Wellness In Action: How the League partnered with three communities to pilot a new model for public safety wellness programs

By Cali Torell

Due to the nature of their job duties, public safety professionals are exposed to traumas that can cause short- and long-term injuries — whether a physical injury like a broken bone or a mental injury like depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress. Without treatment, mental injuries can worsen, compelling many talented first responders to leave the workforce.

To improve employee recruitment and retention in the field, many communities have created programs to support public safety mental health and wellness within their organizations and others are interested, but don’t know where to start. Across the state, this takes many different forms. The League of Minnesota Cities sought to understand the critical components of a successful wellness program for public safety and help cities know where to begin.

“We needed to find a way to help our members by providing an outline or foundation for them to build off of,” said the League’s Public Safety Program Coordinator Lora Setter. “Many of them had pieces of things that were going on, like ‘Check Up from the Neck Up,’ or peer support programs, but we wanted to understand what an overarching wellness program needed to look like and answer the question: How do I do this if I’ve never done this before?”

To support cities in developing these beneficial programs, the League created the Action Guide to Support Public Safety Mental Wellness, a five-step model with best practices and considerations for supporting public safety employees and their well-being.

Over the past year, Setter piloted this approach with three communities: Moorhead, Madelia, and Chaska. Before the pilot project began, each community varied in its existing approach to employee wellness in addition to other differences like city size, agency structure, and overall benefits programs. Joined by the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust’s Aimee Gourlay as a facilitator, Setter and these three communities followed the steps of the action guide to gain insight into their own offerings, as well as the applicability of the model for other cities starting or refreshing wellness programs for public safety employees.

For the City of Madelia, a community of about 2,500 people in Watonwan County, participating in the pilot program was the push it needed to better prioritize employee mental health, according to Police Chief Rob Prescher.

“For a lot of small agencies, you don’t deal with it until it smacks you in the face,” Prescher said. “This is our first attempt as a community to do something proactively.”

While they didn’t have a good understanding of what a wellness program could look like in their community, Prescher said everyone wanted to participate and learn more. They formed a wellness team representing all city departments to begin moving forward.

Getting on board

At the outset, each community participated in the critical first step: gathering city leaders for a conversation about what it means to be an organization that supports mental health.

“One of my biggest takeaways was how committed all of the department heads seemed to be in regard to mental health for all their employees and how willing they are to normalize the conversation,” Setter said, reflecting on the pilot program participants.

The City of Chaska has a citywide employee wellness program that was initiated within the police department more than a decade ago, according to Denise Beebe, senior city clerk. Even with an established program, Chaska’s BeWell Committee welcomed the opportunity to improve and evaluate the city’s offerings.

“Our wellness program has never been a static thing,” she said. “We are always changing with the different ideas that are coming in by looking at the needs of our employees and what is happening in the larger context.”

In Moorhead, the police department began its own initial wellness programming in 2008, starting with a peer assistance model where employees were trained to provide debriefs after major incidents, according to Moorhead Police Captain Deric Swenson. This eventually grew into the agency’s expanded wellness program, which today includes an in-house counselor. While Moorhead started this process on its own, Swenson said he’s glad that the action model provides guidance to communities that are now exploring these programs.

“It’s such an important topic that has not been a priority for many departments until now and there are so many vendors selling a product around wellness,” Swenson said. “The League is offering some standards and base knowledge to help communities as they navigate this.”

Assessing employee needs

After the wellness team is established, the model encourages cities to survey employees to inform the development of the community’s wellness strategy. For the pilot program, the League helped facilitate these surveys with questions around the employee’s own mental health and their perceptions of the organizational culture. Understanding employees’ current experiences and needs gives communities the data they need to create effective programs and evaluate progress.

In Chaska, the survey process was eye-opening and helped to identify key gaps in the wellness program.

“One of the things we realized through this process is that we are so focused on trying to reach employees with these benefits, but we aren’t getting to the rest of the family,” Beebe said.

An immediate outcome of this work in Chaska is greater communication to families about benefits and resources, like the city’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Often, families are the first to realize a loved one is struggling and needs access to resources, Setter said.

Beebe said the survey also gave the Chaska BeWell Committee the data it needs to gain support from various administration representatives and department heads for new initiatives.

Wellness initiatives range from no or low-cost team-building efforts, like Chaska’s “Stop the Clock” program, to major investments, like professional counseling and psychiatric services. Surveying employees helps communities understand what would be the most impactful before they invest, Setter said.

Prioritizing public safety

Many wellness programs are citywide, as in Madelia and Chaska, offering programming and benefits throughout the organization to support the well-being of employees. But it’s also critical to acknowledge the unique needs of employees in public safety roles.

“Wellness has been a part of workplace culture for a long time in many organizations,” Setter acknowledged. “But to really focus on the issues that public safety personnel struggle with is new and needs to be approached differently than a citywide program.”

That was the case in Moorhead, Swenson said. The police department found itself advising and training the city’s EAP provider to help prepare them for the types of issues and traumas first responders face.

“When you have a citywide program, that includes employees who work in public works and finance, they aren’t looking at the same traumas and situations that law enforcement is dealing with,” he said.

But how we define trauma and stress varies from individual to individual, Swenson added. It’s important to adapt and communicate with employees about the types of support they need.

Though Madelia is a smaller community, it was clear to City Administrator Christine Fischer that the city should take a holistic approach to employee wellness. Many employees have dual roles serving the community in the street department, while volunteering part time with the fire department, Fischer said.

“We need to make sure that these people are OK and that they have all the resources that they need to know that we are here for them,” she said. “Some of the things that we see are not great, but we’re here for a purpose to protect the community. We need to look at the whole picture.”

While the model can be applied to both city-wide and agency-specific wellness programs, many of the actionable steps in the model focus on gaining input from public safety employees to ensure wellness programs are relevant and useful.

Ready for action

In Madelia, the city is taking steps to implement new wellness initiatives for employees based on feedback in the survey, including a new, monthly all-staff lunch. The goal of the program is to build camaraderie and support employee relationships while the city explores more comprehensive offerings, like an on-duty fitness area or expanded benefits.

As the pilot program continues, the cities will follow the final steps of the process by putting wellness plans into action and evaluating their success.

Taking their learnings from this process, Setter and Gourlay revised the model in late 2023 to reflect feedback from participants and observations from facilitating. A key takeaway: connecting wellness to purpose.

“Having a strong sense of purpose builds resilience. And we know from our surveys in the pilot program that employees feel deeply connected to their purpose,” Setter said. “That’s why one of the first steps in our model is finding ways to help keep employees focused on their mission because research shows that having a strong sense of purpose increases well-being.”

For communities interested in applying the model to form or update their wellness programs, the Action Guide to Support Public Safety Mental Wellness is available at lmc.org/ActionGuide.

Cali Torell is account manager/lead writer for Goff Public.