What is a Workplace Health Needs Assessment?
The Workplace Health Needs Assessment (WHNA) is an evidenced based tool that helps your organisation fully understand the health of your workforce. The results of the WHNA will help you as an organisation understand what areas of your workforce's health and wellbeing require improvement, as well as what is currently going well.
Our WHNA has been updated by the Healthy Workplaces Leicestershire Team from that originally created by Public Health England and Healthy Working Futures. The updated version includes a range of topic areas including mental and physical health, workplace culture and financial wellbeing
The WHNA is free to all organisations based within the Leicestershire County Council boundaries.
Why should you do a Workplace Health Needs Assessment?
Organisations and their employee health needs differ hugely, even across Leicestershire. Completing a WHNA will provide you with anonymised data on the health and wellbeing of your workforce. By helping identify which areas of health and wellbeing have the biggest scope and need for improvement in your organisation, the WHNA will help your organisation to target your efforts and resources more effectively. Supporting you to both improve the health and wellbeing of your employees, and be more effective whilst doing it.
The WHNA also provides your organisation with baseline data that you can compare against when you complete the WHNA again (usually every two years). This will allow you to track your progress over that time and monitor any changes and progress that has been made to the health and wellbeing of your workforce.
Organisations who take a strategic approach to employee wellbeing are far more likely to report a number of positive achievements from their activity, at both the individual and organisational level.
How does it work?
In short, the WHNA works like a staff survey. It contains a range of topic areas including mental and physical health, workplace culture, financial wellbeing and more. Once your organisation has signed up to use the WHNA, you will receive:
- A web link (URL) that is unique to your organisation
- A ready-to-use poster with QR code
- An employee guide that includes all of the information about the WHNA that you can share with your employees
The resources above will help make sure employees understand the purpose of the WHNA when responding, ensuring that response rates are high and the responses themselves are accurate.
In order to get the best response rate possible, we work with you to decide how long to keep the WHNA open for responses from your employees. Usually we suggest 2 weeks, but this can be changed dependent on the needs of your organisation.
As an organisation admin, you will be able to see how many individuals have responded to the WHNA via your dashboard to help you decide whether more communications are required in order to gain more responses.
How are the results used?
Once the deadline for responses to the WHNA has passed, all responses will be aggregated to give you an overall view of the health and wellbeing of your workforce. These results will be given to you in your own bespoke report that you will be able to access via your online dashboard.
The report will help highlight areas of your workforce's health and wellbeing that are good, but also areas that may require some improvement and focus from you and your organisation's senior leadership team. The report will also contain some national and local statistics to allow comparisons and most importantly, it will provide recommendations for improvement.
Once the report has been shared, a member of the Healthy Workplaces Leicestershire Team will meet with you to discuss your organisation's results and review any recommendations and questions you may have. This can be online or face-to-face. If your organisation has signed up to the Healthy Workplaces Leicestershire Accreditation scheme, it will be at this point where we begin to agree your goals and targets for the first stage of the accreditation.
How much does the WHNA cost?
The below costs are for organisations based within the Leicestershire County Council boundaries. If you are based within Rutland, visit Healthy Workplaces Rutland or if your organisation is based in Leicester City or outside of the county, please contact us for more information.
Arrange a quick conversation about your organisation and how to get started with your free Workplace Health Needs Assessment.
