In our work with employer clients, we often talk about the importance of relationships. We know without a doubt that the relationships we have with teams is what cultivates the fertile ground for behavior change to take root, and that is what ultimately pushes a population towards better health slowly and steadily over time. We also know that in many cases, it is our existing relationships that lead to our most synergistic client partnerships. But how that happens is almost always a true surprise.
In the winter of 2019, I had received a call from Mike after he had just hung up from an interesting conversation. A past APHPT Certification graduate had been talking about the concept of ‘upstream embedded models’ on a family trip, where the General Manager of a plant of one of the largest steel companies in the world was also in attendance. After hearing a little bit about this ‘fundamentally different’ approach that brings prevention and health promotion to industrial workforces, the general manager insisted that he needed to talk to ‘these people’ and find out how to implement this type of approach in his aging industrial workforce.
From the initial conversation, the goal was clear - the organization as a whole believed firmly in taking care of their ‘team’, of doing what is right by the person working alongside them as well as their family. From first phone calls to the initial site visit, it felt like that was an almost eerie level of synergy in the way our respective organizations saw the world. It didn’t take long to agree that the fit was right, and to begin rolling out a pilot of our musculoskeletal prevention approach onsite with their team.
The initial synergy we felt was only compounded when we got to work, quickly integrating into the culture and learning about a whole new world of industrial athletes. Even when the pandemic hit a mere 2 weeks after starting our onsite initiative, the message from leadership remained clear - “keep taking care of our people.”
And so we did just that. We started mopping up as many musculoskeletal messes as we could with our two days a week onsite. We adapted to the ever-changing demands of the pandemic and the impact on an essential workforce. We kept evolving our approach to meet the needs and fill the gaps of the team as we encountered them. After about a year onsite, we realized that we were still only scratching the surface, and decided to expand our offerings to include family members as well and have a full-time member of the Pro-Activity team embedded onsite. With a little coaxing, our ‘gunner’ Aaron Perez uprooted his life to move to a rural part of South Carolina, and our teams worked together to build out an incredibly robust model spanning primary prevention thru tertiary care.
Eventually, word started to spread across town, and we began working with another division of the company down the road. Again, we started small, and pretty rapidly built upon a foundation of trust-filled relationships that would lead us to bring on two more members to the Pro-Activity team.
Although the results started to show some impressive movement of the population in the right direction - healthcare costs declining, concentration of services moving from tertiary services towards more primary and primordial efforts, and positive feedback from the team and leaders, the sentiment always came through the same - “just keep taking care of our people”. Even through changes in leadership, spaces, schedules and tactics, the sentiment of deep caring about doing right by ‘their team’ was an absolute constant.
While we have no idea what the story will look like with this partnership in the next quarter century of Pro-Activity’s existence, the stories we have witnessed already paint an incredibly bright picture for the future. From people taking control over their health and moving from significantly limiting pain to losing significant inches off their waistline & improvements in their metabolic panel (and undoubtedly adding healthy years to their life), to some of the hardest working industrial athletes realizing their body does not have to break down from a life of use…the impact this partnership has had on OUR team is remarkable. We have found that working with a company who simply desires for us to ‘take care of their people’ ultimately can yield to some of the most fulfilling, ‘fundamentally different’, work for ours.
-Ali H.
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