Getting feedback about your wellness program is important in all stages of implementation. It’s helpful to ask your employees about the program before it starts, while it’s going, and after new initiatives. This will help you be sure you’re giving your employees things they truly want and need.
So, easier said than done, right? Here are some TotalWellness tips for getting employee feedback about your program.
Tools to Use
There are a ton of ways you can seek feedback from your employees. Depending on how your office runs, some might make more sense than others. No matter what tools you use, consider anonymity and inclusion.
You’ll want people to give honest feedback without worrying about potential repercussions. So, don’t have them submit their thoughts to a direct supervisor or someone they work with regularly.
You also want to get feedback from everyone that you can. Try not to seek out only specific groups of people. Your wellness program is available to all employees, so take into account what all your employees have to say.
Some potential tools to use include:
- Surveys—A list of questions your employees can answer on their own time
- Focus groups—A session where you can discuss your program with a small group of employees
- Check-ins—Individual meetings with or progress reports from employees
- Trends—Common rises and falls in program or event participation
- “Open Door” Comments—The opportunity to give feedback to program leaders whenever it’s convenient or thought of
Questions to Ask
Any tool you use to seek feedback is great—as long as it fits your workforce. With all of these tools, though, it’s important to ask specific, direct questions that are easy to understand. This will help you guide the results to get valuable information, rather than wasting time on irrelevant topics.
Consider using questions like:
- What’s working best in our program?
- What progress have you seen due to the program?
- What do you hear wellness participants say about our program?
- What would you do differently if you were on the wellness leadership team?
- What isn’t working in our program?
- What wellness services do you think we offer?
- What wellness services would you like us to offer?
- How do you feel about participating (or not) in our program?
- Do you believe our program can help you?
Notice how there’s a mixture of open-ended and closed-ended questions. There are also questions asking for positive and negatives. Finally, take note of the perception-focused questions. People’s perceptions are very difficult to change. If they don’t believe your program is worth it, it might be time to change the program because you probably can’t change their mind.
Use the Feedback
Once you get valuable employee feedback about your wellness program, it’s very very important to use that information. Otherwise your program won’t improve AND you wasted a bunch of time and effort asking questions.
So how can you use the nuggets of wisdom your employees gave you?
Discuss it with leaders.
You now have all the information you need to sit down with your wellness leadership team and really take steps in the right direction. Go over the feedback you got, analyze it and get any follow-up questions answered before you even think about creating solutions. This is also an excellent time to do some group brainstorming.
Make and prioritize changes.
If you took our advice and sought feedback from all of your employees, odds are you got a variety of results. Go through the complaints, praises and general information to categorize them into like-minded ideas. Then prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
Logistically, you just can’t tackle a bunch of changes at once. Split your change ideas into things that are:
- Easy to change and a pretty big concern
- Easy to change but not a huge concern
- Difficult to change and a pretty big concern
- Difficult to change but not a huge concern
Then, take care of the changes in that order. That way you’re systematically getting things done, but not wasting time on things that people don’t really care about.
Share it all with your employees.
This whole process ends right where it started—with your employees. Send out the aggregate results of the feedback tools you used. You can even include a list of the changes you hope to make.
This is a huge deal if you ever want to get employee feedback about anything, ever again.
If you don’t show your employees why you asked all those questions, they won’t see the point of answering the next set of questions you have for them. It also helps them to feel more invested in your employee wellness program because they know they had a part in its planning.
Getting employee feedback can be hard and overwhelming. Try to break down the process into picking a tool, deciding on questions and utilizing the results. That will help you tackle the task and get the most from your employees so you can create a wellness program they’ll truly want to use.
How else do you seek employee feedback??
