When Adaora Otiji, EdD, CPTD, ADC, joined the District of Columbia Department of Health (DC Health) three years ago as chief learning officer, one of her first initiatives was a new strategic plan for workforce development. She began this process with curiosity — specifically, Otiji was curious about how employees felt about their own wellness and their workplace.

She and her four-person team launched a data-driven, strategic approach to assessing employee wellness and culture. With support from the PH-HERO initiative of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), Otiji and her team developed a strategic plan designed to create a culture of wellness through trauma-informed servant leadership.

Building employee wellness goals into strategic plans can have many benefits for health departments. These plans can serve as a roadmap for reducing burnout and increasing employee engagement. Further, aligning department-wide goals with employee wellness goals helps create and sustain a resilient and adaptable workforce that stands ready to meet shifting community health needs.

Ask critical questions

Otiji and her team examined PH WINS data around workforce retention, as well as internal data collected by DC Health, to better understand how employees were feeling about their work experiences. With many employees reporting stress and burnout in a post-COVID work environment, “we began to ask how we could help people feel safe in taking care of themselves and carving out space for that,” she said. Those conversations helped identify a need to conduct regular assessments of the agency’s culture and wellness.

These assessments proved key to understanding how employees feel within the department’s culture and how culture supports — or doesn’t support — employee wellness. Otiji knew that sustaining a healthy culture would require a focused strategy.

To delve more deeply into this work, she and her team developed and launched DC Health’s first culture and wellness assessment. They used the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Worker Well-Being Questionnaire (WellBQ) as a framework. WellBQ incorporates five domains of employee well-being: Work Evaluation and Experience, Workplace Policies and Culture, Workplace Physical Environment and Safety Climate, Health Status, and Home, Community, and Safety.

The assessment was open for about two weeks. “We had a 60% response rate during that time,” Otiji said. “We were aiming for 25% and we exceeded that in the first two days.”

She attributes the high response rate to a series of engagement strategies. “We didn’t just release the survey and say, ‘Here, go do this,’” she said. “We paired it with engagement events so people could see us, talk to us, and ask us questions.”

Events, which included a massage day and a painting party, were designed to help employees step away from their workspace and connect with each other. But they were also an opportunity to boost survey participation, Otiji said.

The 14-person DC Health Learning and Workforce Advisory Committee, which Otiji oversees, also talked to employees within their administrations about any concerns they may have regarding the assessment. Otiji noted the importance of anonymity to promote psychological safety and reassure employees that they wouldn’t be identified. In fact, she was clear that the data would never leave her team.

“I’ve had many requests from our leadership team over the last year for raw data, and I’ve said no every single time,” she said. “I remind people what we agreed to.”

Data analysis, report writing, and stakeholder feedback took about a month.

“We wanted to be forthright about how people felt the department was progressing, and what it looked like from the experience of an employee, from team to team and manager to manager,” Otiji said. “We needed to work through the nuance to get those different perspectives.”

Now what? From data to strategy

The report, known as the Culture and Wellness Action Plan, outlined a set of recommended actions across the five WellBQ domains, including the establishment of an approach for employee recognition and adding quarterly agency “town hall” meetings (see DC Health Wellness Action Plan Recommendations). Otiji and her team presented their findings in a department-wide virtual meeting that included breakout sessions. During those sessions, employees chose the domain that interested them to learn about assessment findings and recommended actions. Attendees could also suggest actions they wanted to add or enhance.

As a result, the team added several new or enhanced recommendations to the Culture and Wellness Action Plan. From there, they set strategic goals for DC Health in each domain. “We identified actions, gathered feedback, and documented our revision process,” Otiji said. “We’ve already started to implement many of these actions.”

As an example, DC Health is beginning to plan for the incorporation of mental health reflection days. “That would mean no meetings on those days and employees would have an opportunity to work on personal projects,” she said. The department will also recognize employees with an awards program, a recommended action in the WellBQ domain of Workplace Policies and Culture.

Otiji encourages colleagues at other health departments to think about sustainability when incorporating employee wellness into strategic planning. “With wellness work, it’s easy to lead with our heart and not our head,” she said. “We need to think logically about wellness. We don’t stay in the same roles forever. Building our employee wellness expectations into a policy that can be enforced is how we create sustainable change.”

Continual assessment and iteration are also critical, Otiji noted. “We’re always looking at our progress and adapting strategies to maintain long-term success,” she said. “We’re really proud of this work.”

Action steps for building an employee wellness strategy

Want to incorporate employee wellness into your health department’s strategic plan? Here’s where to start:

  • Stay realistic. Start with achievable initiatives that let you build momentum and trust throughout your organization.
  • Start with leadership. Buy-in from the organization’s executive team provides critical support for employee wellness strategies, including allocation of resources such as dedicated staff, funding, and policy development.
  • Make it inclusive. Involve employees in plan design to avoid creating initiatives that don’t meet their needs. Including employees in making wellness goals and programs part of strategic planning also increases employee investment in, and support for, program success.
  • Make wellness assessments easy. Long or complicated survey tools can be a roadblock to gathering critical information. Test your assessment tool and adjust it to help streamline the process and increase engagement.
  • Refine continuously. Track participation, engagement, and outcome metrics for employee wellness programs. Understanding how employees participate in initiatives, why they don’t, and what outcomes result from wellness efforts helps determine program feasibility long term and drive new initiatives that are responsive to specific employee needs.