Maine Department of Transportation Region 5 Employee Wellness Program Evaluation Report

Well-designed wellness programs can keep healthy employees healthy, support employees with health risks to improve their health behaviors, and facilitate organizational efforts to achieve workforce performance goals. Productivity lost through absenteeism, sickness, and injury was a key driver for the development of the Maine Department of Transportation (DOT) Region 5 wellness program, offered since 2004. In 2008, the Maine DOT engages the University of Southern Maine's Muskie School of Public Service to create a more robust and sustainable evaluation process for their employee wellness initiative, as assist in planning to replicate the Region 5 program across the state. The Muskie School evaluation team developed a logic model as the cornerstone for determining the components for program evaluation. The desired outcome of a "safe, injury-free work environment that costs less to maintain and operates at full capacity" provided the direction to develop activities, inputs, outputs, and short-term outcomes.