Gathering information on worker health behaviors

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

Corporate Health Promotion Plan Data on your worker population

Health Risk Assessments / Health Risk Appraisals

Some health plans offer employers free web-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.

Corporate Health Promotion 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.

Corporate Health Promotion 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 barriers related to health provides a wealth of information on which to base decisions on how to improve your organization’s Corporate Wellness Program. Corporate Health Promotion Plan focus groups are especially useful for obtaining information from hard-to-reach worker populations, such as those for whom English is a learned language.

Keep Corporate Health Promotion 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 Corporate Health Promotion Plan focus groups. The Corporate Health Promotion Plan coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Health Promotion Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with workers in a variety of positions to better understand their attitudes, interests and barriers related to a) health behaviors and b) the worksite policies, environments 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.