Employer Wellness : Workplace Physical Activity Programs: Assessment Guide
What Do You Wish to Achieve?
Consider why you’re evaluating and what your evaluation is going to measure.
If you’re trying to discover whether plan has been efficacious, see if you stuck to your mission statement and met your goals.
If you don’t have a mission statement or goals, agree with senior staff and your employee Workplace Health Promotion Program Committee how your organization will measure success.
By way of example, you can track success by changes in:
• Physical measures (e.g., strength, flexibility, waist circumference of staff members).
• Psychological measures (e.g., employee morale, satisfaction levels, stress levels).
• Productivity measures (e.g., decline in absenteeism rates, increased employee productiveness).
Thinking About workers
If you’re considering making improvements to the plan, think about whether the plan is still relevant and appropriate for employees. See if there are any barriers to participation in the program or to participation in physical activity during work.
As workers are the ones participating in the program, it’s significant to give them a chance to support feedback on the physical activity program.
Choosing an Evaluation Method
Decide on your evaluation method. Both measurable results (e.g., absenteeism rates or questionnaire responses) and descriptive results (e.g., one-on-one interviews or focus groups) can be used to evaluate. The method you choose will depend on the time and funding available and what you want to measure.
Deciding How to Do the Assessment
Decide when and where you will do your evaluation (and who will be evaluated). For more information, read the “Types of Evaluations” section on this website.
You may want to pilot test your assessment (e.g., with members of the Worksite Wellness Program Committee) before sending it out to staff members. The employee Worksite Wellness Program Committee may also wish to evaluate the initiative’s planning process.
Doing the Evaluation
• Compare your outcome to baseline information (i.e., evaluation results from before the launch of your initiative). If you don’t have this information, save your evaluation outcome to compare with later results. You can also look at other information you may have, such as employee satisfaction survey results.
• Analyze and share meaningful and simple-to-know results with management and employees.
• Evaluation results can be used to improve the current physical exercise program and/or to cultivate new pushes in future.