Motivating Coworkers (a little long)

[tulip]

Would the current wellness coordinator be willing to work with you? Sounds like she's not really coordinating any wellness! You have great ideas! I'm sure others on TE will have useful suggestions.

[sfa]

The first thing I'd do is talk to the current wellness coordinator about your ideas. You don't want to be duplicating effort and it's possible that she already has ideas like yours planned for implementation at some point. That would also ensure that no one accuses you of trying to invade someone else's work-turf! Before you talk to her, do a bit of research to find out what wellness programs other organizations have in place. I suspect that organizations tend to focus heavily on what is easily available to them. I work at a college and our employee wellness program has two components--exercise and education. When you sign up for the wellness program, you agree to try to get 3 hours of exercise a week and two hours of wellness education over the semester, then the college makes it easy for you by offering classes at the fitness center and lunchtime education programs so you can meet these requirements. So it makes sense to me that at a hospital the program would focus heavily on the vital signs that you describe! And what you want to do is try to stretch the current program a bit, possibly in a direction that the current wellness coordinator might agree is a great direction, but a bit more difficult to implement. So you want to be able to present the ideas to her as you making her job easier--you're supporting what she's doing and offering to help develop new ideas and coordinate the classes and rides, all under the umbrella of the wellness program she coordinates (translation: you do the work, she gets the credit. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing!).

When you talk to her, have a couple of very concrete ideas in place--group ride on the rail trail twice a month on Saturday mornings at 8 a.m., meeting at such-and-such a location. All she'd have to do is make up some flyers and put your name on as "contact for more information." Simple. Workshops/talks at the worksite are a bit more complicated since they involve reserving a place to meet and bringing in an outside person to run the workshop (and that person may want to be paid), so you'd want to have with you the name of a person willing to do this sort of thing, preferably for free to start.

But I think that along with bringing concrete suggestions for things that would be easy to implement, you don't want to overwhelm her--start with just a couple of things and if the response is good, add ideas from there. With any luck, once she sees a couple of successful programs like this, she'll take the idea and run with it so you don't have to be so heavily involved.

Good luck!

Sarah

[andtckrtoo]

I agree with everyone on checking with the Wellness director. Could be she would love someone with your experience to help her out.

We have a cycling club at my office. We have a group email address to which you have to request to be added. Rides are announced and people say whether or not they are able to come. It's pretty informal, but it is a lot of fun.

I was thinking that an easy "challenge" to do would be a "step challenge" - with cheap pedometers. People in hospitals walk a lot - it may be very encouraging to see how many steps they are actually taking.