Health Links (HL): What does being a healthy workplace mean to your organization?

Colorado Rural Health Center (CRHC):  A healthy workplace the an environment you create and the awareness you generate. At the Colorado Rural Health Center, our work environment involves a lot of sedentary work. Highlighting the need for our employees to take breaks and encouraging them to walk away from their desks helps to slowly evolve focus to other areas of health. By generating awareness, health in our organization has been primarily employee-driven. We’ve moved from taking breaks during the workday to engaging staff in health and well-being challenges around movement and fitness, nutrition, social interaction, hydration, and sleep, reaching all aspects of Total Worker Health^®. 

HL: How has Health Links helped your organization?

CRHC: Health Links has helped us by connecting us to like-minded organizations and providing an abundance of health and wellness resources. The Health Links advising sessions have been critical for us to develop the structure of our wellness programming in our organization, develop goals and a mission statement, and most importantly, create a vision for how employee well-being fits into our organization. The goal-setting process and reviewing the assessment with our advisor helped us to understand our needs and where our challenges were. We really appreciated having the advising session virtually as it fit our work structure and allowed us to pull in the key players across the organization without needing to find time for everyone to be physically present.

Last year, we experienced a bit of attrition and burnout on our wellness committee. With the help of Health Links and our advisor, we were able to create an action plan to revitalize the wellness committee, build in incentives for joining, better market the committee internally, and consciously take the time to celebrate our successes and wins, both big and small.

HL: What tips or pieces of advice would you give to a business looking to create a healthier, safer, and happier environment?

CRHC: Connect to Health Links as a resource to jumpstart your organization. Especially for organizations that don’t know where to start, the assessment and advising session help you figure out where to start, what you can work on, and what you need to keep working towards over time. Network with other like-minded business in your industry and join coalitions to share your experiences and learn from other the organizations who may have faced challenges at one point.