Western Wellness

National Faculty & Staff Health Assessment Results

In 2025, Western Wellness administered the National Faculty & Staff Health Assessment (NFSHA) at Western Michigan University (WMU) to measure trends and track progress toward the university’s priorities for employee health, safety, and well-being. The NFSHA serves as a key performance metric within WMU’s 2032 Strategic Plan, helping to evaluate and guide efforts that support the overall well-being of faculty and staff.

 

Executive Summary

FAQs

  • The WMU 2022-2032 Strategic Plan includes goals, objectives, and metrics for well-being (WMU Strategic Plan, page 27). The well-being goal states, “We safeguard the overall health of our community by embedding well-being into all aspects of WMU’s culture, administration, operations, and academics by utilizing the social determinants of health and eight dimensions of wellness- physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social, environmental, financial, and occupational”. There are five objectives and one key metric that WMU will implement over the next 10 years to improve the well-being of students and employees. The specific metric that WMU set for employees is to increase the sense of well-being and safety among faculty and staff as measured by the National Faculty and Staff Health Assessment (NFSHA). The NFSHA was developed by the American College Health Association, the national organization that will assist WMU in administering this survey.
  • The NFSHA survey is designed specifically for faculty and staff working on college campuses. This survey will provide anonymous data that will assist WMU and the Western Wellness Committee in making data-informed decisions when determining the most significant employee health needs to prioritize in our efforts.  
  • Western Wellness and the WMU Well-being Collective
  • Identify common health and wellness risk factors affecting employees’ performance and productivity.
  • Design and implement evidence-based health-promoting educational programs.
  • Share data for policy discussions and presentations with faculty and staff, administration, and board members.
  • Impact campus culture with an opportunity to have an open dialogue about supporting the wellness of employees.
  • Evaluate progress and the impact of programming with this baseline data report, followed by repeat administration of the survey every two years. 
  • ACHA will undertake the responsibility of maintaining a national database and providing individualized data sets and results back to WMU. Data transmission is encrypted and firewall securities are in place. After you submit the survey to the secure server, a message thanking you for taking the NCHA-Web will be displayed in your browser window, and you will receive a confirmation email.
  • ACHA agrees to use the employee email addresses provided by WMU only for this single survey effort. Per the Qualtrics, Box.com and ACHA policies, employee email addresses are never shared with another party nor used to any other purpose. The Western Wellness Committee will be responsible for disseminating the results and generating reports for the campus community under the direction of the Vice President for Student Affairs. Individual responses are not connected to any unique identifiers to ensure the confidentiality of responses. De-identified results may be presented at conferences and included in professional publications.
  • Should you have any questions before or during the study, you can contact Beth Northuis or (269) 387-3762. You may also contact the Chair of the Institutional Review Board at (269) 387-8293 or the Vice President for Research at (269) 387-8298 if questions arise during the study.