Health in the Workplace: Pedometer Challenge

At Eden Kafevend we strive to continually improve the well-being of our employees by ensuring a healthier, safer and supportive working environment. Towards the end of last year, whilst reviewing our future HR objectives, we were keen to focus on employee health and wellbeing. We understand that healthy employees are happy employees and we wanted to spread this message to everyone in the business.

What we do at Eden Kafevend for our Staff

We want our colleagues to benefit, get involved and ultimately help us achieve our goal. Eden Kafevend already have some great initiatives in place including discounted gym membership, fresh fruit delivered to all offices, staff water coolers for home, occupational health services and a healthcare cash plan. However, we wanted to adopt a more interactive approach – involving our employees – with the ultimate aim of getting our organisation in better shape!

After conducting some research into health and wellbeing, we came across an NHS initiative called
Healthy Working Lives. The Healthy Working Lives (HWL) award process is an integrated approach to improving health, safety and wellbeing at work. This accredited award programme supports employers and employees to develop health promotion and safety themes in the workplace in a practical, logical way, which is beneficial to all. There are 3 levels of award - gold, silver and bronze. We signed up to the programme and were assigned an advisor whose role is to guide and support us through the process.

Setting up the Challenge

In February (in association with the British Heart Foundation) we launched a company-wide pedometer challenge. We asked employees to form teams of 5, and provided everyone with a pedometer, to count steps on a monthly basis. Everyone who entered also gets the chance of winning holiday vouchers at the end of the challenge. This challenge has been a great success, breaking down silos, whilst encouraging healthy competition between teams!

Weekly motivational emails are sent to encourage motivation. They include suggestions for exercise, fitness events, health and fitness resources, reminder of the health benefits, healthy eating ideas and more, as well as publishing a monthly league table to see who is in the lead. The competition will run until the end of July, when the winning team will be crowned and announced here!

What we have Planned for the Future

Some other initiatives we have introduced as part of our Healthy Working Lives campaign are mental health training sessions, mindfulness training, a health and wellbeing resource library and we have also engaged with the Credit Union to help employees get their finances in better shape and save for the future.

We already have some great ideas for further challenges and initiatives that we hope to roll out later this year to keep the momentum going, including a stop smoking campaign and more support and awareness of mental health. We are well on our way to achieving our bronze status and hope to achieve this significant milestone over the next few weeks, which is very exciting! And we won’t stop there - we will then move on to work towards our silver award and beyond with the aim to achieving and maintaining gold status! This will be achieved through practical steps, proactive promotion and training and most importantly, we can only achieve this through the continued engagement and support of our colleagues. We will keep you updated with our Pedometer Challenge progress!