Skip navigation Search Create Avatar image Finding Joy at Work: How Wake County Public Health Is Building a More Resilient Workforce
Success Stories“There’s a lot of research around joy in work, and you just can’t get away from how behavioral health and mental health really impacts people at work and at home. So, why not address that at work as much as we can? “ — Annie Deaver, Public Health Workforce Manager, Wake County Public Health
Wake County Public Health Department had a clear goal when Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) funding arrived: invest in their workforce in a way that would actually make a difference for staff. That meant grounding every decision in staff input and letting the data drive the strategy. To do that, Public Health Workforce Manager Annie Deaver and her team launched listening tours across the department, asked staff what they needed, and then built their wellness strategy around the answers.
What they heard was honest: Staff were still carrying the weight of COVID-19; work stressors don’t stay at the office, and home stressors don’t disappear when employees clock in. Wake County leaned in and developed a program designed to enhance existing wellness offerings and support employees as whole people. They used what they heard during the listening sessions to guide quarterly wellness offerings, tailored clinical sessions with professional counselors and social workers, and programming built around what staff said they were experiencing, what they needed help with, and what brought them joy.
The result: a workplace culture that fosters psychological safety and a more resilient workforce, because public health workers who feel cared for at work are better equipped to care for their communities.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How have you used PHIG funding?
We needed to introduce folks to what the PHIG funding could potentially mean. So, we started out with listening tours. We went to every area in our public health department, and we just wanted to listen. In our listening tours, we wanted to hear from our staff directly. What do you feel like is missing at work? What brings you joy at work? What makes you happy? And what we did was, we constructed a survey and we asked the same questions in every area, and then we were able to pull all that data together, and that helped us to refine what we needed to actually offer and how to best use these funds to meet the needs of our staff.
How did you take action based on what you heard?
After the listening sessions, we determined that we really wanted to build out some programs to enhance what was already being offered at Wake County. So, we actually started focusing more on internal wellness. What we heard from our staff is that they still feel some of the impacts of COVID-19 and the impact of life stressors. So, we moved towards offering quarterly wellness offerings. For example, our next offering is going to be a holiday-themed offering, understanding that sometimes the holidays may not be the best time of year for a lot of people. There may be some struggles or something going on during the holiday time. So, we want to take care of our folks, and we’re doing a tailored offering where we can offer chair massages, people can make a handmade craft; they can just come together with their colleagues, or even just sit solo and just do something that brings them joy, helps them to relax, to maybe get away from their workday, and to have something to take home with them.
And also, we have selected an organization to continue wellness-related offerings. They’re a national organization, so they’re going to continue with virtual wellness-related sessions and in-person sessions from local professional counselors, local clinical social workers, and we’re going to continue to tailor those. Our first clinician is already ready to go with our virtual and in-person offerings, and they’re going to talk about things like workplace stressors, conflict resolution, preparing for the holidays, and then after that, we’re going to test it out pre- and post. And depending on those findings, we’re going to continue to make sure that we gear our wellness-related clinical offerings to meet staff needs, depending on the themes that are emerging from these initial sessions.
What’s been the impact?
Because of the PHIG funding, we’ve helped staff to build more resiliency, and we’ve also helped staff to be more aware of what’s available to them as a Wake County employee on the whole, but also what’s available to them because of PHIG funding. When staff members engage, whether it’s in the clinic or in the community or just with one another, because of some of the programming and some of the initiatives that we’ve been able to put forward, folks frankly feel better — and I think that’s important. There’s a lot of research around joy in work, and you just can’t get away from how behavioral health and mental health really impacts people at work and at home. So, why not address that at work as much as we can? And we’ve been able to do that with this funding.
Why is this work so important?
There’s nothing better than coming to work and feeling psychologically safe. That’s very difficult to achieve in any space, but I think most especially in governmental spaces. I think, being in this kind of middle space in workforce development and having the opportunity to have conversations with boots on the ground and also have conversations with leadership, it puts us in a unique space where we can really impact our systems. So, it’s really exciting. This funding has been just an amazing opportunity to be truly impactful. We’re able to offer services that are outside of the traditional “checking the box” of “okay, you can have this training,” or “okay, we’re going to gear this training for this particular area.” We can actually listen, we can take time, we can say, “Okay, this is what we’re hearing from all of our staff members,” and as a result, we can tailor our offerings. And then we can bring in others from the community to really say: “We care about you. We realize that you may not be able to make that distinction between home stressors or work stressors. We want to equip you to just be a better public health servant, leader, no matter where you are.” And they can use those skills, those supports, at work and also outside of work.