A health risk assessment (HRA) or personal health assessment (PHA) is the most important tool in any workplace health and wellness program.
Without them, you don’t know the problems, you can’t target your activities, and you can’t tell if your program is working
For a successful workplace health and wellness program, you need to assess two things: behaviour and culture.
The best way to assess employee behaviour is through a health risk assessment or HRA, sometimes called a personal health assessment or PHA.
Why invest in a health risk assessment?
HRAs are powerful little things. While they may only take your employees around 5 minutes to fill in, they will give your health & wellness program immense drive, energy and direction.
1. Evidence of need
The most important benefit of a HRA is to give your senior management evidence of the need to change. There, in black and white (and all sorts of colourful graphs!) they can see the rising cost of health to their organisation – the potential cardiovascular disease and obesity, the stress-levels and the mental health issues, all contributing to absenteeism, presenteeism and lost productivity.
A HRA helps you gather crucial data for developing a workplace health program that’s directly targeted to address these issues and boost your organisation’s productivity.
2. Evidence of change
Secondly, when you repeat the HRA year on year, it provides you with a clear, unequivocal evidence of the success of the program.
A good HRA will not only show each employee the improvements they’ve made in their health and lifestyle habits, but will give you a really comprehensive aggregate report, which shows the impact of all these individual changes across the organisation.
You’ll be able to see how your Lose4Life campaign has resulted in a reduced obesity risk, for example, or how your Good Night campaign has improved sleep patterns.
3. Awareness raising
Last but not least, a HRA will raise employees’ awareness of their own health, and any harmful habits and behaviours.
Your workplace health program should move your employees from “not thinking” to “thinking” about their health. Then, you can raise their awareness of the problems, and show them the easy solutions.
What should a good HRA include?
A best practice HRA looks at all aspects of health and lifestyle behaviours, going beyond the physical to look at things such as stress, job satisfaction and relationships. Make sure your HRA assesses:
- Health behaviours: such as physical activity, sitting, diet and sleep
- Addictive behaviours: such as smoking and alcohol
- Emotional health: stress, anxiety and depression.
- Job satisfaction
- Health & productivity: job performance and absenteeism
- Relationships: loneliness and social support
Success factors
Research into the most successful types of assessment has found that the best HRAs share the following criteria:
- Provides immediate, actionable feedback to each employee, with a tailored plan of action.
- There’s a way to reach everyone: both online and pen & paper options
- Includes your organisation’s brand: employees know and trust its from their employer, and they get the message that their employer cares about their health.
- Gives both individual and aggregate reports: Coordinators and managers can see detailed reports easily and quickly, without having to collate or analyse data themselves.
- It’s short: a HRA shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to complete
- Easy to complete, with easy to understand feedback
- Not preachy – the feedback and actions should be encouraging and positive, and nudge towards action.
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