With health and fitness a priority for all firefighters, South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue service wanted to find a way to support their employees to live healthier lives. Corporate communications manager Alex Mills explains how they achieved their objective. This case study forms part of our internal communications toolkit.
In 2015 the Government introduced a new fitness standard for all firefighters across the country. It stated that fire fighters had to be able to reach a certain level of fitness in order to be able to ride in a fire engine. Those who didn’t would not be able to attend operational incidents, which could have had an enormous impact on our operational effectiveness and ability to maintain public safety. With so much at stake we wanted to make sure that we supported our employees to live healthier, fitter lives.
The plan
Before we did anything we surveyed our staff to get a baseline of how active they were. The results were positive, but indicated that with a few adjustments people could easily improve their fitness levels. Armed with this information we worked closely with our newly appointed health and fitness advisor to come up with a campaign that focused on nutrition and physical activity. We worked with him to develop a set of key messages that outlined the small changes that people could make to improve their nutrition, including advice on how to reduce levels of salt, sugar and processed foods. We also crafted messages to explain the benefits of exercise and developed some simple workouts that people could easily follow.
We wanted to make sure that our campaign messages felt relevant to our audience so we took the decision to feature firefighters from South Yorkshire in our campaign materials. We felt that using familiar faces would increase the likelihood of our audience engaging with the campaign.
The execution
As firefighters are rarely at their desks we decided to make the campaign very visual to increase the chances of catching people’s attention. We created a short, informative video that we screened across the digital screens in all our fire stations and our headquarters building. This included our employee-led campaign visuals and some quick tips for improving health and fitness that people could easily digest. We also created a poster campaign which we displayed across our sites with details of where employees could go for more information. The purpose of these posters was to show people that even small changes could make a big difference and that improving your lifestyle was something entirely achievable.
We also included more detailed information in The Bulletin, our weekly staff magazine. This allowed us to reach employees who had more time to read our messages and encouraged awareness of the campaign across the organisation – not just our operational frontline teams. We wanted the whole organisation to benefit from the messages of this campaign so it was important that we used all our available channels.
The impact
Once our eight week campaign period had finished we surveyed staff to see what impact it had. Over 45 per cent of employees told us that they had increased the amount of physical activity that they were doing since the campaign started. Almost half of respondents (45.6 per cent) said that they had made healthy changes to their diet and 48.39 per cent of people surveyed said that they felt inspired to make permanent lifestyle changes as a result of our campaign. We achieved all this despite only having a budget of £1300 so we were very pleased with the results.
Why it worked
One of the most effective aspects of the campaign was that it featured our real employees. Our staff enjoyed seeing their colleagues in our materials and it encouraged engagement with the campaign in a way we hadn’t seen before. The key messages were also focused on making small changes rather than completely overhauling your lifestyle. This made staff much more inclined to listen to what we had to say.
Lessons learned
If we ran this campaign again I think we would like to involve even more staff in the creative part of the campaign as we were heavily reliant on one crew at one fire station. It would have been great to have shown staff across a wider variety of locations and included people in non-firefighter roles to help strengthen its relevance to our whole workforce. We would have also liked to have included some focus group sessions as part of our research and evaluation stages to complement the survey work.
Want to know more?
For more information please contact Alex Mills, corporate communications manager.