The challenge

The City of Boston employees support the largest city in New England—and to support them, City leadership sought to generate a renewed focus on health and wellbeing. This strategy included a combination of new tools and a goal to raise awareness of the many resources that were already at each employee’s disposal.

To begin this process, the City looked for a wellbeing partner who could replace a text-heavy, underutilized program with a targeted, engaging online resource hub that could also be customized to adhere to strict municipal guidelines set forth by the City.

Strategies and solutions

The City of Boston partnered with its unions and appointed a Wellness Committee to help select a wellbeing partner to develop a custom incentive program that included a focus on City-specific activities, resources, and rewards. Among the many activities the City incorporated were:

A resource hub to improve communication of available benefits: Navigate can integrate with any third-party provider, allowing the City to launch its platform as a resource hub that consolidated its many employee benefits in one convenient location. Navigate worked with the City to promote these benefits through custom posts and graphics on the platform, and through tailored year-round engagement newsletters.

Employee-specific resources tailored to their interests: Beyond just hosting resources, another goal of the program was to help guide interested employees directly to City resources that would benefit them. This goal aligned perfectly with Navigate’s holistic wellbeing resources, which are organized according to The 8 Pillars of Wellbeing: balance, community, financial, mindfulness, nutrition, physical, purpose, and social.

To accomplish this goal, customized links were added to each of these categories, directing employees to City resources sharing content most relevant to them, whether it was family-oriented activities, mental health resources, physical fitness, or healthy eating.

Custom group challenges to generate engagement: Navigate creates a library of brand-new group challenges each year. The City took advantage of these challenges and complemented them with custom-built challenges designed specifically to appeal to City employees.

Created by Navigate’s internal marketing team with guidance from the City, these unique engagement opportunities included the Bay State Pursuit Challenge, a virtual tour of local landmarks, and the Boston Duck challenge.

Tools to help adapt to change: In response to COVID-19, Navigate’s account and technology teams worked with the City to expand the Project Care resources to all employees. These online resource packages, developed specifically in response to the pandemic, supported employees with tools and strategies for staying healthy and resilient while providing tools to help manage the stress of uncertainty and isolation that has accompanied social distancing.

BurnAlong: In 2021, the City also provided employees access to BurnAlong, a service (and Navigate partner) with thousands of live and on-demand classes and wellness programs, social connections, personalization options and 45+ categories. Employees can even complete remote workouts together to stay in touch or rack up activity minutes in group challenges.

The Wellness Champion Network: The City’s Wellness Committee and Navigate’s account support team continue to work together and focus on program awareness and employee development, a process that includes working together on resources and communications facilitating the creation of an internal Wellness Champion Network who will promote the program internally and raise awareness of upcoming activities.

Results

The City of Boston’s Wellness Committee, in partnership with Navigate, has developed a custom and well-used program that has raised awareness of their employee benefits, grown to become more impactful over time, all while maintaining strict adherence to the City’s municipal regulations.