Key Message:
Assessing your Needs will help you identify the issues important to employees and to the organisation. Collecting baseline information will help you identify these Needs and will also provide benchmark data to evaluate your initiatives.
Knowing the health status of your employees and what health concerns are important to them is valuable information to couple with the goals of your organisation. This will help you design programmes that are mutually beneficial. Gathering information about both your current situation and the desired future state, is an important part of the process. Comparing ‘where you are now’ to ‘where you want to be’ (what you hope to achieve) will help you clearly see the gap between the two, illuminating the path forward.
Tips from the evidence base…
The most valuable types of assessments include:
Information collected at the outset will help you assess what health initiatives are actually needed in your workplace (from the perspectives of both the employees and the organisation). Finally, baseline data is also important for evaluating and demonstrating the success of your initiatives.
The above data audit can be formal; however, experts also stress the effectiveness of informal approaches, through conversations or calls for opinions for example, that are less resource intensive. Remember that these are guidelines and should be scaled according to your capacity.
The key take-away here is that you should aspire to gain some kind of information in three key areas: employee concerns, organisation concerns and health deficits – this will help you find a balance between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’.
The formal or informal data collected at baseline will inform your needs. From here, you can develop objectives that reflect the specific needs of your organisation. Well-written, SMART objectives will help guide the rest of the process through the lens of sustainability and will shape your evaluation plans. If you carefully decide what indicators will determine the success of your initiative at the outset (by setting measurable goals and objectives), you will easily be able to evaluate and demonstrate their success and reveal constructive improvements.
If you are unsure of what you would like to achieve with your initiative, have a look at the Case Studies section to see what other successful Healthy Workplaces have achieved.