A Challenge to Keep It Fresh

Background:  The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s WorkLife Wellness Office implements three major wellness campaigns each year. Each campaign includes a communication plan with many channels. With employees receiving high volumes and often critical scientific emails, getting a message out to remind employees to take time for their own health is a challenge. No single communication channel can reach the majority of employees. It takes a multi-faceted communication plan to imbed wellness into a diverse employee population. By partnering with Human Resources, Employee Organizations, Wellness Committees and Liaisons in various offices, the WorkLife Wellness Office has developed a communication infrastructure to help reach more of our employee population. Currently, this infrastructure includes over 20 dissemination channels. The largest channels include 36 wellness liaisons, 10 partner groups (wellness focused workgroups and committees), 3 listservs (reaching over 2,500 subscribers), and daily announcements (reaching over 4,000 employees). The communication plan highlights many employee health benefits, and is multi-tiered depending on the size and scope of the program being offered. One of the largest agency wide campaigns is the annual Healthiest CIO Challenge. It challenges the many CIOs – Centers, Institutes and Offices to strive to be the CIO with the healthiest workforce.

Program background:  The Healthiest CIO Challenge is CDC’s agency-wide health competition designed to get CDC staff more active, help make healthier food and nutrition choices, and achieve better work-life balance. In its 5^th year, the Challenge has been able to maintain an approximately 30% or greater participation rate. By keeping it fresh with new ideas and current social media trends, the Challenge has been able to attract a mixed population of sedentary and active employees. to join and participate. Individuals, teams, champions, and leadership levels all join together to help build a healthier workforce.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  By tracking participation and completion through process and outcome assessments, we have been able to evaluate and improve on the following year’s program.  Also, by having employee send photos through the “Healthy Selfie” part of the program, we were able to assess the types of healthy activities (both social and individual, at work, home and in the community) our workforce engages in. We also measure interest in the program by the amount of website traffic.

Conclusions:  By leveraging current trends in social media, events quantitative and qualitative data, the Healthiest CIO Challenge is integrated into the culture of wellness CDC encourages for its employees and other public and private employers. Each year the Challenge continues to include high employee engagement and participation through teams, champions, and leadership support that creates a culture of wellness that gets stronger each year.

Implications for research and/or practice:  The yearly assessments of the Challenge allow future implementation of similar physical activity programs and campaigns in other worksite settings including small, medium, or large and/or other public and private sectors. The field of worksite wellness can learn from operationalizing activities like the Challenge to understand wellness cultures and social support for physical activity interventions.