Ensuring the health of employees through the establishment of wellness programs has become a popular trend in the U.S. Companies establish these courses as a way to improve employee health and happiness.

At CooperVision, a contact lens manufacturing company and division of The Cooper Companies, a grassroots effort has sprung up to support wellness. While many companies implement wellness programs in order to cut costs on insurance programs, for the past eight years CooperVision has embraced the idea of developing wellness champions. The wellness champion concept allows those employees who take on the champion mantle to become the best they can be. It is a movement embraced by all levels of employees. Even members of the senior leadership team at CooperVision have shared their wellness goals with the company.

“It’s about creating a supportive environment for wellness with our employees,” says Leanne Fisher, global wellness manager at The Cooper Companies. “Having happy and healthy productive employees is our goal.”

Wellness has become such an important cornerstone at CooperVision that it’s been blended into the culture of the company. The tagline of CooperVision is “A quality of life company,” which is something the employees embrace from the top down, Fisher adds.

The company has identified a swath of employees to serve as wellness champions to help carry the message of good health through the rank and file departments. The champions usually have a passion for some kind of wellness or fitness, such as yoga or weight loss, and have a desire to help others meet their goals.

Across the 10,000 employee-wide company, there are 84 trained wellness champions, and nearly 100 more waiting to be trained. In the Rochester area there are approximately 50 wellness champions for about 1,200 employees, Fisher says.

“Our champions work in various aspects of the company,” she says. “You can find champions at most levels of the company. That network of champions helps the company reach the employees so they can make the (wellness) changes.”

Fisher says the champions will talk about the importance of things like good dietary behavior, getting annual flu shots and participating in high blood pressure reduction challenges and biometric screenings. Several of the CooperVision sites across the U.S. conduct biometric screenings as part of the wellness program in order to help employees understand chronic disease measures like high blood pressure, cholesterol and BMI measurements.

One of the key components of the wellness concept embraced by CooperVision is not just about managing weight or curbing smoking, but to help employees find their life’s purpose. Employees are encouraged to think about what their life’s purpose is. By determining a purpose, Fisher says it’s easier for people to make behavioral changes to meet that determined goal.

“For years the idea has been to scare or incentivize people into doing the right thing,” she says. “But true and lasting change has been tied to how people want to change with something really important in their lives — children, grandchildren, honoring someone who has died, things like that. Purpose can change over people’s lives.”

Fisher recalls one experience of a wellness champion finding her purpose, which she described as powerful. During a class aimed at helping employees of another company quit smoking, she heard the testimony of one smoker recount how her second-hand smoke caused her cat to develop a type of lung cancer.

“The woman quit smoking because of what happened to her cat,” she says. “You could see the pain in her eyes and it’s that moment that you decide ‘No more’ and you commit to doing what it takes.”

Fisher says the idea of marrying purpose to wellness is less about eat this and don’t eat that, but rather it helps an individual to connect his or her life to something that he or she feels powerful about.

When it comes to the training of champions, Brian Quinn, a CooperVision wellness coordinator, says they first ask champions what they are seking from the program. The theme of the wellness champion training is to align your purpose at work and home.

“We want to follow through with what they want in order for them to be more successful at the program,” Quinn says.

With the addition of the wellness champions, Quinn says CooperVision is seeing a more concise message through the delivery of a more energetic wellness program.

“We’re seeing a big difference between the sites that have a wellness champion and those that don’t,” he says.

In October CooperVision conducted another round of training for about 20 of its champions. Quinn says the company hopes to see the number of wellness champions grow across its multiple sites.

“We want their champions to be infiltrated in every department across the company,” Quinn says. “It’s a people-driven message so we want to make sure that people can be champions with their own teams. It can make the teams more cohesive.”