Employee wellness has never been more important. Work-related stress, depression, and anxiety account for 44% of work-related ill health and 57% of working days lost in the tax year. It’s the same story across the western world.
Taking care of any company means taking care of the people who make it run: its employees. In the USA, workplace wellness programmes save employers an average of $5.82 per dollar spent by lowering absentee counts and costs. Here are 5 employee wellness strategies that work.
Think About The Physical Environment
Countless studies have shown that working environments have a bearing on everything from employee job satisfaction to personal motivation and co-worker interaction patterns. Of course, not everyone can afford to hire a huge office space, but what private office space London based can provide your employees with is a more secluded work environment with easy access to many facilities in and around the city.
When it comes to office space, it’s all about balance. Open-plan offices are great for encouraging productivity and interaction, but you still need to make sure employees have an area they can retreat to when they need privacy, quiet, or solitude.
Free Fresh Fruit
Arranging regular fruit deliveries to communal office spaces is a great way of encouraging healthy eating and employee interaction in the office setting. Some companies have even started including breakfast in their remuneration package. As well as helping employees make the right dietary choices, this enables workers to break bread together first thing in the working day and establish a healthy informal line of communication. Not to mention helping them turn up on time for their free meal!
Facilitate Healthy Travel
As an employer with a social conscience, it’s your duty to promote sustainable transportation wherever possible. If there are walking and cycling schemes in your locality, these are worth investigating; sometimes, there are government incentives to help you implement these changes in your business. Creating a space for employees to leave their bikes safely is the most important thing you can do. Beyond this, helping them to invest in bikes, offering advice on how to secure them, and even offering changing facilities can go a long way towards increasing uptake.
Encouraging employees to switch to pedestrian-powered modes of transport is not only about keeping them more physically active and cutting down your company’s carbon footprint, but it’s also about putting workers back in control of their own journey and reducing the stress of the morning commute. A final benefit of healthy travel is that many employers find lateness becomes less of a problem when employees are walking and cycling into work. During rush hour in most cities, bicycles and pedestrians will move more quickly than cars.
Promote Physical Activity
Keeping employees active can make a major difference in terms of productivity. At the more radical end of the spectrum, US-based TotalWellness explains the wide-ranging benefits of encouraging their employees to exercise for 30 minutes every day on company time: stress relief, social connection, better energy levels, productivity and disease prevention. You could enforce some more simple measures in the office: regular walking breaks and enforced periods of standing away from the desk are two popular options. Beyond this, you should look to promote the benefits of exercise outside of work. Negotiating a corporate gym discount and advertising this throughout the office is probably the most effective way of going about this.
Healthy Body, Healthy Mind, Healthy Workplace
Employee wellness strategies work when they target the physical and mental causes of employee stress together. By investing in schemes that reduce the incidence of both these things, employers will save money in the long run. More to the point, they’ll get to experience all the benefits of working in a more positive, productive and co-operative working environment where employees feel valued.