The average American spends 8.5 hours per day at work during the weekdays. Over the weekend, 5.4 hours per day are spent in the office. But time spent at work doesn’t automatically translate to productivity. 70 percent of U.S. workers don’t reach their full potential, while 52 percent aren’t engaged at all.
Working with employees that are emotionally disconnected from your company can undermine your interests as a business. Thankfully, there are simple things you can do to dramatically boost engagement and morale in your staff. One of them is to prioritize workplace well being.
In this comprehensive guide, we outline some of the ways you can boost workplace wellness and keep your employees happy and productive.
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What Does Workplace Wellbeing Entail?
According to the ILO, workplace wellbeing relates to every aspect of working life. These include the quality of the physical working environment and its safety. It also involves how employees feel about their job, their environment, work organization, and climate at work.
The primary aim of instituting workplace health is to complement OSHA measures in making sure workers remain healthy, safe, engaged, and satisfied at work. The well-being of your staff is essential in determining your company’s long-term effectiveness. That’s because there’s a direct correlation between the general well-being of a workforce and productivity levels.
Failing to recognize and promote employee wellness can give rise to such workplace problems as stress, conflict, bullying, drug abuse, and a host of mental health disorders.
Keeping your employees healthy and happy is something you can achieve if you set your heart on it. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
1. Institute Flexible Working Hours
The modern employee appreciates a job that enables them to maintain a stable work/life balance. Workplaces that have tight schedules with hardly any breaks only create a toxic working environment. Employees remain miserable, and the impact on productivity is negative.
The solution is to let employees find the perfect balance between their work and other priorities in their lives. That means offering flexible work hours so they can devolve time to other pursuits besides work. You can also provide work from home options.
Flexibility in work hours gives your employees the freedom to person optimally. It communicates that you trust your employees to deliver results.
2. Incentivize Fitness
You want a healthy and fit staff, but lecturing them about wellness may not inspire them to take action. What you need to do is to get the team excited about their wellbeing by making health and fitness enjoyable.
For instance, you can start to offer yoga lessons, give discounts to gym memberships, or organize fitness challenges in the office. Such actions serve to foster employee relations while boosting employee health.
Sure, you’ll probably spend some money incentivizing fitness, but the gains are well worth it. With a healthy staff, you spend less on healthcare costs, employee absenteeism decreases, and overall productivity soars.
3. Emphasize Healthy Eating
What kind of food do you keep in the pantry? Start to provide healthy snacks, such as oatmeal, protein bars, and fruit. You can also offer coffee, tea, and hot water.
Some companies even provide healthy breakfast or lunch options. When you provide your workers with the appropriate nourishment and encourage them to adopt healthier eating habits, you give them the opportunity to stay focused and productive all day.
4. Encourage Standing Desks
Many office workers spend a lot of time sitting at their desks. This sedentary lifestyle is a threat to their overall well-being. In fact, spending most of your day sitting can undo the benefits of any exercise you do in the morning, putting you at increased risk of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and early death.
A sure way to offset the danger posed by sitting for extended periods is standing. When you work while standing, you’re burning energy since your back, core, and leg muscles must tense to maintain balance.
5. Provide Protective Gear
Some workplaces, such as warehouses and construction sites, present hazards that workers need to be aware of at all times. Sharp edges, chemicals, falling objects, and noise are just some of them.
As an employer, you need to protect your workers from workplace hazards by offering protective gear. This gear may include gloves, eye and foot protection, protective hearing devices, respirators, full bodysuits, and hard hats.
Failure to provide suitable personal protective equipment (PPE) not only exposes your workers to danger but also attracts hefty penalties by OSHA.
Thankfully, you can easily find appropriate PPE online. Reliable sites like OTT Safety Gear offer great deals on protective gear.
6. Don’t Neglect Mental Health
Interest in mental health has increased considerably in recent years. Gone are the days when mental health problems at the workplace were stigmatized. Companies are taking the responsibility to foster an atmosphere of openness when it comes to mental health issues.
Encourage your employees to speak openly about such issues as stress and personal challenges they may be going through. Consider hiring someone in your HR team who is knowledgeable in dealing with issues relating to mental health.
Consider providing mental health awareness programs, as well as counseling to counter depression at the workplace. Provide other mental health options so people who need help can access something that works for them.
Keep Your Workplace Healthy for Your Staff
Every employee wants to work in a workplace that fosters their health. Fortunately, achieving peak workplace wellbeing doesn’t need to be unnecessarily difficult or expensive.
Implementing the suggestions we’ve recommended in this article can help keep everyone in your working environment healthy. Would you like to read more content on how to improve your office? Please keep visiting our blog.
Also read: The Many Advantages of System Performance Monitoring
