Partner Reflections

3M

Holding the MHFC Partner Certification is a public means to show 3M’s commitment to healthy living habits and changes for our employees. We were able to get certified as a Texas Mother Friendly organization due to this process. I was able to review each section and ensure we are equal and meeting all the items in the process to look for room for improvement in health for our employees. Having been MHFC Partner Certified previously, there was nothing in the process that surprised me. Our workplace wellness program is so very holistic, I probably did not even capture it all. I am very proud of all that 3M does in every means available to support the health of our employees, and provide means to achieve health goals individually and for the family.

Austin Community College

Recognition by the City of Austin’s Mayor’s Office gives our wellness program at Austin Community College an official ‘stamp of approval’. We appreciate being recognized for our efforts to keep our employees well. Our administration understands that having a healthy employee population helps us serve our students and the community members better.

The Partner Certification checklist allowed our wellness committee to examine our strengths and find areas that need more attention. Specifically, we decided to expand our nutrition activities to create a healthy meeting document.

Thank you for creating this process for us to more comprehensively examine our program so that we may continue to reach our goals.

Baylor Scott & White

Baylor Scott & White Health is proud to be recognized as a Certified Partner by the Mayor’s Health and Fitness Council. We believe that achieving greater health and wellness for our team members is a high priority that reaps rewards for both our organization and also for the patients we serve. We will always strive to improve and enhance our health and wellness offerings. This recognition is a wonderful reminder that we are on the right track.

emmis communications

Being MHFC Partner Certified means that we are committed to trying various initiatives with the goal of making our workforce more aware of their overall health. The process to become certified guided healthy changes here at Emmis.  For instance, we brought back our annual health fair.  In the past this has been a great way to make people more aware of their health which in turn initiated healthy lifestyle changes.  We also updated our monthly cake day event to include fruits, veggies, and other healthy options besides sweets.  We also installed a vending machine with healthy options that our workforce is now utilizing. It was surprising how relatively easy it was to implement changes to the workplace.  I was concerned about a lot of backlash from employees but the majority embraced the changes. We are most proud of the positive response we received.  The majority of our staff seems pleased with this new program.

Foundation Communities

Holding the MHFC Partner Certification is a great honor. It means we are an organizational role model for our employees and our community. We believe in making our workplace and our city a healthier and fitter place for all. The MHFC Partner Certification allows us to lead by example and encourage our staff to be as healthy as they can be. This process guided us and allowed us to evaluate what we are doing well and where we could improve. It moved us forward in getting our Mother-Friendly Workplace certification and the American Heart Association Early Adopter Award in the Workplace Health Achievement Index. What surprised us the most was that so much of what were already doing was what was recommended and tracked by the MHFC certification process. We are most proud of our employee’s participation in the program. 85% of our full-time employees have participated fully in the employee wellness program and many have made lifestyle changes as a result committing to live healthier, fitter lives!

Frost Insurance

Holding the MHFC Partner Certification shows that Frost Insurance not only practices what we preach to clients, but are also invested in driving meaningful behavior change within our community.  Being part of an organization whose sole mission is to make Austin the healthiest city in America has been extremely rewarding, and we look forward to accomplishing that goal one day here in the near future!

LIVESTRONG

LIVESTRONG is so proud to be part of Austin’s health and fitness community. We have always promoted cancer-prevention, wellness after cancer, and community fitness through our programs and Team LIVESTRONG events externally. Internally, we place just as much emphasis on ensuring that our staff have work/life balance, onsite fitness options, and incorporate health and well-being into everything we do. Being certified through the MHFC allowed us to take inventory of our programs and policies and really reflect on those successes. As a small nonprofit organization, we don’t have the budget for an elaborate employee program, but health and fitness don’t have to cost a lot of money when you commit to fostering a culture of wellness.

People's Community Clinic

People’s Community Clinic serves some of our community’s most vulnerable citizens, helping them to be as healthy as they can be.  We are proud to be a MHFC certified partner because it shows that we are “walking the talk” with our employees – encouraging them to adopt healthy values and behaviors too.  The resource links on the website are helpful to us as we plan our healthy objectives for the year and the higher levels of certification definitely inspire us to do more each year.  We are proud to include the MHFC logo on our website’s employment page – we definitely feel it helps our recruiting!

Progressive Casualty Insurance

It is a great privilege for Progressive Casualty Insurance to be recognized by the Austin Mayor’s Health & Fitness Council in our efforts to make our campus and workplace a healthy and fit environment for not only our employees, family members, but also our community. Becoming certified is a fantastic way for Progressive to continue grow our Core Values and efforts in providing a variety of resources and outlets within our Wellness Program, which in turn will continue to create a Healthy, Happy, and Fit workplace.

Texas Associates Insurors

In 2009 we attended a Health Summit that discussed key points for businesses who wanted to take a stronger lead in integrating Health and Fitness into their company culture for the benefit of all their employees.

We took the seeds of what we heard, planted them in our office and starting slowing growing the TAI Wellness Committee.  This committee has been going strong ever since.  From day one (8 years ago!) we began our quest to gain certification with the Mayor’s Health and Fitness Council but hit one roadblock or another UNTIL 2017 when all things came together and we became officially certified as partner!

Through the pillars of wellness we learned from both the MHFC and our companies health insurance programs we have had numerous successes from quitting smoking to stress management to helping to live a better life with diabetes.  We have a steady 50% participation rate in challenges we do throughout the year and strive to keep things fun and exciting.  We have integrated step challenges, drink more water challenges, nutritional lunch and learns, monthly national observance topics at our monthly meetings that is reviewed by all staff and healthy options for the breakfast at these menus.  We are proud to have the support of our owners and upper management that really set a good example for all employees and they believe in the continued success of our wellness committee.

Texas Mutual

We are excited to partner with the Mayor’s Fitness Council. The partnership provides us with another view of our wellness program, and to make improvements by partnering with other leaders in the community. Just as we are committed to preventing workplace accidents for our policyholders, we are committed to providing our employees the resources they need to manage their health.

TKO Nutrition

As the owner of a small mom and pop supplement and smoothie shop here in Austin, we are consistently struggling with ways to stay relevant in the business as large corporations and websites.  Instinctively, we turned inward and instead of looking for new and better ways of besting ‘them’, we started at looking for new ways to better ourselves. As a business in the health and wellness industry, people look to us as role models for implementing good health practices into not only what we sell but what we do for ourselves and our team.

When we saw an opportunity to formalize our practices and be recognized for something we thought should already be commonplace in the industry, we leaped at it. Many of our practices were already in place and with the help of the MHFC recognition, we were effectively able to tie up any loose ends and structure our business practices accordingly.

Upon receiving notification of our official recognition, we held a Team TKO meeting and recognized our team and partners as well. As with any recognition, we saw it as an opportunity to recognize those that helped us achieve the goals we set. We announced the recognition on our TKO NUTRITION social media pages and received a show of support and gratitude from the community that we never really even sought in our initial plan. Effectively, by simply making the workplace healthier for ourselves, our team and our client, we garnered the support of our community and proved we not only ‘talked the talk’ of a healthy company, we now ‘walked the walk’.

In doing the things that are merely the ‘right thing to do’ for TKO NUTRITION, we earned the support, respect and trust of an entirely new client base and community support system. Thus, defining ‘relevance’.

We are humbled, honored and overjoyed at the opportunity this partnership presents us with and look forward to refining our role in the community as a leader amongst our peers in healthy living.

The University of Texas at Austin

We are proud to be certified with other healthy employers in Austin, and it is an honor to be among a business community that prioritizes the health of their employees. Austin is known as a fit city; it is great to see it in action and as a priority of the Mayor. We want our employees to know that we care about their well-being. The certification process is one way to show the value and importance we place on health. The recertification effort this year was an opportunity to evaluate our wellness results and continuously improve the health and well-being programs that we offer such as revising our tobacco free campus policy to be more robust and highlighting cancer resources and trial treatment options offered through our benefits plan to our employees. We have 70,000 people come to campus each day. We are a small city within a city. There are so many organizations across campus that contribute to the health of our faculty, staff and students. Completing the application was a good time to take a step back and appreciate all our campus resources and how far our worksite wellness program has come. I am most proud of the integration of our Work-life Balance & Wellness Program and the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Mental health affects physical health and vice versa. We collaborate closely to emphasize all aspects of employee well-being.