Collaborate with Worksite Wellness Staff

Strategize and Act on Food Service Guidelines

At a glance

Collaborating with wellness staff is a key to facilitating implementation of food service guidelines. These staff often lead to successful initiatives because they can readily garner buy-in from leadership. Engage them early in the process.

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Introduction

Worksite wellness staff are credentialed professionals, such as registered dietitians, who are trained to maintain employee health. They are responsible for implementing programs and environmental changes that promote health and well-being. Building relationships with worksite wellness staff can be a successful entry point for implementing food service guidelines.

Expertise of wellness staff

Worksite wellness staff often have direct access to organizational leadership. This enables them to easily obtain buy-in from leaders to move forward with food service guidelines implementation.

Wellness staff also have established communication channels with other staff. They can use these channels to promote the sale of healthy foods and beverages and link health information to healthy eating. Since they are often the champions who are the key to your success, it is important to engage wellness staff early in the process.

Worksite wellness staff can also support healthy food and beverage practices outside of food service guidelines implementation. For example, they can encourage healthy meeting and breakroom policies within organizations.

See CDC's Tips for Offering Healthier Options and Physical Activity at Workplace Meetings and Events. You can use this resource with food service guidelines to create a workplace supportive of healthy eating.

Worksite Health ScoreCard‎

CDC's Worksite Health ScoreCard helps employers determine gaps in worksite health-promoting interventions. Some material overlaps with the Food Service Guidelines Organizational Assessment Tool, which is more specific to food service guidelines. However, the scorecard also assesses strategies for health behaviors such as physical activity and weight management. The ScoreCard offers strategies related to prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke, cancer, and more.

Next steps

Return to "Building Blocks"

Use the "Building Blocks of Food Service Guidelines" to navigate to other parts of the Food Service Guidelines Implementation Toolkit.