Valerie Molloy, senior manager, safety, health and wellness, with WorkSafeBC, talks about communicating wellness programs within her organization, and some of the other special programs the company offers.
How do you communicate the wellness program to your employees?
We do a variety of things. We have an intranet with a lot of information available to employees. ‘The Pulse With Dr. Pete’ talks by our chief medical officer, Dr. Peter Rothfels, are available through video.
We also have a poster board, which is located right outside our cafeteria. Again, we put up information, and there are various pamphlets and handouts.
There are also posters located throughout the organization at all of our entrances where employees are coming in. WSN This Week is our weekly electronic newsletter that goes out to
all WorkSafeBC employees, so we ensure that we have a number of stories and profile our events through there.
What other wellness programs do you offer?
One of the risk factors for our employees is weight, so we have Weight Watchers on-site. It’s employee-paid, but out of convenience it happens on-site over the lunch hour. There is also on-site massage and physiotherapy, which again is employee-paid, but is built around the convenience.
We also focus [on wellness] with our cafeteria. We do heart-healthy campaigns and offer gluten-free food, and there are no trans fat oils used in our food preparation.
Volunteer instructors teach a variety of fitness classes, and we have a number of sports teams that play regularly.
We participate in a challenge called Corporate Champions Vancouver. A number of organizations in the Lower Mainland get together and go through various competitions. We actually won that last year. It’s kind of our claim to fame.