Overlooking The Obvious

The First Intervention In The Personal Health Assessment Process Should Be Interpreting The Report

Personal health assessments are catching on in the corporate world. For the uninitiated, a personal health assessment is an online/hard copy healthy survey designed to help working people better understand their own health status. They take about 15 minutes to complete and offer a lot of very important information in return.

Employers are offering personal health assessments to their employees because much of their health care expenditures and productivity issues can be traced back to employee health behaviors. For example, obese workers file nearly twice as many worker’s comp claims; they have seven times higher medical costs associated with these claims and 13 times more lost work days due to illness/injury than non-obese employees (Duke University News Release). Because of numbers like these, employers have seen the light when it comes to the personal health assessment process.

But here’s the takeaway. When you offer personal health assessments to your employees, the first priority after completion is to make sure that the reports are interpreted. This can be done in a one-to-one coaching session or better yet, have your employees bring their reports to a one-hour session where the speaker can explain what the report means and what people should be doing next. As is always the case, make the session voluntary–an incentive will help to drive participation–and remind employees they don’t and won’t have to share any of their individual findings in the group session.