Assessment Tools

• The CDC National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s (NIOSH) Quality of Worklife Questionnaire provides 76 questions on a wide range of work organization, work/life balance, and worker well-being issues.
• Health Risk Appraisals at the Worksite: Basics for HRA Decision Making [PDF-2.3M] is a guide developed by the National Business Coalition on Health in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the selection and use of health risk appraisals in the workplace available for employers.
• CDC has developed a vaccine questionnaire that can be used by employees to determine whether they need to discuss vaccines with their physicians.
• CDC Healthier Worksite Initiative—Health Risk Appraisals (HRA). This site provides practical guidance for the use of Health Risk Appraisals (HRA). The site describes what an HRA is; reasons why employers might use HRAs; and important employer considerations when implementing and using an HRA, such as ethics, incentives, and method of follow-up with employees.
• CDC Worksite Health Scorecard Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Health Scorecard is a tool designed to help employers assess the extent to which they have implemented evidence-based health promotion interventions or strategies in their worksites to prevent heart disease, stroke, and related conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.

NHWP Employee Level Assessments

NHWP Employee Health Assessment (CAPTURE™)[PDF-957K]
Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for use in the National Healthy Worksite Program, is a tool to assess employee health status, health behaviors, readiness to change, needs and interests related to worksite health and safety, and work-related health history.

NHWP Health and Safety Climate Survey (INPUTS™)[PDF-857K]
Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for use in the National Healthy Worksite Program, is a tool to assess employee perceptions of the work environment, working conditions, and the attitudes of supervisors and coworkers that support a healthy worksite culture.

NHWP Health and Safety Climate Survey (INPUTS™) Manual[PDF-1M]
Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for use in the National Healthy Worksite Program, the user manual discusses how to administer and score the Health and Safety Climate Survey.

NOTE: There are important ethical considerations regarding protections of confidentiality, civil rights, and rights of the medically disabled when conducting employee surveys. These concerns require careful planning on the part of survey administrators to protect the rights and safety of all participants. Below are a few recommended guidelines.

1. Establish procedures to protect the confidentiality and privacy of employees. This is very important for avoiding the perception or fear of harassment, discrimination or retribution directed towards those employees who may express unfavorable responses.
2. Collect surveys anonymously, making sure that participants cannot be identified when they turn in their completed survey.
   • Instruct employees NOT to put their names on the survey form.
   • Do not allow supervisors to collect survey forms from subordinates.
   • Appoint a survey administrator (preferably someone external to the organization) to distribute and collect the surveys.
   • Provide envelopes for returning paper surveys to shield responses. If allowing “drop offs” (e.g., for off-shift employees), provide a locked container or other secure holding arrangement so that survey responses cannot be seen by other employees.
   • Establish privacy procedures to prevent web-based survey responses from being traced back to the participants. This involves changing the settings of the software to NOT collect e-mail and IP addresses of participants.
   • Consider omitting demographic questions, particularly if the organization is small or medium sized. This can help assure privacy of individuals when results are analyzed.

3. Protect privacy during data management.
   • Limit access to the survey data to a trusted data analyst, preferably someone external to the organization.
   • Be sure that data are captured and stored as de-identified. De-identified data (without e-mail or computer or work unit identifiers) can be downloaded into an excel spreadsheet.
   • Establish procedures to prevent unauthorized access to the data.

4. Protect privacy during reporting of results.
   • Individual employee responses can easily be identified when reporting results for small groups, even if unintended; this is especially true in small and medium sized organizations. For this reason, AVOID reporting results by work unit, location, or any demographic category (e.g., age groups, gender, race, etc.) unless there is a minimum of 25 employees in each category.
   • If your organization has 25 or more employees and you would like to perform comparisons between work units, locations, or employee characteristics, the following is a list of demographic questions[PDF-725K] that you may consider using.