FAQs

Herts Healthy Workplace has been designed by Hertfordshire County Councils Public Health team, providing a framework and structure that allows you to implement health and wellbeing initiatives within your workplace. The accreditation element on this programme encourages growth overtime, making sustainable behaviour change across your workforce. There are many benefits to creating opportunity in the workplace for employees to engage in health and wellbeing activity, including improving employee morale, increasing employee productivity and retention and reducing absence rates which in turn can save your business money.

To make the implementation of this programme a success we will ask you to nominate a Workplace Health Lead within your organisation, they will take the leading role on the implementation of the action plan and be the point of contact for our Workplace Specialist. With this in mind they will probably need some of their working time allocated to this role, we would suggest between 1-2 days a month, but that would be a maximum amount and be flexible based on the need in your business. Their time would be used ad-hoc, for example to promote materials and organise activities. We envisage each business will take a year to complete each level of accreditation, of which there are three. This means that the demand on time and resource is low whilst meeting the identified needs of your employees.

The Workplace Specialist is the role within Public Health that delivers the programme, the Specialist will be your point of contact throughout the process and is there to lead you through the programme. They are trained in health improvement and will be able to create personalised action plans that imbed real health and wellbeing change within your business. The Workplace Specialist is on hand to support you throughout the process whenever you need, they will package information and resources ready to be shared by your Workplace Health Lead, freeing up their time to focus more on promotion.

As part of the programme you will receive free Workplace Health Champion training for nominated employees, these will support the Workplace Health Lead with the delivery of the wellbeing action plan. We have a ratio for this dependent on the size of the business, the Workplace Specialist will be able to let you know how many you will need in your initial meeting with them.

This will be completed through a digital survey link and should take employees around 10 minutes, the questions will centre around their current health and wellbeing. We will then summarise the themes from the responses, alongside the responses from the employer consultation, into an easy report shared with the Workplace health Lead. No personal information that identifies employees will be shared in this report, and it will help inform the personalisation of the action plan for your business. 

Content and material on the platform is reviewed and updated by Public Health, making sure information you access is up to date and relevant. Your Workplace Health Lead will have a business admin account, giving access to organisation specific information and your action plan, allowing you to track progress through the programme. They will also be able to manage logins for your employees, all of which will gain a personal login to view resources, information and signposting to health and wellbeing content and services.

Don’t worry, if you don’t meet the criteria for this programme, we can still assist you. Get in contact with us and we will be able to talk you through all the ways we can help your business support employee wellbeing. 

All aspects of the programme are accessed completely free of charge, including the offer of access to the platform and some training for your employees. Training that we promote will also include some from our partners, these therefore may have a cost attached but will be additional to our training offer and not compulsory. It will take some time and resource from colleagues to action some of the initiatives, but as mentioned before this is not fixed and can be flexible to suit your workforce. Allowing time for employees to engage with health and wellbeing in the workplace can in turn reduce absence rates and increase productivity of your workforce. 

You can register your interest right away; we have an intake for the programme once a quarter as this helps us manage the flow and means our specialist can dedicate time to getting your business set up. Our intakes are in January, April, July and October each year.