On-Demand Webinar | How to Create, Communicate, and Evaluate an Employee Well-Being Strategy | Wellvation

The shift toward sustainable workforce health requires moving away from fragmented wellness programs and embracing integrated, organizational frameworks. In this session of the Wellvation Webinar Series, Bridget Berkland, HR Manager of Employee Well-Being and Assistant Professor of Health Care Administration at Mayo Clinic, joins Dan Proulx to break down the systematic overhaul of Mayo Clinic’s employee well-being strategy. Discover how an organization of over 80,000 employees successfully consolidated multiple disparate wellness models into a unified, co-created strategy built on shared responsibility, innovative communication pathways, and data-driven evaluation methods.

Webinar Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

Co-Creation Mitigates Initiative Fatigue: Designing a well-being strategy with employees rather than for them drastically increases buy-in, builds institutional trust, and ensures programs address actual workplace needs.
Shift to Shared Responsibility: Modern corporate wellness is no longer solely an individual burden. True employee well-being requires an active, interconnected role played simultaneously by individuals, teams, leaders, and the broader organization.
Language and Framing Matter: Highly clinical or corporate terminology can alienate staff. For example, replacing abstract phrases like "Optimized Work Demands" with a clearer focus on a Healthy Work Environment significantly increased staff resonance and engagement.
Passive Communication Pathways: Leveraging native digital workflows—such as automated corporate screensavers and mandatory open enrollment guides—ensures continuous, high-visibility messaging without creating email fatigue.
Standardized, Continuous Evaluation: Utilizing standardized Post-Activity Evaluations via tools like Qualtrics allows leadership to establish a definitive dashboard, proving whether specific resources offer high, moderate, or low impact on employee well-being.

The Five Core Well-Being Focus Areas

To build a comprehensive strategy, Mayo Clinic synthesized multiple industry frameworks—including the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Joy in Work framework and Stanford Medicine's Professional Fulfillment model—into a unified, five-part focus schema.

The framework maps out how these five areas interact across different levels of organizational responsibility:

Well-Being Focus Area	Employee Experience & Target Outcome	Level of Shared Responsibility
Healthy Work Environment	Employees feel physically and psychologically safe; workload challenges are actively addressed.	Systemic / Institutional (Led by Strategy & Operations)
Personal Enrichment	Staff connect deeply with the corporate mission and experience personal growth, emotional health, and resilience.	Individual & Interpersonal (Supported by Coaching Programs)
Community at Work	A strong sense of belonging is nurtured through supportive peer relationships and multidisciplinary teams.	Team / Peer Group (Driven by Local Team Dynamics)
Being Valued	Workers feel respected, appreciated, and heard via equitable compensation, benefits, and visible recognition.	Leadership & Managerial (Executed via Leadership Behaviors)
Meaningful Work	Individuals find genuine purpose and personal fulfillment aligned with their unique skills and strengths.	Individual / Cultural Alignment (Nurtured through Culture of Wellness)

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is a co-creation approach in employee well-being strategy?

A: Co-creation is a collaborative strategy that actively engages cross-functional stakeholders and employees to comprehensively assess an organization's environment, strengths, and unique challenges. By gathering direct feedback through listening sessions and surveys, leadership can transition away from rigid, top-down programming toward a tailored infrastructure that employees feel genuinely invested in.

Q: How can organizations effectively communicate well-being resources to a hybrid or virtual workforce?

A: Organizations can optimize communication by embedding well-being touchpoints directly into daily digital workflows and existing administrative structures. Key tactics include utilizing corporate screensavers to broadcast snackable wellness prompts, integrating dedicated resource pages into annual benefit open enrollment guides, and supplying leaders with downloadable presentation toolkits to easily facilitate peer appreciation during routine meetings.

Q: How do you evaluate the business and cultural impact of an enterprise wellness program?

A: Enterprise wellness programs are best evaluated through a standardized post-activity assessment model tied to core strategic focus areas. By issuing brief, post-event surveys via platforms like Qualtrics, organizations can capture quantitative data on how activities influence metrics like psychological safety or workload management, mapping those trends onto unified leadership dashboards and annual impact reports.

Webinar Summary

[00:00 - 02:22] Introduction & Partnership Foundations

Dan introduces the core webinar theme: how to systematically create, communicate, and evaluate employee wellness strategies. He highlights the long-standing integration of Mayo Clinic’s world-class educational content and evidence-based subject matter expertise into Wellvation’s ManageWell platform.

[02:23 - 04:03] The Challenge of Fragmented Wellness Models

Bridget details the baseline reality of managing well-being for an enterprise of over 80,000 employees. Prior to this unified push, different arms of Mayo Clinic were using separate wellness architectures, stretching from Stanford's wellness models to internal committee structures. The primary strategic objective was creating a singular, unified framework published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

[04:04 - 06:25] Executing the Enterprise Co-Creation Process

This section breaks down the tactical mechanics of the co-creation phase. Guided by a core Well-Being Steering Group, Mayo Clinic engaged cross-functional partners—including HR, Occupational Health Services, Employee Assistance Programs (EAP), and Spiritual Care. They distributed preliminary drafts to collect feedback via surveys and virtual input sessions with hundreds of active stakeholders.

[06:26 - 08:39] Defining the Five Focus Areas & Shared Responsibility

Bridget explains how employee feedback directly reshaped the language of the framework, steering it toward clarity and human-centric messaging. She introduces the final five focus areas and outlines the "Shared Responsibility" model, emphasizing that well-being succeeds only when individuals, teams, leaders, and institutions share the ownership load simultaneously.

[08:40 - 10:46] Aligning Corporate Mission with Strategic Vision Statements

Focus turns to institutional alignment. Bridget shares how the newly revised Mission and Vision statements were purposely adjusted to explicitly mention both patients and colleagues. This structural pivot formally treats employee health as a foundational, organizational prerequisite to delivering high-quality clinical care.

[10:47 - 12:55] Omnichannel Communication Strategies & Workflow Integration

Bridget displays the practical communication channels used to drive awareness across various regions. She previews the redesigned "Well-Being Central" website, which allows users to navigate resources based on their organizational role. She also highlights the distribution of downloadable PowerPoint slide templates designed to prompt individual reflection and peer celebration during team check-ins.

[12:56 - 16:16] Real-World Team Application: Fostering "Being Valued"

A video segment demonstrates a real-world application of the toolkit within a virtual team setting. Members of Bridget's enterprise team use a birthday celebration as a structural opportunity to practice public peer recognition, specifically celebrating colleagues' strengths, thirst for learning, and problem-solving capabilities.

[16:17 - 18:37] Native Communication Touchpoints & Executive Messaging

The presentation highlights advanced workflow communication tactics, such as embedding well-being resource links directly inside the annual HR Open Enrollment Guides and deploying monthly desktop screensavers. Bridget then hands the session over to Dr. Colin West, who delivers video messages reinforcing psychological safety and enterprise wellness workshops.

[18:38 - 21:00] Web Redesign & Role-Based Content Delivery

The digital environment is explicitly organized around role-based tabs (For Individuals, For Teams, For Leaders), ensuring users encounter intuitive, context-specific toolkits rather than a generic index of links.

[21:01 - end] Data-Driven Evaluation, Dashboard Metrics, and Closing Q&A

Bridget presents the final phase: evaluation. Mayo Clinic implements standardized post-activity surveys via Qualtrics to measure how effectively programs support the five strategic focus areas. These data streams feed into leadership dashboards and annual impact reports. The webinar concludes with a brief clarification confirming the use of internal Qualtrics surveying platforms.