A Health Advocate is someone who is passionate about health and wellbeing, wants to help raise awareness of health topics, and contribute to developing a positive wellbeing culture in the workplace - and even beyond. This can be anyone in the organisation, regardless of role or experience. The Health Advocate role is voluntary, and can be a great addition to a CV. It is a good opportunity to develop and practice skills such as communication, persuasion and motivating others.
We started the award in 2020 as we were keen to help improve the wellbeing of our employees, particularly post covid. One of our values is putting people first, and we felt like this was a step in the right direction to achieve this.
We now have a team of 10 passionate health advocates to help improve the wellbeing in the office. It’s a great feeling when the office looks forward to the health campaigns and want to be involved. It feels as though the work we’re doing is benefiting our employees.
We participated to provide a further structure, focus and sustainable framework to our wellbeing programme.
The Award offers full support in terms of co-ordinator and resource information including best practice ideas and structured targets to aim for – it feels like we’re working together rather than in a silo!
We chose to participate in the award programme as it is providing us with a structured and planned schedule of events and initiatives that supports our overarching health and wellbeing strategy and objectives. It is a key strand to use providing a holistic approach to our employees’ health and wellbeing.
The award programme has provided us with key benefits including pointers in data gathering, event planning and networking opportunities. The monthly health advocate meetings are invaluable in providing information on what local support is available to enable us to build up our calendar of events and provide relevant and engaging content to our employees on a variety of health topics.
We are excited to be part of this programme and look forward to progressing through the differing levels to provide real benefit to our workforce. This will ensure we continue to put health at the heart of Hitachi.
We wanted to engage with our employees and provide a platform for everyone to improve their health and wellbeing at work but also support their families at home.
It has provided a focus for our Health & Wellbeing activities in the workplace and the support / information we receive from our workplace health leads has been invaluable in helping shape different campaigns rolled out across the business.
As we work in an office, we wanted to take part in the award to help our staff become more healthy and to live a healthier lifestyle, with the hope that it would improve staff morale and productivity.
We’ve received fantastic feedback from staff about how much they’re enjoying the campaigns we are running for the award and noticed that staff are more motivated and there’s a positive atmosphere in the office. We are also enjoying being creative with our campaigns, learning more information about health and wellbeing!
Our Hospice values the health and wellbeing of our staff and volunteers and the award is a fantastic way to be able to formalise our approach and provide a structure and focus to delivering health and wellbeing campaigns to our workforce.
The award has helped us to plan and focus more strategically on our priorities for campaigns and events with regards to health and wellbeing, following the structure provided by the award and with support from our workplace health lead.
