wellness Program promoted to all workers or to a specific group?
• Do you have a Employee Wellness Program champion (someone who is joined with different groups in the organization, and well respected) who can help in your promotion efforts?
• If your marketing efforts don’t seem to be working, do you have a way to revisit and change your strategy?
• How will you determine effectiveness and evaluate your program?  And how will you collect the information needed to evaluate your program?  

Topics most frequently included in Worksite Wellness Programs:

• Nutrition
• Physical Activity/Exercise
• Tobacco Use Cessation
• Bone Health
• Cardiovascular Health
• The Spine
• Stress Reduction
• Chronic Disease Awareness & Prevention
• Self-care; Wise Medical Care Consumer
• Screening Services (BMI, Blood Pressure (BP), bone density, blood lipids, glucose, posture, vision, and other…)
• Ergonomic Assessments
• Health Fairs
• Kids/family Events
• Others topics that employees have interest in  

The topics and type of Employee Health Promotion Program planned depend on the needs and interest, overriding goal and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as brochures and/or education sessions, behavior modification programs such as smoking cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or business backing such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in vending machines.  

The programs planned also depend on the demographics of your workforce.  If you have a young, healthy workforce, you may want to focus the wellness attention on keeping workers healthy and not need to screen for disease.  Instead you might want to focus on healthy lifestyle behavior such as exercise and great nourishment to prevent the on-set of disease.  Click here for more information on strategies for keeping workers well, identifying disease early, or returning workers to work who already have a chronic conditions.

It is also valuable to consider, and plan how you will evaluate the success of your wellness program.  The system needs to be shown for tracking certain data and recording events depending on the program goals.  Step 7 discusses program evaluation in more detail.   And Step 6 will launch your program!