Employee Wellness Newsletter : Corporate Wellness Program: formulate a Detailed Action Plan  

The Workplace Health Promotion Program Committee should set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing goals and 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 available, 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 and objectives, as well as the budget since different strategies will yield different outcomes.  By way of example, if your objective is to increase awareness on a topic, then distributing handouts or scheduling a one-time class may be appropriate.  Nonetheless, if your goal is to change behavior, then different strategies may be necessary, such as ongoing weekly sessions and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Options for additional ideas.

Workplace Health Promotion Program Marketing

Now is the time to coordinate your marketing strategies!  How can you market the wellness program and ongoing activities?  No matter how you decide to, market frequently, keep it fresh, and remind staff members over and over!  Consider having an overall kickoff exercise to let everyone know about the wellness program.  Senior Management must support the introduction or invitation so that all staff members are knowledgeable about their support and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing methods:

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

Other Corporate Health Promotion Program Considerations:

• Is the Corporate Health Promotion Program promoted to all staff members or to a specific target audience?
• Do you have a Worksite Wellness Program champion (someone who is associated 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 adjust your plan?
• How will you determine performance and evaluate your program?  And how will you gather the information needed to evaluate your program?  

Topics most often included in Workplace Health Promotion Programs:

• Nutrition
• Physical Activity/Exercise
• Tobacco Use Cessation
• Bone Health
• Heart 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 issues that employees have interest in  

The subject matters and type of Employee Health Promotion Program planned depend on the needs and interest, central objective and resources available.  Program Design Options   include awareness programs such as pamphlets and/or education sessions, behavior change programs such as tobacco cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or organization reinforcement such as no smoking policies or healthy selections in snack 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 good 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 important to consider, and plan how you will evaluate the success of your wellness program.  The system needs to be established for tracking certain data and recording activities depending on the program goals/objectives.  Step 7 discusses program assessment in more detail.   And Step 6 will launch your program!