Driving the Culture of Wellness
HALE - Health Assessment and Lifestyle Enrichment
HALE was Infosys' response to counter the increasingly evident issues at the workplace like busy schedules that had long periods of sedentary activity and irregular working hours. HALE is a non-monetary benefit extended to all Infoscions and has been recognized as the best internal brand with great recall and participation. It has consistently helped in meeting the business objectives and has emerged as a highly acclaimed engagement tool, winning many industry awards as well.
Since its inception, HALE has done pioneering work in employee health (physical and mental), employee safety, encouraging leisure and creating and sustaining a healthy workforce that can balance work life and is productive.
Driving the Culture of Wellness
As workplaces and workspaces are transforming around us individual and collective well-being have become the focal points with an enhanced focus on employee wellbeing and care. Given the challenges of today’s environment, employee burnout is a lurking issue and if not given immediate attention can significantly affect the productivity of the workforce.
OBJECTIVE of HALE
A proactive approach to health and life enrichment aimed at increased awareness, and overall well-being resulting in good health, reduced stress levels, a safe work environment and improved productivity levels.
PILLARS of HALE
At Infosys, we believe in providing a holistic wellness experience to our employees where we focus on their physical and emotional wellness while also ensuring they have fun at the workplace and a safe working environment.
Physical Wellbeing
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Emotional Wellbeing
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Safety
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Social Wellbeing
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POST PANDEMIC
Post the pandemic, we created a 3-tiered model to help us navigate our wellness journey, which we believed would provide our employees, nothing short of a seamless wellness experience.
Self-Help Model:
Increasing the awareness quotient of employees through enablement, education, and continuous communication. Self-help tools, chatbots etc.
Microenvironment:
Our managers and teams are the ones who are steering the wheels of the organization, and for any big change to happen, it will only begin with the shifting mindsets of our managers, which will then create a ripple effect.
Macro Environment:
The central set-up will revolve around creating a great digital wellness experience, alliances and tie-ups, policy redesign, insurance, vaccination program, leave nudges etc.
Self Help
Online self-help tools
Due to the onset of a virtual mode of working, we enabled employees with a host of self-help tools for them to assess their emotional health. These tools are available on InfyMe for them to access anytime and anywhere.
COVID Emotional Assessment Tool: An online tool (questionnaire) created for self-awareness that assists employees in identifying their stress levels during COVID and thereby seeking help or taking appropriate measures to improve their mental health basis the results.
Resilience Tool: To help employees assess their resilience levels. Resilience is the most important skill all of us need during these times and hence, this tool was created.
Macro-Environment Transition from Physical to Virtual
Support and Care
At Infosys, Support and Care for employees and their families have always been at the center of all that we do. We introduced various support measures post the pandemic to strengthen our narrative.
Micro-Environment
Infy Ikigai
Some of the key findings from our Employee Survey post-pandemic were a stark decline in the Work-life balance for employees, higher stress levels due to disproportionate meetings and no days off and managing the dual responsibilities of work and household. As a response to the survey, we conceptualized an initiative ‘The Infy Ikigai’, emphasizing the importance of stepping away from the physical and mental demands of everyday life and focusing on taking care of oneself.
- Creating a culture where leaders and managers lead by example when it comes to focusing on their mental health, and prioritizing work-life balance when the life around them seems out of balance.
- No meetings/no calls a day, dedicating wellness hours to take care of themselves
- To reduce mental stress arising out of completing repetitive tasks like status reporting etc. Automation was done for multiple operational activities
- Weekly expert talks by professionals underscoring the importance of drawing digital boundaries, coping with stress, resilience building, and managing dual responsibilities of home and work.
- Manager enablement sessions on the importance of me time, understanding boundaries, and personal space of their team members
- Creating dialogues and conversations around these topics. Leave nudges to ensure the importance of taking days off.
COVID CARE
COVID Care (Medical Support / CCC)
With COVID being one of the major deterrents to the health and safety of employees, we introduced a multitude of offerings to provide every medical support possible to employees and their families.
- COVID Care Centers: COVID Care Centers were introduced for employees and their families in partnership with hospitals across our DCs to take care of COVID+ individuals with mild or no symptoms with no adequate home isolation facilities, to isolate from their loved ones.
- Health Insurance Policy: To aid employees during these challenging times, we modified our existing Health Insurance Policy and provided the best health benefits for employees and their families like Exhaustive Coverage for COVID-19.
- COVID Leave Policy: 21-day leaves for employees who tested positive
- Hospital Tie-ups: We introduced hospital tie-ups across locations with testing labs, ambulance services, beds
- Teleconsultation Facilities: Post the pandemic, Teleconsultation emerged as one of the key focus areas and we are offering a menu of telemedicine vendors on the app for employees to connect with medical professionals on the go.
- COVID-19 Helpline: A single helpdesk number is introduced for employees for any concerns/queries related to COVID Medical Support/Vaccination.
- Communication: Targeted communication was sent to different segments like employees, managers, and women employees on different health-related aspects like the dos and don’ts during COVID, myth busters, and tips for parents and women employees.
Vaccination
It has been our constant endeavor to ensure that our employees and their families are safe. We introduced vaccination facilities for our employees and their families so that we can embark on the journey of making sure we win this fight against the pandemic. We have comprehended the importance of the role that vaccines play in our fight to counter this pandemic. By working very closely with the government authorities and medical experts, we have put together various frameworks for the immunization drive to encourage employees and their family members to get vaccinated. The vaccination facility has been introduced for employees and their 3 family members via different mediums.
- Created COVID Vaccination Centers (CVC) inside some Infosys campuses, operations have commenced across some DCs already and is a work-in progress in other DCs. These are exclusive safe vaccination zones for employees and their dependents to come and get vaccinated.
- Tied-up would multiple hospitals across locations. Working with medical partners to establish tie-ups in all Tier 1/2/3 cities in India for vaccination slots for employees who are now working from home in various parts of the country. The vaccine centers set up under the supervision of partner hospitals and each location and have been approved by the local district nodal officers to ensure compliance.
- Developed an internal system to obtain consent from employees for vaccination and update vaccination data in accordance with the govt. prescribed process.
- Given Vaccine is available now for 18+, teams across DCs, are working together to create a seamless experience, along with hospitals and government authorities for the vaccination drive.
This has been very well received by our employees and family and we are now working with partner hospitals to safely vaccinate more and more of our employees and family and protect them from the pandemic. Enablement and awareness around the importance of vaccination.
Women Wellness
Through our real-time employee surveys and focus group discussions, one of the concerns was the rising difficulties amongst our women employees to manage the dual responsibilities of home and work. Hence, we created an ecosystem for our women employees where they were provided a host of offerings to take care of their wellbeing.
Women Samaritans Network
We created a Women Samaritans Network, which focused exclusively on handling cases pertaining to women employees. Samaritans are our barefoot counselling network by the Infoscions for the Infoscions. Post the pandemic, since the issues amongst women employees were rising, an exclusive network was created to handle their concerns.
Communication
Virtual Wellness Coach
We have had a network of professional counsellors available for the past 2 decades and they have been traditionally providing professional counselling, both face-to-face and on-call, in times of crisis. However, post-pandemic, that wasn’t possible so we moved to digital counselling platforms where employees could get on video calls with counsellors to discuss their issues 24x7. We also provided one on one counselling facilities free of cost, to the families of employees who tested COVID +ve, to provide them respite during distressing times.
Samaritans on the go
Samaritans, our peer-to-peer counselling network was introduced on InfyMe for employees to reach out to Samaritans across locations just at the click of a button. 100+ Samaritans across locations.
Wellness Chatbot
A chatbot has been introduced for our employees on our in-house app as a self-help platform for them to be able to resolve any basic issues and queries they have at their fingertips.
Podcasts
Diverse topics covering facets of well-being are available at the disposal of employees at the click of a button. They can listen to these podcasts anytime and anywhere. These range from featuring external speakers who provide their professional opinions to the internal leaders and managers on their unique approaches to handling well-being in teams. We have launched 25+ wellness podcasts, for our employees to access on the go
Social Wellbeing and Virtual Camaraderie
Communities
We have been successfully able to transform the concept of physical communities into virtual communities, where our clubs and communities are now driving programs on different facets of well-being – physical, emotional etc. Such programs are being driven not just at a location level, but at the unit/account level too. Through these communities, we have been able to customize our offerings better. Currently, each location has close to 15+ virtual clubs.
Fitness Influencer Teams (FIT)
The concept of fitness influencer teams emerged even before the pandemic, when we identified employees who were driven and passionate about fitness and wanted to create an impact in their little ways on more and more people around them. We identified 350+ influencers across locations to drive the message of wellness more effectively. Post-COVID, we have been able to drive multiple programs through these influencers like weekly workout sessions, talks etc., thereby creating a far-reaching impact.
Wellbeing Focus at GEOs
Since Infosys is spread across geographies, it is pivotal for us to create an ecosystem where we maintain a healthy balance of localization and globalization. Different geos had different challenges post-pandemic, however, the one thing that stayed constant was the focus on Employee well-being.
| A series of informative webinars through the Bright Talk Channel was launched in Europe in cooperation with Allianz partners. The series will cover a wide range of topics from health, mindfulness, nutrition, fitness, and mental health. | HALE Campaigns were launched covering various aspects related to mental and physical wellness. These were mailer series launched under the title – “Keeping Your Head Up” and “Taking Care of Yourself”. |
| In partnership with AXA, a health insurance provider in the UAE, a string of health and wellbeing webinar sessions were organized about meditation, and nutrition. The next hugely reckoned initiative in the UK was Doctor@Hand, that’s a virtual GP service which puts one in touch with doctors who can answer your questions, without the need for a physical visit. Employees can speak to a GP anytime, from anywhere, through mobile, tablet or smartphone. Video calls are available alongside telephone calls. |
Kindness Matters, a marquee event of the quarter in the UK, started as an attempt to create a ripple effect with kindness and turned into a tsunami of positivity! In its run of 21 days, the #KindnessMatters campaign received 26 unique stories, ranging from simple and random acts of kindness (cooking for their teams, neighbors, helping strangers in need, being part of charity organizations, etc.) to celebrating the efforts of NHS and its workers.
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HALE Americas World Mental Health Day series emphasizes the importance of Mental Health
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HALE America Yoga Wednesdays – Virtual Yoga session conducted by Infoscion. 5 Sessions, 670 participants. |
