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.
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.
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.
At the plant, we really wanted to support our Employees Health and Wellbeing as we transitioned back to normal business, following the Global Pandemic. This award provided us with the structure we needed to develop and launch the Health and Wellbeing plant wide strategy.
Not only does the award provide us with a criteria and structure to follow, it also allows us to focus on topics which we may not have considered previously. In addition, it provides us a network with other local businesses to allow us to benchmark and share best practices.
We wanted to be able to share wellbeing initiatives we were proud of but at the same time receive feedback on anything that was missing or could be enhanced.
Love being part of the Award process - gives structure to our wellbeing plans for the year and showcases the amazing work our people do to support each other and our teams.
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.
"The programme encourages organisations to look at prioritising the physical and mental health of employees.
Using the Better Health at Work programme, structure and guidance, the organisation has introduced a number of ways to improve individuals’ physical and mental health; whilst encouraging employees to take responsibility themselves".
