Tec wins top workplace wellness award in Mexico

Tecnológico de Monterrey has won the top workplace wellness award from Workplace Wellness Council Mexico (WWCM), an organization that has been promoting healthy work environments in the country for 18 years.  

The ceremony was held on April 28 at the Cancer Center in Mexico City, and it brought together leading companies and institutions in workplace wellness. 

This award, known as the Wellness Model, is the highest recognition on an eight-stage scale used by the WWCM to assess how committed organizations are to the health and wellbeing of their employees.  

“For the Tec, it has been a watershed moment,” said Mario Rangel Martínez, National Coordinator of Health, Safety & Environment. 

“This recognition tells us that we’re going beyond basic compliance.” 

To get there, institutions must demonstrate concrete progress in areas such as training, internal communication, social support, work-life balance, and risk prevention in the workplace.  

This is the third time that Tec has participated in the awards, and the first time that it has won the top award. 

“We began in the development phase, then the growth phase, and we’re now fully consolidated. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but this tells us that we’re on the right track,” Rangel said. 

The award is the result of three years of continuous work involving multiple areas, led by the Vice Presidency for Inclusion, Integrity, and Compliance and the Health and Safety Directorate, in collaboration with the Comprehensive Wellbeing for Staff and Talent team. 

One of the key factors in the evaluation was the implementation of NOM-035, the official Mexican standard designed to identify and prevent psychosocial risk factors at work, such as stress, excessive workload, or hostile work environments.   

Although the standard took effect in 2019, this marked the first time the Tec has implemented it uniformly across all its campuses and entities nationwide.  

More than 12,000 Education Group staff and faculty participated.  

Although the Tec’s result exceeded the national average, Rangel admitted that “There are issues we need to address.” The next cycle will assess how consistently and effectively these measures are implemented. 

Rangel, who is an occupational health specialist, explained that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way institutions think about their employees’ wellbeing.  

Even though four years have passed, its effects on the workplace are still visible.  

“Post-pandemic, mental health has taken center stage, making the prevention of psychosocial risks more critical than ever,” he said. 

Against this background, the Tec began coordinating previously isolated initiatives — a step WWCM had suggested since their initial involvement in the awards.  

WWCM evaluated and recognized the Tec’s national ecosystem, which includes the My Wellbeing program, teacher training by the Center for Faculty Development and Educational Innovation, and the TQueremos emotional counseling helpline. 

The Tec shares this top award with organizations such as 3M Mexico, PepsiCo Mexico, Scotiabank, Ternium, Monex Grupo Financiero, Softtek and Medtronic, to name but a few. 

According to Rangel, one of the most significant aspects of the recognition is what it represents for educational institutions as a whole. Unlike the private sector, universities and technological institutes are often overlooked as employers with formal occupational health obligations toward their staff. 

“As an academic institution, people don’t often view us as a company as such, but we’re an educational enterprise,” Rangel pointed out. 

With nearly 85 years of national presence, the Tec stands as Mexico’s pioneering higher education institution in this field. 

According to Rangel, the next step is to create a formal occupational health program that directly addresses employees’ physical and mental wellbeing — a standard corporate practice that educational institutions have been slow to adopt.  

The goal, he said, is to establish a permanent department dedicated to employee wellbeing, with its own structure, resources, and continuity, consolidating what this recognition already demonstrates: that caring for people isn’t just a program, but a culture.