Our Solution
Approach
Lack of Inaccessible Tools & Awareness
UC Berkeley's Be Well at Work Department was created for the sole purpose of assisting employees with accessing their benefits and other health/safety resources. However, the tools being provided have been inaccessible to the diverse employee population and are not allowing their concerns to be voiced and heard properly. Additionally, there is a lack of awareness among employees on what benefits and resources they are offered.
Our solution aims to address these two concerns. Our needs assessment tool will be implemented in an accessible manner to ensure that employees with varying language preferences and technology comfort can use it and voice their concerns. Additionally, the needs assessment tool will gauge how well employees understand the resources provided to them. The Be Well at Work Department can work with employees after better understanding employees' knowledge.
Prototype
Our prototype involves 3 main elements:
Needs Assessment Tool
Implementation Framework
Policy Recommendations
1) Needs Assessment Tool
Needs Assessment Tool Design:
We translated our needs assessment tool in Mandarin, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese, Tagalog , and Vietnamese since those were the languages requested by workers at Cal. We did this by partnering with the VHIO.
Decided to create audio files in these different languages to go along with the Needs Assessment Tool to help Be Well at Work Facilitate the Needs Assessment Tool
Created a paper needs assessment tool since most of our interviewees preferred it and it eliminated tech proficiency concerns
2) Implementation Framework
We suggest that the Needs Assessment Tool be given out through this framework:
Given out during work hours in group sessions based off of language preference
Having interpreters on hand incase people had questions
Playing audio files while administering it to limit the number of interpreters needed
3) Policy and Program Recommendations
Monthly Town Halls hosted by RSSP and HR to answer any questions workers have about their benefits and direct them to more resources if need be.
Have sessions in different languages explaining benefits workers receive during the on-boarding process
Create student - worker programs around common interests both students and workers may have (ex: anime) to foster a relationship between workers and students.
Needs Assessment Design Process
First Iteration
The first iteration of our prototype was the existing Well-Being Questionnaire developed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). We aimed to improve the questions and their formatting to make it more accessible to Berkeley RSSP employees.
Second Iteration
We integrated themes from our interviews into this survey and modified our questions accordingly– for instance, the question on the top left is from wellBQ (I am …satisfied); We decided to ladder the question further into two more specific questions clarifying the worker needs. In the third question, again we added more clarity and specificity to what the term “benefits” even meant.
We also decided to omit some questions that we deemed inappropriate based on what we learned about the worker population. We don’t even know if all workers have access to three meals a day, so it seemed incentive to ask questions asking how much "leafy greens" a person eats in a day. So we decided to remove questions that were specifically asking about type of food intake
Final Prototype
This is the final iteration of our English prototype, where we decided to make our surveys more comprehensible by adding a visual aspect to the four options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, also as a means to lower some subjectivity that may go into interpreting those options. We also decided to add a free response section after every two pages to give workers a chance to elaborate if they wish on the previous questions they were asked.