Strengthen Your Corporate Wellness Program With These Surveys

How often do you ask employees for feedback on your corporate wellness program?

When you’re spending resources on building wellness programs, it’s essential to get direct feedback from the audience you’re serving. Before and after-event surveys are must-haves to ensure you’re hitting the mark for your employees.

It’s also important to get initial opinions to help form your corporate wellness program if you haven’t started one. This allows you to get thoughtful responses for what you’re planning, whether it’s a quarterly health fair, multicultural wellness workshop, or series of health events.

This post covers when to send surveys, what types of questions to ask, and how to encourage employees to complete them.

Read on to learn more!

Surveys Are Essential to Your Corporate Wellness Program

Employees should have opportunities to offer feedback on the corporate wellness program and surveys are an easy way to get it. When done well, surveys offer a chance for your employees to feel heard. 

A 2018 Harvard Business Review article reported that consistent employee opinion surveys are often a part of high-performance HR practices.

And that includes workplace wellness initiatives.

You can do email surveys through a free program like SurveyMonkey or even print out surveys to pass out at your next team meeting. Below, we share detailed questions of what to ask employees when it comes to your corporate wellness program.

Types of Surveys

When it comes to surveys about your corporate wellness program, you have a few options. You can provide employee culture surveys, opinion and satisfaction surveys, and engagement surveys.

Here’s a look at the three survey types:

• Culture survey - This gives you an idea of employees’ points of view and if it’s in alignment with your company’s overall culture company-wide.
• Opinion and satisfaction survey - Everyone loves to give their opinion, so these surveys will likely be popular. This gives employers an idea of their employees’ attitudes and perceptions of the company.
• Employee engagement surveys - These give employers insight into how driven and motivated employees are feeling about their work and the company’s initiatives.

A mix of all three sprinkled throughout various stages of planning your wellness campaigns can be helpful. It can provide wellness committees with the details needed to effectively create and/or readjust campaigns based on feedback.

When Starting a New Corporate Wellness Program

If you’re just venturing into starting a corporate wellness program, it’s essential to ask for your employees’ thoughts. Otherwise, your wellness committee runs the risk of wasting time, resources, and energy on creating campaigns that don’t go anywhere.

A few tips to creating an effective first-time survey:

• Keep it short and to-the-point
• Gauge interest in topics
• Ask what format employees prefer
• Make it easy for employees to complete anonymously
• Ask employees to use a rating of 1-5 (not interested to very interested. 3 is neutral. An alternative is to opt-out of a neutral option.)

Don’t forget: Include a paragraph about why you’re sending the survey, including the company’s wellness initiative and/or vision for employee wellness.

Sample Questions to Consider

Below is a listing of questions to consider if you’re just starting to plan your wellness program. Adjust questions as you see fit and for what works best with your company’s wellness mission and culture.

Note to Employees: Mark next to each topic using a 1-5 rating scale. 1 is not interested to 5 being very interested. 3 is neutral.

1. How interested would you be in learning more about the following topics?

• Sleep
• Exercise
• Heart Health
• Brain Health
• Quit Smoking
• Allergies (seasonal)
• Chronic Conditions (types and management tips)
• Budgeting, Finances & Financial Planning
• Silent Killers (i.e., Blood Pressure, Diabetes, etc.)
• Diet/Nutrition (healthy cooking, cutting sugar out, weight management, etc.)
• Multicultural Wellness and Diversity Training
• Men or Women’s Health
• Mental Health (i.e. anxiety, depression, etc.)
• Social Health
• Stress Mitigation & Management
• Understanding Health Insurance
• Healthy Workspaces
• Other:

2. How interested would you be in attending the following event types?

• Health fair
• Webinars
• Health screening
• Healthy challenges and events
• Online programs
• Community events (Ex: 5K or group walks)
• I do not plan to participate in any wellness programs at work
• One-time event (Ex: one-hour class, workshop or lunch & learn event)
• An event series (Ex: multi-week stress management or weight loss course)
• Other:

3. How interested would you be in participating in company hosted wellness events during the following times?

• Before work
• During lunch
• After Work
• Weekends
• During normal work hours

4. How interested would you be in participating in events that are:

• Less than 15 mins (i.e., survey)
• 15 to 30 mins (i.e., short presentations during meetings or video class)
• 30 mins to 1 hour (i.e., lunch and learns, screening events)
• 1 to 2 hours (i.e., interactive presentations)
• ½ day (i.e., field trip, health fair)
• Full day (i.e., field trip, health fair, community event)
• Other:

5. How likely would the following incentives impact your participation in wellness events?

(Rate on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being not at all likely to 5 being extremely likely)

• Extra time off
• Gift cards or cash
• Raffles or games with prizes
• I would participate without an incentive
• Free food served during the program/event
• I would not participate even with an incentive
• Event-related gifts or takeaways (i.e., desk plants from a healthy office seminar)
• Other:

6. Do you have any concerns about participating in wellness events? (check all that apply)

• Time constraints and getting work done
• Privacy and confidentiality concerns
• Not interested in workplace wellness
• Other concerns or questions:

7. What changes would you like to see in our company in regards to wellness? (Ex: free healthy snacks, healthy vending machine options, tobacco-free workplace, walking groups, etc.)

Final Question: Anything else you’d like to add?

When Creating a New Wellness Event Calendar

When planning your next event calendar (year, quarter, month based on however your organization plans) use a survey to find out what’s worked well in the past for employees. You can reuse the initial survey and add specific events that your organization held as well.

1. We held X events last year/quarter, listed below. Please rank from 1-5 how valuable you thought the event was with 1 being not valuable at all and 5 being very valuable.
2. Which was your favorite event and why?
3. Which was your least favorite event and why?
4. What would you like to see more of? (AKA what are we getting right?)
5. What would you like to see less of? (AKA where are we going wrong?)
6. On a scale of 1-5, how helpful are you finding our wellness program?
7. Anything you’d like to add? (Ex: Topics you’d like to see covered, any questions or concerns, etc. )

After a Corporate Wellness Event

After your wellness committee has put in all the hard work of planning an event or campaign, a follow-up survey is a must! It can be a very short survey after each event to gauge employee satisfaction while the event is fresh in their minds. Make it super easy to answer for the best response rate.

An example:

On a scale of 1-4 (with 1 being not at all and 4 being very much so):

1. How helpful was this event to you?
2. Did you enjoy the event?
3. Would you like more events like this? (yes/no)
4. Any other comments?

Corporate Wellness Program Survey Final Tips

Ingraining wellness into your company’s culture takes time and thoughtful planning. Part of that includes soliciting regular feedback from your employees on what’s working and what isn’t working.

You may be surprised at what you learn about how easy it can be to satisfy your employees. If it’s like pulling teeth to get surveys answered, consider throwing in a little incentive like a raffled off gift card, 30 extra minutes for lunch, etc.

A few final tips:

• Keep surveys as short and easy to answer as possible
• Keep answers confidential and note that at the beginning of the survey
• Always give an opportunity to leave comments or additional thoughts
• Communicate why you’re asking for feedback
• Let employees know their opinions and time are valuable

Last but not least, give emphasis that the wellness program is for your employees’ benefit. Let them know the company’s leadership and/or wellness committee wants to ensure they’re supporting employees as best as possible. The only way that can be done is through honest employee feedback.

What is your favorite way to get feedback from employees? Do you incentivize it? Let us know in the comments below!

Ready to create a spectacular corporate wellness program? Check out our detailed guide How to Create an Irresistible Employee Wellness Program to snag our 7-step process.