Owens Corning’s Social Handprint: Inspiring Healthy Living
Originally published in Owens Corning's 2020 Sustainability Report
Health & Wellness
We set an ambitious aspiration to eliminate all lifestyle induced disease in our employees and their families. And, although we did not have a 2020 Sustainability (metrics-based) Goal directly related to health and wellness, efforts in this area have been an important part of our journey in pursuit of our aspiration.
Helping ensure that our employees and their families thrive, over the past decade we:
- Launched the Healthy Living digital platform, linking employees to our wellness resources and enabling them to track their individual progress.
- Established an aspiration team, led by plant leaders, for each of our six Healthy Living Pillars: know your numbers, healthy mind, physical activity, nutrition, tobacco-free, and financial health.
- Enabled 99% of our employees work in tobacco-free facilities.
- Created a Champion Network, in which select employees are trained to help us deliver wellness-based programming at our sites around the world.
- Responded to the U.S. opioid crisis by implementing a three- day limit on short-acting opioid prescriptions.
- Integrated the principles of Total Productive Maintenance into our health living initiatives, empowering employees to address health-related issues.
Brian Linder
Corporate Medical Director
Owens Corning has a long history of commitment to employee health and wellness. We have been working with our employees to educate and improve their well-being since the earliest moments of employer engagement in this space. It’s a natural extension of our dedication and commitment to employee safety. There is an understanding at the highest levels in our company that our employees are our most valuable assets, and they are cherished partners in all of the successes we enjoy as an enterprise.
Although the medical science underpinning our objectives to improve employee health and well-being have remained largely the same over the last decade, the strategies we employ to deliver on these objectives have changed a great deal. In essence, it’s not the “what” but the “how” that continues to drive our actions in helping our employees lead healthier lifestyles. Our early efforts were mostly focused on centralized, corporate solutions to deliver education and lifestyle improvement services. This is still a very important component of our wellness strategy, but we have found that by recruiting local facility assistance, including the help of plant leadership, building local wellness champions, etc., we can achieve an even greater impact in helping employees stay healthy.
We look forward to partnering with all of our facilities to deliver state-of-the-art medical education and services, in a locally based and focused approach that will result in continuous improvement in employee health and wellness long into the future.
