Wellness Advocate Program

Employees who prioritize wellness are happier, healthier, and more productive in and out of the workplace. Wellness is the foundation upon which an engaging workplace culture and a meaningful employee experience must be built.

Through the Department Wellness Advocate Program, we strive to cultivate a culture of holistic wellness in our respective departments, focusing on the 6 dimensions of wellness, by providing opportunities to learn wellness principles, providing opportunities to apply those principles in the workplace, and inspiring our colleagues to apply wellness principles on their own, in and out of the workplace.

The Department Wellness Advocate Program trains and supports Wellness Advocates, representatives from each department, to fulfill these purposes in their workplaces to better customize and cater wellness offerings to the needs of the individuals in the department. Being a Wellness Advocate for your department is a great way to meaningfully impact the employee experience for yourself and your colleagues.

Click here to see a list of active Department Wellness Advocates.

Poor wellbeing takes a huge toll on individuals and workplaces. When you are not well, you do not have the capacity to bring your best self to work or continue giving high levels of dedicated effort over long periods of time.

Here are some of the most common consequences of poor wellbeing in the workplace:

• Increased medical costs. Did you know that DMBA's premiums are determined by how many claims are made in the previous year? It benefits all DMBA insurance users to require fewer medical assistance. According to Gallup, 75% of medical costs accrued are mostly due to conditions that could have been prevented. Click here to read about the Exercise is Medicine that many BYU professors have joined based on what they have learned through their research regarding preventing inflammation, cancer, and many other conditions through exercise. Studies have found that a sedentary lifestyle is extremely damaging to human health, even with exercise, but one of the best ways to improve health outcomes with a sedentary job are "intermittent interruptions of sedentary behavior during work" (National Library of Medicine).
• Increased turnover. Employee turnover is one of the highest costs a company can face. Turnover requires time spent hiring, training, and onboarding every time an employee leaves, and employees who are not encouraged to be well at work and dramatically more likely to get burned out and leave the organization. If you believe allowing an employees 15-30 minutes every day to focus on their wellness during the day is lowering productivity, think about the time, energy, and resources you will have to spend posting the job, reviewing resumes, interviewing, onboarding and training someone new and the fact that your new hire will likely be less productive than the previous employee for several months while they learn about their new job. Turnover is expensive, and can be prevented by allowing employees adequate time to recover from the demands of their job during the work day.
• Increased sick days. Once again, if you're worried about lowered productivity of your team, not permitting them to take time for their wellness increases the number of sick days taken, either for real sickness or needing some additional time off work, and sick days are additional days spent not working and an indicator that employees' bodies are not able to adequately recover. This abstract diagram by Britchida demonstrates this concept well.

There are many other negative consequences related to the absence of wellness at work. Your department's Wellness Advocate is the one who can speak up about wellness, encourages employees to take breaks, helps employees connect, and helps address other wellness needs that employees in your department might be facing.

Even at BYU, where we are all working toward an incredibly meaningful mission together, employees still need to be able to have space to recover from the demands of work and family life.

In addition to being able to make a difference on campus, our wellness advocates generally really enjoy participating in the meetings - wellness is fun!

Wellness Advocates are BYU employees who work hand-in-hand with their supervisor and the BYU Employee Wellness team to cultivate a work culture that enables the learning and application of wellness principles for the employees in their workplace. It is up to the Wellness Advocate and their supervisor the amount of time dedicated to these purposes in the department. For many advocates, this means they have a little bit of time each month or semester to plan some department wellness activities.

Successful advocates have a good rapport with their supervisor and colleagues and use that rapport to create the conditions to that will bring about increased productivity and job satisfaction as well as greater employee well-being, which are the natural results of improved wellness of each individual employee. A passion for wellness and understand its importance in human lives is very beneficial as well.

Here are a few other expectations for Wellness Advocates:

• Attend at least three of the six total one-hour collaboration meetings each year. These meetings occur on the 2nd Friday of odd-numbered months at 11:00 am.
• Take the departmental wellness assessment each year.
• Attend a goal-setting meeting and a follow-up meeting each year.
• Attend at least one Employee Wellness event or utilize at least one on-campus wellness resource per year.

To learn more about becoming a Wellness Advocate for your department, click here. Contact us at wellness@byu.edu if you have additional questions.

If you are interested in becoming an advocate, you'll want to do the following:

1. Talk with your supervisor to get approval for program participation and to discuss goals and ideas for the department.
2. Apply using this online form. Once your application is submitted, it will be sent to your supervisor or department leader for approval. Once approval is received, you will be invited to join the Wellness Advocate meetings and be added to the MS Teams Wellness Advocate Team.