County Durham Sport’s Active Workplace programme endeavours to provide new, fun and social ways to encourage Workplaces to prioritise the health and wellbeing of their staff and get employees more active, more often. County Durham Sport started working with DISC to help support the organisations work towards their continuing excellent status for the North East Better Health At Work Award. The staff team at DISC were commonly found to suffer from high levels of stress due to the nature of the charity's work and were keen to look at different physical activity options to help improve the wellbeing of staff.
ACTIONS
County Durham Sport surveyed the DISC staff to find out what sort of physical activity opportunities they would like to access. A large number of those who completed the survey were interested in starting to run.
As part of County Durham Sport, Durham County Council and England Athletics recreational running programme, a beginners running group was set up to start from outside the office at the end of the working day. The group had a great take up and managed to go from Couch to 5K.
As part of The National Active Lunch Challenge January-February 2017 County Durham Sport organised an 8 weeklunch time boxercise course for the DISC team.
Attendees of the Boxercise class said:
“I feel it gives me a good kick-start to the week and encourages me to get up out of the chair as working in IT some weeks I spend a lot of time sat down at my desk or driving. It also allows me to integrate more with colleagues that I wouldn’t normally get to spend social time with, building these important relationships in order to get stuff done.”
“I really enjoy the sessions, they definitely give me a bit of a lift for the afternoon.”
“I have really enjoyed the boxercise classes and found the lunchtime sessions have been ideal for me. My evenings & weekends have being extremely busy lately with college, exams and caring for my grandad so I have found it really difficult to make time for exercise for a number of months. This has been a perfect opportunity to kick-start my fitness and health regime and has given me a taste for something I really enjoy and would love to continue.”
Read the full Case Study Active Workplace DISC Case Study.pdf