Wellness Forum

Step 8: Maintain Adherence

Besides offering incentives and friendly competition, peer-to-peer support (mentoring) and evaluations are often the best ways to maintain employee participation in wellness programs. Consider using both of these tools as a way of ensuring the success of your worksite wellness program.

Mentoring

A mentoring program (or “buddy system”) allows employees to rely on each other for support. A mentor can encourage healthy eating and physical activity in the workplace. They can also offer assistance to employees who want support or are having difficulty observing a policy.

Evaluation

Evaluations can help you determine what programs are being used and which ones are not. They can also measure whether employee’s attitudes, behaviors, and health indicators have changed as a result of the program. All of this information can be used to modify the program in order to better meet employee needs or ensure that the program is working effectively.

How to Evaluate: It’s important to plan how the program will be evaluated when setting up a wellness program. Review the Wellness Council of America’s Planning Wellness: Getting Off To A Good Start. The guide provides information on how to develop a program evaluation as well as how to use evaluation results to benefit your program.

Evaluation Options: There are a variety of ways you can evaluate a worksite wellness program. Review the list of evaluation options for a more information about each of the following evaluation tools:

Participant Feedback
Health Status Questionnaire
Evaluation of Objectives
Employee Acceptance Data
Outcome Evaluations
Organizational Indicators