Success Stories > Canadian Pacific Railway: Corporate Leadership and Grassroots Support

Knock on the Corporate Wellness door at Canadian Pacific Railway’s Calgary headquarters, and you’ll find Sylvana Leclerc, who helped launched an award-winning program in 1999 and remains confident about the value of workplace wellness.

Sylvana is the only CPR staff member whose time is fully dedicated to health promotion, but that doesn’t mean she works alone. From the beginning, the company established a senior level committee spanning both managers and union representatives to provide direction. Their involvement is invaluable, she says. “It requires more time to go through a committee but the support and input is essential.”

Equally important are CPR’s health and safety committees, sprinkled across 200-plus worksites. Here the nitty-gritty decisions are made about workplace wellness initiatives. “I find participation is much better if they are involved,” Sylvana says. “I really want them to own what goes on.”

Safety is a mantra at CPR, so it stands to reason that health and safety committees hold knowledge and influence. Each committee’s annual safety plan to senior managers includes wellness goals that are guided by the corporate wellness plan as well as local needs. Some may concentrate on ergonomics, others on physical activity, others on cardiovascular health or fatigue. Whatever options the committees choose, Sylvana almost certainly has resources and tools they can adapt to make the initiatives fly.

“Most experts agree that workplace health promotion requires management support, and I believe that,” Sylvana reflects. “But I also think it’s very important to have support on the ground. Managers move around, CEOs and VPs retire, and wellness is not yet as mainstream as I’d like. So it’s important to get engagement at all levels by offering value-added programs. Then you’re more likely to be able to continue and not have the program scrapped. Sometimes you need that one person who says ‘Make it so,’ but in the long run, culture changes through the grassroots.”

Like most wellness promoters in multi-site organizations, Sylvana scrambles to meet widely varied needs. Some sites have indoor bike lockups and showers, but not all. Some employees are surrounded by a wealth of community experts, others can’t even snag a physician. Although she can’t make it to every whistle-stop every year, Sylvana puts significant energy into giving outlying workers equal access to such key initiatives as wellness subsidies, health screenings and resources on the company intranet.

Sylvana also hires experts who live in or near those communities to facilitate onsite learning sessions. “I try to use local resources as much as possible, creating a network that employees and their families can go to when they need more help.”

CPR is now into its second five-year corporate wellness plan. Among changes in the current plan, which stretches to 2010, is a revamped and re-energized wellness committee. “It’s always a tough balance between getting enough people who have a corporate perspective and finding people who can make it to meetings,” Sylvana says.

In 2006, Wellness moved from Occupational Health to Human Resources, a larger department with a mandate for both Canadian and U.S. operations. The 2010 Wellness Plan was also assigned its own budget, enhancing the program’s sustainability.” Evaluating the financial impact of wellness is always a challenge,” Sylvana notes. “By working closely with the benefits group and aligning our data collection, we will improve our ability to demonstrate financial benefits.”

“I’d say I’m most proud of the momentum we’ve acquired,” Sylvana says. “People are now self-motivated and supporting corporate wellness goals on their own initiative, without always relying on us to say ‘Here is something we have for you.’ Shared responsibility has been our motto, and to me that’s very important. We are going to help our employees manage their health but not manage their health for them.”

Staying Well at CPR: A Summary of Initiatives

• Physical Wellness Subsidy: Reimburses employees for half of their fitness fees, to a maximum of $300 a year. Initially focused on physical activity, the subsidy has broadened to include weight management, dietary expertise and stop-smoking programs.

• Know Your Numbers: Contract nurses or pharmacists screen blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose. About 30 per cent of employees have used this free service. They receive immediate counselling, and people with specific issues are urged to get further medical advice. Each person’s results remain confidential, but group data show some improvement, particularly among employees with multiple risk factors (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and excess weight).

• Shiftwork and Alertness Education: CPR is part of a group building a railway-specific fatigue management website with one section for employees and a second offering ready-made materials for internal trainers. Strategies for battling fatigue come up often at safety meetings, particularly when new and seasonal employees sign on.

• Healthy Workplace Week: Initiatives all across the corporation support and tap into this national campaign.

• Wellness education and opportunities for action: Intranet, staff newsletters, learning seminars and other ways are used to promote mental health, physical activity and healthy lifestyles. Corporate support is also available for site-specific programs. Recent examples include a fitness challenge in Moose Jaw and a “stair-athon” in Calgary that helped fund renovations in a downtown women’s shelter.