Case Study: Unilever UK
Vitality in Action Programme
Unilever's Health & Vitality programme has three main
components for employees:
-
MiLife remote online behavior change tool to increase
physical activity, maintain weight or assist in weight loss
- Nutrition tool and intervention programme
- GCC – Global Corporate Challenge
MiLife is a remote online behaviour change tool, which
increases physical activity, maintains weight or assists in weight
loss as well as offering continued support. Engagement with the
tool was high, with 91% retention, and an impressive 74% of
users went on to register for an ongoing programme.
The engagement with the website, employee activity levels
and the weight of all users were monitored throughout, and the
mean activity level recorded throughout the programme was
173 minutes of moderate/high activity per week. Employees
also reported significantly improved overall sleep quality, both
in terms of the hours of actual sleep achieved, supported by
the ease of both maintaining attention and/or enthusiasm for
everyday tasks.
The nutrition tool and intervention programme is an online tool
for individuals, which was supported by an awareness-raising
campaign that took place at Unilever's five higher health risk
sites. Up to 254 employees used the tool, and were given
specific information on how to address their lifestyle risk by
improving nutritional practices.
Additional support is provided to employees via Lunch'n'Learn
sessions at each site, facilitated by in-house Unilever
nutritionists. The content is specifically focused on encouraging
people to take action to improve their health through eating
good food. The lunches are sponsored by site management,
and the on-site catering teams have partnered with Occupational Health to
provide the healthiest lunch offerings,
with illustration of nutritional content such as fibre, fat, sugar
and salt.
Also through the Lunch'n'Learns, the partnerships between
the site leadership teams, Occupational Health, and catering
have been strengthened, which in turn has led to an overhaul
of on-site food provision via changes in the restaurants. The
catering changes are being extended nationally, and the Healthy
Workplace Catering Project has been commended by the Food
Standards Agency as an exemplar of best practice.
The Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) is a team-building and
incidental activity programme where teams work to support,
encourage and motivate each other to exercise. Individuals
wear a pedometer to record their daily step count, which they
then enter into GCC website. The site converts this total to a
kilometre/mile distance, and plots the teams' progression on a
virtual tour of the world. A total of 203 employees participated,
and from the beginning, all participants increased their daily
steps to an average of 11,200 steps per day.
In addition, Unilever introduced other national provisions during
2008, such as a new Health and Vitality Communications
Strategy across all UK & I sites; Site Vitality Steering Groups;
Health Awareness Modules at all sites; and standardisation
of the on-site gym management reporting.
From 2009, the
Occupational Health-led Vitality Programme has evolved into a
business-led initiative called Fit Business, which will create an
environment for our employees to help make small
changes that will improve their health. Fit Business is about
giving people the resources they need to make informed
decisions, creating an environment that makes healthy choices
easier, and offering incentives to make small changes and
sticking to them.
This case study is featured in our booklet Workplace Wellbeing: The Food Industry in Action (pdf, 1.2Mb) . Unilever UK is a member of FDF's Workplace Wellbeing Group.
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Last reviewed: 25 Mar 2009