Article Image Alt Text

Senior Lecturer in Management Studies at the University of the West Indies (U.W.I.), Cave Hill Campus, Dr. Dwayne Devonish in an interview with The Barbados Advocate after the Annual Commonwealth Scholarship Winners Alumni Breakfast Social yesterday at Radisson Aquatica Barbados.

Employer buy-in key

Looking towards the sustainability of a National Wellness Policy

The National Wellness Policy must have employer buy-in in order for it to be sustainable.

This is coming from a Senior Lecturer in Management Studies at the University of the West Indies (U.W.I.), Cave Hill Campus, Dr. Dwayne Devonish who spoke to The Barbados Advocate after the Annual Commonwealth Scholarship Winners Alumni Breakfast Social yesterday at Radisson Aquatica Barbados.

Speaking on the three-year old policy yesterday, he stated that this policy is a strategic document that covers eight aspects of wellness and it is targeted at all companies in all sectors.

“I am working with the Barbados Workers’ Union and other members of the social partnership in crafting a national wellness policy which is supposed to be a strategic document which covers almost eight dimensions of wellness including physical wellness, psychological or mental wellness, environmental wellness, occupational wellness, cultural wellness, spiritual wellness, social wellness and so forth and the goal of the actual policy is to guide employers, employees, unions, institutions like workplaces, hospitals, insurance companies across every sector and community about ..., the appropriate ways of going about developing wellness policies at their level.”

He stated that they are looking to enhance the effectiveness of this policy within workplaces and employer buy-in would certainly go a long way towards accomplishing that goal. This is because while they have found that while some individual companies do have their own wellness programmes in place already, these are not always sustainable.

“And we are hoping that the National Wellness Policy serves to provide not only guidance, but also kind of an incentivized environment in which all stakeholders can gain control of incidences and factors that contribute to not only positive wellness, but also, an environment in which wellness policies themselves can actually operate successfully because businesses are concerned that you have a wellness policy in the workplace and that it has [more than] a lifeline of six months and then everybody gains weight, everybody goes back to doing something else. ..”

“...So we want it to be sustainable and we believe that sustainability lies in having people buying into the policy and not to forcing it on employees or forcing it on anyone, on employers themselves.”

In addition because they did decide to go the policy route instead of the legislative route because they did not want employers to feel that they were being compelled to do it.

“That is why we did not want to go in a legislative route. We wanted a policy that was not in some way demanding of employees because we already have the Health and Safety Act, we already have the Employment Rights Bill, why do we need to have all of this legislation? So that was the reason behind the path towards the Wellness policy rather than a Wellness Act.”

Barbados Advocate

Mailing Address:
Advocate Publishers (2000) Inc
Fontabelle, St. Michael, Barbados

Phone: (246) 467-2000
Fax: (246) 434-2020 / (246) 434-1000