Gathering information on employee health behaviors

If your employer is interested in measuring the impact of your Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative efforts in future years, you’ll want to gather relevant baseline data on the health and health behaviors of your employee population.

Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative Data on your employee population

Health Risk Assessments (HRAs)

Some health plans offer businesses free online Health Risk Assessments (HRAs), 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 employees of confidentiality and consider providing incentives 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 employee population.

Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative Health Surveys

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

Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative Focus Groups and Informational Interviews

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

Keep Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative focus groups small (8-19 employees, ideally all of a similar job class). If possible, offer incentives 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 and Wellness Initiative focus groups. The Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative coordinator of your health improvement Strategies or selected members of the Workplace Health and Wellness Initiative Committee can conduct one-on-one interviews with employees 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 employees.