Nebraska Medicine, one of the nation’s largest healthcare systems, enhanced their efforts to engage employees and create goodwill in their community

The challenge

Nebraska Medicine places a strong emphasis on the health of their employees and their community. To take their existing wellbeing program to the next level, they began a search for a partner who could align with their culture, help them build a unique program, and promote healthy living—not just at Nebraska Medicine, but in the community as well.

Strategies and solutions

Getting the details right from the start

Nebraska Medicine had a few key priorities right off the bat that they wanted to be sure to incorporate into their program, including providing employees access to holistic resources, highlighting their own robust internal resources, and creating an internal focus group that provides feedback on continued program improvement.

To ensure that Nebraska Medicine’s program fit their specific needs, Navigate took them through our proven implementation process. This includes six key milestones to address tailored needs and identify and deliver on core expectations:

Building flexible technology tailored to Nebraska Medicine’s culture and strategy

In addition to building out a customized platform, Navigate and Nebraska Medicine worked together to create a customized incentive tracking table unique to their specific culture and strategy to achieve the following goals:

1. Team engagement through quarterly challenges: A heavy focus on togetherness and camaraderie meant Nebraska wanted employees to be able to sign up for multiple group challenges each quarter. The team has created several custom challenges and they’ve also leveraged several challenges from Navigate’s annually updated library of core challenges
2. Friendly cross-healthcare competition: To reach out to fellow healthcare workers and engage employees in their health with friendly competition, the program included a special wellbeing challenge where groups of Nebraska Medicine employees competed against teams of employees from another healthcare system.
   
3. Reinforcing culture-based initiatives: To act as an extension of their company culture, activities must align with their pillars of wellness: Emotional Wellbeing, Financial Wellbeing, Physical Wellbeing and Community Wellbeing.
   
4. Incorporating Omaha-specific give back initiatives: The tracking table includes activities aligned with specific organizations in Omaha, such as donating blood with the Nebraska Community Blood Bank, while a unique “Do Good Week” highlights SHARE Omaha, a site dedicated to helping Nebraskans find volunteering opportunities.
   
   This focus continues in 2021—as part of Earth Day Omaha events in April, LiveGreen Omaha will have an EcoChallenge on repurposing and sustainability, and an initiative with Keep Omaha Beautiful will focus on cleaning up community parks in the fall.
   
5. Helping employees locate mental health resources: Together, Navigate and Nebraska Medicine are developing a new tool to help Nebraska Medicine teammates find appropriate and available mental health resources in their local area. Through a combination of survey tools and a resource hub, the tool provides anyone who is struggling with an understanding of how to seek help, both inside and outside of the Nebraska Medicine network.

Results

Nebraska Medicine and Navigate’s partnership has created a successful program that continues to grow, with future initiatives that will focus on reducing employee burnout, incorporating additional activities from their resource inventory, and more.