Businesses can evaluate and tweak their health and wellness programs to get the best possible results. Here's how to measure the effectiveness of your workplace wellness program.
Company wellness programs aren’t just nice to have — they make good business sense. Multiple studies show that healthier employees are more engaged, productive, and efficient in their roles. Moreover, studies show that when employees are engaged with wellness programs, it results in business performance improvements.
However, this is a challenge for most managers. Let’s take a look at how businesses can evaluate and change their employee health and wellness programs to consistently gain the best possible results.
The Importance of Evaluation
Good company well-being helps employers maximize the effectiveness of their workforce — and this is especially true of smaller organizations. But workplace wellness programs are only effective if they’re managed effectively. To get the most out of them, businesses need to measure, monitor, and improve programs to keep employees engaged.
No employee wellness program is successful in the long term without individualization, feedback, and evaluation. It starts with a company vision that everyone works towards by measuring progress and adjusting along the way. Here are three important program outcomes:
- Identify program accomplishments
- Ensure the organization’s resources are spent in meaningful ways
- Achieve employee well-being
It’s important to work out a simple evaluation plan that your employees, management, and HR can get behind. For that to happen, your plan needs to be focused, actionable, and aligned with your organization’s goals.
Your effectiveness evaluation plan also needs to be practical and respect employee’s privacy. For example, you may think tracking employees’ blood pressure levels with wearables to find out whether a specific initiative is working might be the ideal route, but is it feasible? And will all employees want to share that level of personal information? Instead, it might be more effective to call for volunteer employees to give a sample for research.
Which Metrics Should You Track?
Before we get into the metrics, let’s talk about two important terms: lagging indicators and leading indicators.
What Are Lagging Indicators?
Lagging indicators are performance metrics that reflect past outcomes. They are easy to measure because they provide concrete data on what has already happened. However, they are difficult to influence directly since they represent the result of various factors over time. For example, someone trying to lose weight can step on a scale to see their current weight.
This number is an output — it describes the result of their past eating and exercise habits. In workplace wellness programs, common lagging indicators include employee absenteeism rates, healthcare costs, and productivity levels — all measurable outcomes of past actions.
What Are Leading Indicators?
Leading indicators are predictive metrics that help forecast future outcomes. They focus on inputs — actions or behaviors that can influence results — but they are harder to measure directly. For instance, in weight loss, tracking daily calorie intake, exercise consistency, or sleep quality are leading indicators. These factors contribute to weight loss but are complex to monitor and adjust.
In workplace wellness programs, leading indicators include employee engagement in wellness activities, participation in mental health initiatives, and stress management efforts. These inputs shape future outcomes, such as reduced absenteeism and increased productivity, but require ongoing measurement and refinement.
Here’s How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Workplace Wellness Program
Measuring program participation and effectiveness is key. Follow these steps to evaluate the effectiveness of your program:
1. Start With Your Main Goal
Why do you want to implement a wellness program, or if you already have one, what do you want it to achieve? Keeping this in mind will help you ensure every aspect feeds back into your overarching goal. Here are some popular reasons:
- Improve employee productivity
- Reduce employee health risks
- Improve employee health
- Reduce company healthcare costs
- Improve employee morale and retention
- Attract a higher caliber of talent
- Boost the efficiency of your existing workforce
All of these are important, but to maintain focus, work out which one is the top priority for your organization.
2. Choose the Metrics You’re Going to Measure
Your metrics selection will be directly related to your priority, and there are many ways to measure the success of a wellness program. For example, if you want to reduce employee health risks, your metrics for wellness program effectiveness might include:
- Absenteeism due to workplace injury
- Number of workplace injury incidents
- How satisfied employees are with workplace safety initiatives (survey your employees)
- How engaged employees are with workplace wellness initiatives
3. Analyze Your Data
Measuring leading indicators is easy. To use the example above, you can measure:
- How many sick days have been taken off due to injury
- Reported incidents of workplace injury
- How many employees have completed safety training programs
- How many people have signed up to program activities and coaching
- What employees are engaging with
- Percentage of employees who rate safety within the company positively
When it comes to measuring lagging indicators, some questions might include:
- Did those who took part in training programs, coaching, or activities in year one see a reduction in workplace health incidents in year two?
- Were there fewer healthcare claims among those who engaged with wellness programs than among those who didn’t?
Once your data has been analyzed, you can take steps to improve your wellness program. Depending on the metrics you’re looking to improve, this could include additional training, a better onboarding procedure, or investing in a comprehensive wellness program package that’s more effective at meeting your organization’s needs.
Leverage Corehealth Technology for Efficient Wellness Programs
All too often, workplaces implement wellness programs but skip the vital task of setting up an evaluation plan. As a result, tracking and measuring important employee and organizational wellness indicators is nearly impossible.
CoreHealth Technologies Inc. is a total well-being technology company dedicated to provide and support corporate health and wellness programs. The Corehealth wellness program provides easy access to tools and resources to improve employee well-being.
Developing a focused and effective health program consisting of a strong vision and relevant questions that all lead into your primary focus is critical when developing a wellness program. For example, at CoreHealth, we measure our wellness platform using Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®, to measure customer experience and to predict business growth. This proven metric provides the core measurement for customer experience management programs around the world. It can prove effectiveness, return on investment (ROI), and other statistics that demonstrate effectiveness, such as participation rates.
Ready to improve your employee wellness program? Contact us today for help with your employee health and well-being strategy. Successful wellness programs start with Corehealth.
Read more about crafting the perfect wellness program with these articles from the Corehealth blog:
- 5 Ways Workplace Wellness Program Providers Track Engagement
- Next-Generation Wellness Programs for Gen Z: Essential Elements
- Top 15 Budget Friendly Corporate Wellness Incentives For Employees
About CoreHealth Technologies
CoreHealth Technologies Inc. is a total well-being technology company trusted by global providers to power their health and wellness programs. Our wellness portals help maximize health, engagement and productivity for 3+ million employees worldwide. We believe people are the driving force of organizations and supporting them to make behavior changes to improve employee health is in everyone’s best interest. With the most flexibility, customizations and integrations of any software in its class, CoreHealth’s all-in-one wellness platform helps grow great wellness companies. Simple to sophisticated, based on you. For more information, visit the CoreHealth website.
