Health and Well-being Strategy: Completing the Process

June 17, 2020
Annette Maggi
Business Skills

By RDBA Executive Director, Annette Maggi, MS, RDN, LD, FAND

In last month’s article on developing a H&W strategy, the first two steps in the process were discussed. Today’s article focuses on the final two steps in developing your strategy to drive success in nutrition programs and services.

Once you’ve gathered and analyzed information and created a vision statement for health and well-being at your company, the next steps are as follows:

Step #3: Defining Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Tactics
A goal is a what, not a how. It’s a broad statement of what you hope to achieve, not how you get there. You overall plan may have multiple goals. Objectives move down a layer and line up under each goal. Clear metrics are essential as a part of objectives. Examples might include growing service participation by a specific percentage or average sales and volume lift amounts on RD promoted items in the store, on ad or in e-commerce. Strategies are the how, indicating how you’ll accomplish each goal. Finally, tactics are very detailed, stating exactly what needs to get done under each individual strategy.

Step #4: Program Evaluation
As we all know from occurrences over the past several months, the retail environment can change quickly and suddenly. For this reason, ongoing evaluation of your overall health and well-being plan should be documented as a part of the plan. Include measurement milestones, how you’ll make any needed adjustments to your plan, how you’ll hold key players accountable, and timing and action for communicating progress against the plan. This final piece should align with the normal cadence of reviews at your company.

While it may feel tedious to document this level of detail, the power of a documented plan is that you can get buy-in from leadership as well as partnering departments and you’ve essentially defined your work plan for the coming months.