At our recent BWN lunch with Jan Tinetti, we heard from BWN committee member Rachael Nunn that her workplace, Port of Tauranga, had partnered with Dignity in March.

Dignity is an organisation that works to increase accessibility to period products in both workplaces and also community organisations.

Turns out, Dignity is just one project that Port of Tauranga has introduced, as part of its Ship Shape workplace wellness programme – an initiative for which they have recently achieved Silver Accreditation for through Toi Te Ora’s WorkWell (its mantra is working better through wellbeing).

We asked Rachael some quick-fire questions to better understand how the Port is supporting its team, especially women, in the workplace.

Tell us about your partnership with Dignity: How does it work?

Basically, in the workplace it’s a buy one, give one initiative. This means for each box of sanitary items that our business buys, Dignity match the equivalent number of boxes and supply them to youth and community groups throughout New Zealand.

For our staff, this achieves three things: 1) raising awareness, 2) free access to period products and 3) discounts on period products such as Oi cups, BeYou patches and AWWA Period Proof underwear.

Dignity have heaps of cool info on their website if people want to know more.

What spearheaded this idea?

Following the period products in schools initiative, we were interested to find out more about how to contribute to the idea of ‘Making periods shame free’.

We also subscribe to YWCA and this is where we initially heard of the #shamefreeperiods campaign. As a result, we did some research and reached out with Dignity to start our partnership.

What is some feedback you’ve had about working with Dignity?

Dignity is a fantastic organisation to work alongside. [Founders] Miranda and Anika are passionate and committed. We receive Impact reports, which are transparent and effective in explaining why this partnership is so worthwhile and we’re proud to be a part of the movement to champion period equity in New Zealand.  

Your partnership is part of your Ship Shape wellness programme – tell me about how this started:

We started Ship Shape back in 2018 – although, it wasn’t named Ship Shape back then (we had a competition to name our new wellbeing programme, and Ship Shape was selected out of a host of different name options).

Ship Shape’s vision is to facilitate “the coming together of our company to encourage and support our staff to make healthy decisions, both at work and at home.”

We do this through a range of exciting initiatives at work, which are implemented with the goal of educating and supporting our people and their families to achieve a happy and healthy lifestyle.

Some of our biggest initiatives to date include partaking in events such as Steptember, Pink Ribbon fundraisers, blood donations, and Movemeber. We’ve had Mike King and Nigela Latta speak to staff, we sponsor sports teams and yoga, and we’ve held some great competitions like darts, table tennis, growing vegetables and puzzles.

How have these initiatives supported staff wellbeing? What is some of the feedback you have got about it?

Our Ship Shape Committee (made up of staff volunteers from across the organisation) work hard to ensure we’re engaging in initiatives which encourage participation from as many people as possible. This means that we do a mix of initiatives which promote physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing and social wellbeing, while also ensuring these initiatives can be participated in across a number of different mediums (e.g. online, at home, at work, after work etc.).

The biggest way in which we encourage staff wellbeing is through education. We send out weekly newsletters with all sorts of information – from healthy recipes, to wellbeing articles and everything in-between. While the events/challenges we host at work encourage participation at the time, lots of the information we send out gets taken home and used in our everyday lives.

We love hearing staff feedback – in fact, we actively encourage it through channels like our newsletters, committee members and suggestion boxes. Lots of the initiatives we run come from staff suggestions and we are always asking for inspiration.

Ship Shape is essentially run by staff, for staff, so it’s crucial we listen to what our colleagues want to see. As part of our framework, we also run annual staff surveys and the feedback from this informs how we plan our next year of initiatives.

In particular, our work-time massages have been quite a hit – here’s some of our staff comments:

“Just want to say that the massage was amazing! Haven’t had one in about 10-15 years so it was an extra special treat to spend my lunchtime being pampered. My poor body has been feeling all sorts of niggles whilst I limp about. Definitely a lovely Friday treat.”

“A huge thankyou from my neck, shoulders, back and peaceful mind.  Ahhhhhhhh”

“I had my first one with Steffi on her last visit just for the 12 minutes and sincerely wish I’d taken the longer one. Steffi is on another level. I enjoyed it at the time, but could also feel benefits afterwards.”

When it comes to your WorkWell accreditation, what do you need to do to achieve your silver status? What does this mean?

Being registered with WorkWell means that we get support from a workplace advisor who helps us to develop and implement an effective and sustainable workplace wellbeing programme.

In May this year, Ship Shape was awarded silver accreditation under the WorkWell framework. Silver Accreditation shows that our workplace is maintaining and strengthening its activities and starting to integrate wellbeing as business as usual. We’re now working towards our Gold Accreditation, which should take 12-18 months.

We worked hard to achieve silver status, and have to provide lots of evidence to prove that we’re meeting the requirements of the accreditation.

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