Case study – Kāinga Ora
Kāinga Ora (previously known as Housing New Zealand) have provisioned for 2,000 staff to use My Everyday Wellbeing platform and programme. Other wellbeing programmes in place are mental health focused and include in-house training resilience training, mental health training one on one (available to all staff), and St John mental health first aid (which is currently available to just key people, with the intention to extend to all staff).
Staff demographics Female 61.8 per cent Male 38.2 per cent – primarily office-based roles – although approximately 46 per cent of staff go out on the road regularly (i.e. most days).
Reason for selecting My Everyday Wellbeing. Financial decision (affordability), and because it put some of the responsibility back on the individual. Some of the other options required recording too much personal information and we weren’t keen to manage that. There were additional concerns around what staff would think about that level of personal information and what the impact on uptake would be as a result.
What were you trying to achieve overall? Giving staff options and helping them accept some personal responsibility. The ability for people’s families to tap in, and the wider impact for the wellbeing of whānau was a key factor when making the decision. We wanted to provide people with support outside work in a way that wouldn’t be seen as hard work/arduous.
What are the main issues you wanted to address, eg stress, general health, diabetes etc? The main issues fall within our four pillars of wellbeing:
• Taha tinana (physical health)
• Taha wairua (spiritual health)
• Taha whānau (family health)
• Taha hinengaro (mental health)
We probably know more now as a result of the figures that My Everyday Wellbeing’s reporting provide, and this has helped to guide the direction of other wellbeing initiatives.
Date Implemented: 13-December-17 Methods implemented: Email and IP address
Results to date (30 September 2021):
• Initial staff uptake – sign-on for an account
– At launch: 481 account activations Currently: 1438 account activations
• Yearly usage generally
– 57,099 page views, 12,475 sessions, accessed from 3,501 unique devices
• Monthly usage generally
– 4,646 page views, 922 sessions, accessed by 495 unique users
• Favourite topics accessed by staff
– Healthy recipes, mental health, hunger/cravings, work lunches, sugar, health goals, exercise, Kick-start challenge
• Competitions and supporting events e.g. lunches, quizzes etc.
– This happens a little ad-hoc, we don’t have a consistent approach, which we are aware of, and hope to address.
– What has happened are shared lunches, various sporting events (Auckland Marathon, walks, netball, quarter iron), Tim attended a number of offices to speak with staff and demonstrate to how to use the resource. We support My Everyday Wellbeing’s email competitions with internal promotions and standard comms channels
What were the best outcomes or improvements you’ve noticed? It’s nice hearing people talk about My Everyday Wellbeing. When distributing the magazines, we can see that they have been well-thumbed. Staff say that they like having access to both the digital platform and magazines. We love being able to offer this initiative to everyone, irrespective of their location — not just to the main sites.
How would you describe the overall impact of this wellbeing resource at this organisation? We don’t survey people around this, however the analytics we get from My Everyday Wellbeing are measurable and reaffirms that we are doing the right thing.
Are there any other positive changes you’ve noticed? We love the way people talk about it. With the welcome email being sent promptly to all new staff we don’t seem to get people saying that they are getting spam, but rather they can see right from the commencement of their employment that HNZ [Kāinga Ora] provides tools to support individual wellbeing.
