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.
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.
The award is a declaration of our commitment to building a healthy and happy workplace culture for every employee. Designing a positive and engaging health and wellbeing offer where health inequalities are reduced is so important to us and we know we will achieve this with the support of BHAWA.
The award process provides structure for Better Health at Work. It provides support, guidance and networking opportunities to learn and improve. The opportunity to collaborate and hear about others practice across the region is always inspiring, we always come away buzzing with ideas.
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 a structured approach to improving the health of employees tapping into the support available and taking the opportunity to benchmark with other organisations to help us improve the health and wellbeing of our people.
The award has been successful in helping us organise dedicated teams and resources as we work through the criteria. So far the campaigns have been very well received by our people and our new Wellbeing strategy has helped us to bring this all together in a framework all our staff understand.
The award is beneficial to the organisation as it prompts us to think outside the box, extend our health and wellbeing support into new and important areas that we might not necessarily touch upon usually; and it also holds us to account for conducting high quality, meaningful campaigns.
We joined the Award to ensure that our health and wellbeing work goes above and beyond the requirements outlined by the NHS health and wellbeing framework, helping to ensure that we support our colleagues across a variety of areas and that we can demonstrate excellence in doing so.
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.
