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At the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), managing Canada’s largest airport is a high-pressure operation. Each year we serve more than 35 million passengers through Toronto Pearson International Airport, the busiest airport in Canada and fifth-most-connected mega-hub in the world. Getting them to their destinations safely is job one. It’s also a complex undertaking that depends on our partners and relies upon our 1,700 workers — 70% of whom are onsite shift workers — feeling their best physically, mentally and emotionally.
Supporting the well-being of our employees is critical to anticipating and exceeding passenger needs, one of the core ways the GTAA is creating a next-generation airport and putting the joy back into travel. By empowering our people to optimize their health, we’re empowering them to meet the demands of their day.
Supporting the Well-being of a Diverse and Dispersed Workforce
Supporting the whole person starts with appreciating the diversity of our people and their roles.
Recent graduates work alongside employees preparing for retirement. We have both onsite and hybrid employees working across our 4,600-acre campus. We have employees working at desks and frontline operational employees who have limited access to computers during their shifts. Roles span a wide range of functions from Baggage Services to Finance.
We’re committed to helping all employees create healthy habits that build resiliency and bring more balance into their daily lives. Because our workforce is so diverse, our approach to wellness needs to be customizable.
Evolving Mental Health Support to Focus on Preventive Solutions
When reviewing how to improve our support for employee well-being, we identified opportunities to establish a more supportive culture around mental health and provide additional preventive support.
Last fall, we adopted Calm as a preventive solution, available to all 1,600 employees and their families, to help reduce or mitigate stress and anxiousness and build resilience.
Bringing Wellness to the Palms of Our Employees’ Hands
When it came to selecting a tool, we wanted to think out of the box about supporting our unique operational frontline onsite and hybrid populations. In particular, our onsite airport employees don’t always have consistent access to wellness rooms or quiet spaces.
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Calm enabled us to put wellness in the palms of their hands. Our employees can take a wellness break while walking or sitting anywhere in the airport. They can plug in their headset and close their eyes for a moment to breathe, listen to a meditation, or take a mental health break and de-stress.
Calm met all our significant criteria for a benefits tool, including:
- Accessibility. To support our wide demographic ranges, we needed a solution that’s simple to access and use.
- Diversity and inclusion. We needed a solution that all employees can personally relate to.
- Variety. It was important to let people “choose their own adventure” and personalize their experience. With Calm, employees can select what they want to do based on where they are on their unique wellness journey.
- Reporting and tracking. Calm allows us to view how many of our employees have signed up, how many are engaging with the app, and which content is used most. We use this information to develop our wellness programming and communication strategy.
- Appeal. We needed a solution that would draw people to it.
- Cost-effectiveness. Coming out of the pandemic, cost was also a factor.
Hands-on Roadshow to Meet Employees Where They Are
Communicating to employees about new wellness perks is always a challenge, but having a large, dispersed population without consistent computer access presents another layer of complexity.
To reach our frontline operational employees, who make up approximately 70% of our workforce, we went to where they work. We launched a wellness roadshow and visited locations across our 4,600-acre airport campus in partnership with our DEI and wellness advisory teams. We shared DEI programs and wellness resources and launched the Calm app, helping employees sign up on the spot. On location, we could tailor the introduction of Calm to the specific employee audience, which really helped us connect with them and make an impact.
Engagement with Calm Exceeds Expectations
Our initial goal was to get 30% of our employees to sign up for Calm in the first month. Not only did we surpass that goal by registering 38% of employees, but we currently have 50.8% of employees signed up, with more than 72.6% engaging daily with the tool. High enrollment among our onsite workers was largely due to our interactive airport roadshow featuring the Calm app. Calm’s well-known brand and content narrated by familiar celebrity voices were hooks that enticed our employees to engage with the benefit.
Calm Business has played an integral preventive role in supporting our employees’ mental health, whether it’s helping them take a virtual wellness break while working in a fast-paced airport environment or wind down and get a good night’s sleep.
For an extended version of this case study, visit business.calm.com.
