Making the call on wellness at work

Most modern companies have some form of health and wellness programmes for employees.

They usually involve benefits like annual health checks, subsidised gym memberships and other incidentals.

Vodafone Ireland has gone several steps further and has developed a dedicated Wellness Centre with its own gym and fitness centre, treatment rooms, and spaces for meditation and relaxation at its south Dublin headquarters.

The centre comes with its own dedicated support staff as well as a range of programmes covering areas such as mental wellness, physical fitness, and general health and beauty.

According to Vodafone Ireland HR director Rachel Mooney there a number of reasons for the company's very strong commitment in this area.

“There are primarily two reasons. The first is that we want to help our community of employees be at their best. We consider investing in our employees’ wellness to be a central part of what it is to work for Vodafone.”

Explaining the pressures on Vodafone employees she notes the nature of the area in which they work.

“There is no downtime in the techie space anymore; our customers expect access to our services 24/7 and they expect to be able to do what they want with them 24/7. That means Vodafone has to be on 24/7.

“Our enterprise side has also moved into new areas in providing IT services for customers. It’s a lot to ask of employees to be on all the time so it is up to us to ensure that we provide a sustainable work environment and a good work life balance.”

The second reason is an appreciation for the overall importance of wellness. “Wellness is important anyway”, she says.

Blurred lines

“Not just at work but in our lives beyond it. There is now a blurring between work and life. When our parents and grandparents were at work, the working day was clearly defined – when they were at work they were at work and when they were home they were home.

“But advancing technologies have blurred those lines making it very important that we make good decisions about our wellness and health not just at work but on our lives outside of it as well.”

Those personal decisions are at the heart of Vodafone’s wellness programme. “What we are doing is encouraging our employees to make good decisions about their health and wellbeing,” Mooney explains.

“None of this is mandatory. We don’t track people’s usage of the centre or the programmes it offers.”

There are three elements to the overall programme: Think Well, dealing with mental fitness; Live Well, focusing on nutrition and exercise; and Feel Well, dealing with health and beauty.

“Think Well is all about mental wellness and resilience and we offer people things like mindfulness and meditation. Most of all, we want to let people that it’s okay to take time to invest in their mental wellness.

“We have done a lot in the past year to try to make people feel okay about talking about things like that. We all have times when we are down and the very worst thing that can happen to us then is to be isolated or feel that there is some kind of taboo around it. We want to create an environment and a culture where people can address their problems and deal with them early on.”

The Think Well programme is unusual in that it was designed and developed by employees.

“We have a team of volunteer wellness ambassadors who surveyed the staff last year to ask them what aspects of their health and fitness were most important to them.”

The physical fitness programme offers gym classes and so on and is what Mooney describes as “fairly traditional”.

Wellbeing app

“We do try to push the boundaries a bit by offering pilates and yoga as part of it”, she adds. “In the Live Well area we look at a variety of lifestyle issues such as when you have a new baby. There is also a convenience piece – employees can have their hair cut while they are at work. That frees up time for them at the weekend or evenings. We also have therapists such as reflexologists who come in to provide treatments.”

These various treatments and activities take place in the specially designed Wellness Centre.

“We worked hard at making it look and feel very different to the workplace – the colours, the tone, the fabrics, the lighting, they are all completely different to the rest of the building.

“We have also appointed a Wellness Centre manager who will introduce different services and evolve the programmes over time.”

The company is very conscious of the fact that not all of its employees are in a position to access the Wellness Centre and its services.

“Our employees are spread out across Ireland and we want them to be able to benefit from the programmes as well”, Mooney notes.

“We have developed a phone app which can be used to access virtual gym classes and access an awful lot of the other services. Employees can use it to build their own wellness programme. The response to the app was tremendous with a huge number of employees downloading it after we launched it.”

The results for Vodafone are not measurable but Mooney says it is worthwhile nonetheless.

“The results are intangible but the number of people using the Wellness Centre and the app is very high and they are asking for the services. We have teams like our Enterprise Team asking for programmes to be brought to them. It is important for people to understand that caring for their health and wellbeing should be part of their day to day working lives.

“We feel very strongly about this – it is a very important part of who we are as an employer.”