Gathering information on worker health behaviors

If your organization is interested in measuring the impact of your Worksite Wellness Plan efforts in future years, you’ll want to gather relevant baseline data on the health and health behaviors of your worker population.

Worksite Wellness Plan Data on your worker population

Health Risk Assessments / Health Risk Appraisals

Some health plans offer organizations free internet-based 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 taking part in an HRA, assure workers 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 worker population.

Worksite Wellness Plan Health Surveys

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

Worksite Wellness Plan Focus Groups and Informational Interviews

The information you can collect from focus groups or informational interviews with workers is an important supplement to the anonymous survey or HRA data. Listening to workers discuss their attitudes, values, receptivity and obstacles related to health provides a wealth of information on which to base decisions on how to increase your organization’s Workplace Wellness Program. Worksite Wellness Plan focus groups are especially useful for securing information from hard-to-reach worker populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.

Keep Worksite Wellness Plan focus groups small (8-19 workers, 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 Worksite Wellness Plan focus groups. The Worksite Wellness Plan coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Health and Wellness Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with workers in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and obstacles related to a) health behaviors and b) the workplace policies, settings 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 workers.