Now that you have implemented your action plan, it’s time to step back and evaluate whether you have achieved your goals and how to design your next steps.

Assess Your Outcomes

Periodically, you should assess whether you are achieving the objectives identified in your action plan. Benchmarking your progress towards target goals is important to:

• Enhance your understanding of what you have or have not achieved 
• Identify areas of your plan which need further adjustments or course corrections 
• Provide concrete evidence demonstrating the value of the initiative to leadership and other stakeholders to help motivate continuing support and sustainability
• Identify new areas of need for the next cycle of improvement.

You may review your results formally or informally depending on your organization’s culture, size, and resources. Either way, you will need to develop a process for assessing project outcomes that is sustainable and effective.

When to Gather Data

Plans for organizational change often take significant time to impact working conditions and employee well-being.^6,33 Therefore, the timing of your assessments should be strategic. Waiting at least a year before evaluating effects to allow changes to manifest fully is wise for ambitious, long-term goals. To capture trends over time, consider conducting these assessments annually, ideally at the same time each year, to control for seasonal variations.⁶ In contrast, frequent and informal assessments may be appropriate if your goals are oriented toward quick wins or short-term improvements. The main objective is to tailor the timing of your data collection to align with your initiative’s specific needs and scale.

How to Gather Data

Begin your evaluation by repeating the assessment you conducted during the problem identification phase, applying the same benchmarks and tools to ensure consistency and accuracy. (Revisit step 2 for guidance.) To keep costs low and enhance sustainability, leverage existing data sources wherever possible and tailor your assessment methods, whether formal or informal, to match the scale and resources of your organization. For more complex evaluations in larger organizations, consider integrating assessment responsibilities into existing job roles (such as occupational health or HR specialist roles) to help sustain the initiative.²¹

A key element of effective assessment is to examine the “chain of effects.” This involves assessing both targeted well-being outcomes as well as the changes in workplace conditions that you expect to positively impact well-being.¹ This will help you to understand if the targeted workplace changes occurred, and if they did, whether they can plausibly explain improved outcomes. For instance, if your action plan aimed to reduce employee stress and burnout by streamlining work to reduce overtime, your baseline and outcome assessments should measure both stress and burnout (employee well-being outcomes) as well as perceived overtime demands (workplace conditions) to determine if your objectives have been met. 

If your baseline assessment involved a broad evaluation of workforce needs, and time and resources are tight, consider tailoring your follow-up assessment to a more essential subset of questions specifically relevant to the workplace conditions and outcomes you targeted in your action plan. Explore the resources at the end of this section for more detailed guides on conducting outcome assessments, including an evaluation plan template for tracking outcomes.  

Whether you are employing a single or multiple committee design, the steering committee should oversee the follow-up assessment process. For smaller organizations using informal assessment methods, members of your committee or team can gather the data and/or enlist the help of interested employees outside the committee. Larger organizations using formal evaluation methods, might consider enlisting help from their HR or OHS departments to conduct and analyze results from surveys and/or focus groups, or consulting with an outside vendor.

Review Your Results

Whether you use external consultants to gather data or do it internally, it’s crucial that your steering committee or department-based team actively participates in reviewing and interpreting the results. Together, analyze patterns and compare the new data to your baseline assessment to discern changes in both workplace conditions and the health and well-being of employees. Larger organizations should consider analyzing results by department or worker group to determine the intervention’s effectiveness across different areas or sectors. Ensure data confidentiality by aggregating results and avoiding detailed reports on small groups.

Communicate Your Results

The primary goal of the review process is to understand the efficacy of your intervention, why it was or was not effective, and to make conclusions and recommendations for the next steps. Secondarily, you might consider identifying any new or continuing problem areas from your assessment that you would like to prioritize in your next project improvement cycle.

Once you have completed your review, you will be ready to present your findings to organizational or departmental leadership and staff. This is an important opportunity to showcase the value of your initiative and secure ongoing support. For larger organizations, be strategic about how you communicate your results. Consider whether to present to different stakeholders separately, such as senior management and employee groups, or together. Tailoring your message to each group can make your communication more effective. For example, you might discuss business impacts like cost efficiencies with senior leadership while focusing on enhancements in the work environment and well-being with employee groups. For a more compelling presentation, frame your findings as a story with illustrative examples. Use forums such as town hall meetings or routine management meetings to convey these results. These gatherings also provide a chance to collect informal feedback, which can guide future improvements to the initiative. Eliciting broad-based feedback in this way enhances implementation by giving workers greater ownership and involvement, which is crucial for creating healthier and more effective working environments.¹²

Adjust, Sustain, and Start Again

Creating positive workplace changes is an ongoing cycle. If you have achieved your goals, take a moment to celebrate this milestone. But then begin the process again. Remember that organizational change is an ongoing and sometimes incremental process, and it is rare to achieve resounding impact right away. Reframe frustrations and barriers to success as opportunities to learn about the work environment and improve. Use the data you collected in Steps 4 and 5 to adjust your action plan accordingly to incorporate new strategies or strengthen existing ones. For instance, one company’s initiative to train supervisors to support employee work-family life failed to reduce work-family conflict in key departments. By examining their process data (Step 4) the steering committee discovered that attendance at supervisor training sessions (a key component of their action plan) had been poor in departments where a supervisor staff meeting had conflicted with one of the three training meetings. With this knowledge in hand, they scheduled additional training sessions for these departments and over time were able to improve perceived work-family conflict in the workforce as a whole.  

Work Design for Health is an iterative process which helps you build on past experiments with change to continually identify and generate improvements in the workplace. Whether or not your first project succeeded as planned, you now have a process for identifying and creating positive workplace change!

Step 5 Checklist

Ask yourself whether you have accomplished the following:

• Conducted a follow-up assessment to determine whether you have achieved your target workplace conditions and well-being outcomes.
• Analyzed the results looking for patterns and comparing new data with baseline metrics.
• Solicited support and buy-in from frontline employees and supervisors.
• Presented findings to leadership and staff whether collectively or tailored to groups.
• Made adjustments to your action plan as necessary.
• Celebrated your progress and are ready to start again!

Step 5 Helpful Resources

Evaluation Guidance

• CPH-NEW planning guide for evaluations – provides guidance on how to carry out both outcome and process evaluations and includes an evaluation plan template to track your progress.
• Monitoring and Evaluation Quick Guide – from the Government South Australia, Healthy Workplaces provides an at-a-glance guide to benchmarking your outcome and process evaluation over time.  
• Selecting an Appropriate Evaluation Design from Education Development Center 
• Non-Researcher’s Guide to Evidence-Based Program Evaluation from the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
• Evaluation Standards from the Centers for Disease Control’s Program Performance and Evaluation Office 
• The Step-by-Step Guide to Evaluation from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation