As awareness of the connection between organisation health and business performance increases, most organisations are now realising the value of investing in human capital over more traditional strategic areas such as marketing, technology and finance.
In the changing corporate world, qualified, motivated and above all healthy employees are essential for Australia’s future economic prosperity.
With Australians spending more than one third of their life at work, the workplace has subsequently became a priority setting for health promotion by both the World Health Organisation and Australian Government.
Hence the increasing numbers of employers who are now investing, not only in corporate health programs, but also in the internationally validated Health Risk Appraisal (HRA).
This credible evidence-based tool assists them to measure and improve their employees’ health and productivity, cost effectively diagnose their organisational health needs, and measure the ROI of their corporate health programs.
Steps to Planning a Successful Employee Health Risk Appraisal
1. Chose your HRA provider wisely
The first and more important step is to select the perfect HRA provider for your organisation. Allow at least four month from the moment you select it to the moment you are ready to launch your HRA to your staff.
2. Define an open enrolment period
This step is crucial as it provides a time-sensitive imperative for your employees to complete the assessment. An appropriate timeframe is to have it open for two to three weeks. With online HRA, you will find that the majority of your staff will complete it within the first 48 hours.
3. Create a solid communication campaign
Do not underestimate the importance of the communication plan in the success of the HRA implementation. The first step of the campaign is to outline the entire HRA process from end-to-end so that your staff has the opportunity to understand how it works. Ideally you should post samples of the HRA and its individual final report on your intranet so that interested employees can have a look at them prior to completing the assessment.
4. Format your eligibility file
Find out your provider’s requirements, and what type of information they need. Format your file so that your HRA provider can easily access and use it.
5. Launch the HRA
Expect between 30-40 per cent of responses from your staff in the first 48-72 hours of the launch. Make sure you have enough resources on high alert in these first two to three critical days.
6. Monitor completion rate
By monitoring the results on a daily basis, you will have information on who has responded and who has not. It will then be easier to coordinate reminder emails to the targeted population with your HRA provider.
7. Schedule coaching sessions for individual HRA review
To help your staff better understand the important information and results contained in their individual reports, you might want to consider hiring a wellness or health coach. He/she will walk your employees through the content of the report and help them start planning their individual health and wellness goals.
8. Review report and action where needed
Once you have received your organisation report, normally two to three weeks after open enrolment has closed, it’s time to review the results. It’s then important to relay the findings to all the people who need to be involved in the action planning process.
If you follow the eight steps outlined above, you will increase the chance for your employees to have a positive experience in completing a personal health assessment. You will also gain a large enough participation rate to ensure that the results are representative of your organisation as a whole.
Healthworks provides an easy online health risk appraisal tool called a Health Risk Assessment, or HRA. Request a free trial of our HRA here, or call us on 1300 90 10 90 to find out more.
