How to conduct an Effective Workplace Wellness Assessment?

Living well is a constant process that requires balance and continuous focus on different aspects of healthy living. Despite acknowledging its importance, most corporate employees get caught up in busy schedules and neglect their wellness, facing health problems.

So, workplace wellness assessment is an important exercise to maintain employees' wellness and ensure the smooth conduct of business. It is crucial for employers to keep track of their employees' well-being status to foster a healthy work environment.

Holistic assessments are essential in the workplace. They ensure employees are aware of their health and motivated to adopt healthier habits.

Employers must help employees learn the value of embracing healthier behaviors through workplace wellness assessment tools.

But first, let us understand what employee wellness assessment is all about.

What is a Workplace Wellness Assessment?

Before delving into the concept of employee wellness assessment, let's talk about workplace wellness.

Wellness is much more than just being disease-free. According to GWD, it is an active process of transition and progression. It is becoming familiar with making choices towards a healthy and rewarding life. Pfizer defines it as the act of adopting healthy habits to achieve better physical and mental health.

When we use the term "workplace wellness," it implies the initiatives companies take to ensure the overall well-being of their employees. That's where workplace wellness assessment comes into the picture.

Wellness Assessments can assess an employee's physical, spiritual, social, and environmental well-being. They are an evaluation method for determining an employee's health status and lifestyle. These assessments can help identify health risks that employees often neglect and do not pay enough attention to.

Hence, the main goal of a workplace wellness assessment is to check for potential improvements in health and support employees with their wellness goals.

Employees should also take these activities seriously and respond in the best possible way. The assessments will provide the necessary information to help management formulate an efficient wellness program. To perform to the best of his abilities, an employee must adhere to all the steps and make the wellness assessment successful.

What are the Benefits of Workplace Wellness Assessment?

• Workplace Wellness assessments can help detect health issues early, enabling employees and employers to address the risks and take preventive measures.

• The assessment results help individuals understand how to seek further recommendations and guidance based on their specific health needs.

• This early detection and the assessment results can make employees prioritize their overall health and wellbeing.

• Employee wellness assessments can help organizations choose the right programs and health services to meet employee health requirements.

• Workplace wellness assessments also help reduce healthcare costs. Addressing potential health risks early on prevents hospitalizations and medical treatments, resulting in low absenteeism.

Before working on any solution, it is always essential to understand the problem. Unhealthy lifestyle choices are the main reason for the wellness slump in any workplace. They result in massive losses, which can be costly for organizations. According to a recent report by Hubspot, yearly losses of around 2 trillion dollars are due to productivity issues alone.

Hence, a wellness assessment is vital. It will inform employers about their employees' health status and help the management prepare more user-friendly and efficient corporate wellness programs.

In the podcast by HRD Connect, HR veterans Chuck Heaton, Chuck Kemper, and Jason Anderson discuss wellness assessments. They mention that engagement levels must be measured appropriately. Engagement directly correlates to organizational success and improves safety, productivity, retention, customer relations, profit, and shareholder return.

How do Assessments help Organizations measure the effectiveness of their existing Wellness Programs?

Once organizations implement wellness programs, they must measure their impact and effectiveness in achieving their end goal. The primary goal is to ensure employees adopt and maintain healthy lifestyles.

Workplace wellness assessments can help companies measure the effectiveness of wellness programs. Carrying out assessments before and after the implementation of wellness programs can help employers identify differences in the health status of the workforce.

For instance, a health assessment for an obese employee will show different results before he participates in a wellness activity. Once he engages in a challenge like a walkathon, his health will show a better picture in the after-assessment. This gives the company an idea that their wellness programs are working fine.

Similarly, employee wellness assessments should be conducted before and after every wellness program. These assessments can easily show lifestyle changes and other good and bad outcomes because of these wellness contests.

Employers can also leverage health assessments to measure their ROIs from wellness programs by comparing the costs and benefits of reduced healthcare costs and zero absenteeism, among other things.

Workplace Wellness assessments provide organizations with valuable data on what kind of wellness programs work and do not. They offer insights into the impact of these programs and areas for improvement.

What are the Steps required to conduct Workplace Wellness Assessments?

Before looking for ways to conduct an employee wellness assessment, one must be clear about the objectives and the metrics.

1. Plan your Assessment

Decide which areas of wellness you are trying to assess. Whether it's physical health, lifestyle behaviors, or you are more concerned about their mental wellbeing. Come up with the types of wellness assessments accordingly.

Whatever assessment you conduct, ensure your employees that their data and information will be protected so they do not hesitate to participate. Protecting employee data is important, considering it is sensitive information and is about respecting privacy.

2. Assess the Work Environment

Tour your workplace and complete the environmental assessment. Check the facilities available for environmental factors that may affect staff wellness. Examine access to healthy food, opportunities for physical activity, and workplace health and safety. Consider all other factors that support employee wellness.

Learn about the organization from different perspectives. Engage in group and individual interviews with key employees. Change the workplace environment to help promote healthy lifestyles.

3. Measure the Engagement Levels

Every organization is unique, so how an employer engages his employees looks different, too. According to research from GALLUP, organizations in the United States with highly engaged employees have 17% higher productivity and 21% higher profit.

Measure employee engagement levels to build trust. Identify strengths and problem areas. Understand how to engage your employees in a way that works best for the organization. Use pulse surveys and conduct workplace audits. Employ tools like the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), an efficient measure of employee engagement.

4. Remote work-related risks

Remote work has brought a fresh set of challenges related to employee wellness.

Job uncertainty, mental health issues, and isolation have increased stress. A lot of these employees are now reporting symptoms of depression. An agile approach from employers will help with better health management. The onus is on them to ensure there is no impact on the flow of business operations.

Communicate with your employees sometimes. Even a simple phone call can go a long way towards encouraging their morale. Ask your employees to communicate with their peers a lot more. Conduct recreational activities over online platforms.

Incorporate several engaging contests and challenges in the wellness platform and reward them.

5. Data Analysis and Interpretation

Integrate and summarize the information collected. Interpret this information from the point of view of your wellness needs. Compare health plans and health care cost patterns of employees.

Use break-even analysis to find potential values of the existing or future programs. Devise a timely intervention and construct a forecasting framework.

Choose an appropriate index as a baseline. The baseline value will influence the outcome and reflect the status of the forecast.

6. Findings and Implications

Consider all the parameters and ensure that it covers all points of wellness. Adjust your existing wellness program. Revise a few changes and make it more efficient and engaging.

Develop an action plan with a timeline and budget to target desired goals.

What are the types of Workplace Wellness Assessments?

1. Innovative Assessment Questionnaires

One can start the workplace wellness assessment with specific sets of questions and data-driven methods.

The collected data will be analyzed, and the insights will be used to improve the factors that impact employees' health and wellness.

Use innovative assessment questionnaires and data-driven solutions with the latest health technology available. This will help guide employees towards healthier outcomes and enhance the organization's bottom line.

The assessment must cover all nine dimensions of wellness. Each dimension should be represented by its own pertinent questions, which must focus on employees' health history and work-related information.

Keep the responses anonymous. It will help to ensure that the data received is accurate. Employees who feel their identity is not anonymous usually offer agreeable responses.

It will provide a snapshot of how employees feel about their wellness. Another tool to test work quality is the Job Quality Index.

2. Interviews

Instead of sharing questionnaires for employees to fill, organizations can also have one-on-one interview sessions to assess employee health. The questions in the questionnaire can very well be asked in those interviews.

The interviewer can have conversations with every employee and collect their health data. This method of data collection is more structured and detailed. They can also collect follow-up data, which is not always possible in online surveys.

3. Documents and records

The existing documents of all employees and their medical records can provide data about health risks and lifestyles. This information will help organizations evaluate their lifestyle behaviors and develop lifestyles aligned with their health requirements.

4. Health Risk Assessments and Biometric Screenings

Biometric screenings constitute a significant part of wellness assessments. They are one of the most effective ways to determine an employee's health status. Health screenings provide data on key indicators like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, BMI, etc. This data is essential for correct assessment and health recommendations.

Whatever health data one acquires, employers can accordingly curate wellness programs tailored to individual needs. This form of assessment helps identify potential threats and help prevent serious health risks down the line. Additionally, it will lead to low healthcare costs and zero absenteeism in the long run.

Using the Vantage Fit App for Employee Wellness Assessment

Vantage Fit is a comprehensive digital wellness platform that is transforming the workplace. It is an engaging platform for users to keep track of their wellness activities. Users can create a customized profile and complete specific fitness tasks. On completion, they are rewarded with points that they can redeem later.

The application gathers all the essential wellness information from the users such as weight, eating patterns, etc., and provides an overall health score and specific recommendations for improvement. The data collected from the platform can give you a fair idea of your employee's health status and how to improve in what areas.

For instance, when we log our weight on the platform, the application suggests us a minimum calorie intake within which we should limit our consumption. Similarly, the application has multiple fitness features that enable employers to monitor wellbeing of their employees.

Book a demo to learn how Vantage Fit can help you create a successful wellness assessment in your company.

Conclusion

There are only a few well-specified methods of program evaluation. Despite that, employers continue to invest in wellness programs, and for good reasons. Making wellness a business priority improves employees’ health and inculcates workplace culture. Thus, it will provide greater zeal and commitment from the employees and promote better ROI.

Foster a culture of wellbeing and focus on long-term goals. Find new ways to engage your employees. Try hosting an employee wellness assessment every quarter and keep tabs on employee wellness and improvements.

Teach them about giving due importance to their personal health. Show your employees that you value their welfare.