How Can You Get Started on Building Your Own Staff Wellness Initiative?
Partnering with our workforce in their journey to wellness — together we thrive
By: Lily Cosico-Berge, Neighborhood House Association
We can all agree that people want to live long, happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives. But our world seems to spin so quickly, and life can get complicated. Life ebbs and flows, presenting us with challenges and opportunities. And we need to be well; mind, body, and spirit to deal with what’s coming our way. The better able we are to take care of ourselves while balancing the realities of our home and work life, the better able we are to care for others. Resilience — our ability to bounce back from adversity and seek meaning and opportunities — promotes wellness!
Recognizing the importance of building resilience in our early childhood education workforce, our Wellness Committee at Neighborhood House Association (NHA) aimed to enhance the quality of our employees’ lives by attempting to understand what “wellness” means to them. Our goal is to empower and improve the health and wellness of our early childhood education workforce to ultimately influence the health and development of the children we serve.
For several years now, NHA’s Wellness Program, called “Balanced Living” has been providing:
- Live Well classes (First 5-SD funded intensive physical exercise pilot)
- Healthy lifestyle education
- Monthly fresh fruits and vegetable distribution
- Lunchtime team walks
- Quarterly 5K walks
- A fiscal literacy workshop series
- Professional development in mindfulness and emotional intelligence
Just recently, in response to our staff’s request, one of our health partners recently introduced an app for an online Wellness Portal. As we know, a great deal of health coaching and messaging is consumed through this avenue. We are excited to reach more folks through this medium.
Last year, we took a step back to review what we have accomplished and asked ourselves how we did in reaching, not just motivated employees, but also the folks who could use a stronger nudge. We realized that we can only be intentional if we truly dig down deeper and learn what is meaningful to our workforce.
Partnering with our staff meant being curious about how they define healthy practices and what activities they are likely to join if we are to offer them.
In short, when an action means something to an individual, it resonates internally, and this helps the connections that would likely help steer positive behavioral change. And that’s what we wanted, an engagement that would lead to lasting healthy practices to improve the lives of not only our Head Start staff but also of the children and families we serve!
How can you get started on building your own staff wellness initiative?
Below are the essential elements that we developed:
ASSESS: Find out what “wellness” means to your workforce.
We revised the employee survey to include questions that connected the motivation to participate in different activities. To help ensure a high rate of completion, we incentivize participation through a “bike raffle,” and mobilized our team leaders to promote its completion. For starters, our Head Start workforce recognized the importance of physical and mental health and endorsed the following as the top answers when asked, “If offered, which activity would you participate in at work?”: nutrition classes, weight management, mindfulness and stress reduction, yoga, exercise classes, walks, health screenings, and financial wellness.
Check out one of the toolkits we used from one of our partners, Kaiser Permanente.
PLAN: Develop a wellness/wellbeing business plan.
Results from our survey informed our goals and focus areas. The data we collected would assist with future grant applications.
Here is an abbreviated version of our wellness business plan as an example.
MARKETING: What is your call to action? How are you informing your staff about your initiatives?
We found that some employees appear to win our contests and challenges repeatedly. This led us to question if we were reaching our most at-risk staff. Yes, a series of small things matter, but it is always better if your efforts are integrated. Our survey results showed that our folks do pay attention to postings in common areas. And, yes, they pay attention to “images and messages that inspire.”
We know our health partners have effective messaging (see toolkit above), and we saw no need to reinvent and recreate these promotional materials. Sharing these resources became one of our asks of our partners, and we started using the materials in our trainings. These partner resources often helped meaningfully connect our staff to the information, such as this video clip about how Steph Curry copes with adversity.
ENGAGE: Launch programs & initiatives.
Start creating a calendar of events, rotate locations and offerings to increase access. As a result of our employee survey, a couple of immediate changes just happened recently: health coaching, a service that has always been offered, but not tapped has been re-launched, with promotional materials more readily available and visible to staff. Yoga classes are also now being piloted!
EVALUATE: How did you do? What do you need to do more or less of?
We are very motivated to learn how we can continue to promote workforce resilience and measure outcomes. To this end, “Workforce Wellness” is highlighted in NHA’s 5 Year Goals and Objectives.
Remember, make your efforts mean something to your staff and make staff wellness part of professional development activities. Use available Head Start mental health resources to address the staff needs and improve the workplace culture by encouraging and creating more opportunities to increase employee support and collaboration. The heart of workforce wellness is relationships and staff resilience.
Live well and be well!
Dr. Lily Cosico-Berge, a child psychologist, and board certified registered art therapist has made it her personal and professional goal to share with the early childhood community her passion and belief in the importance of wellness in achieving balance in one’s life. Dr. Lily is the Associate Vice President of Comprehensive Program Support & Quality Improvement at Neighborhood House Association in San Diego, CA. Her work at Head Start brings trauma-informed practices, wellness and social-emotional competency to the crux of school readiness, as she leads her team in providing integrated trans-disciplinary comprehensive support services to both HS and EHS programs.
