It’s no secret the quality of your employees’ physical and mental health directly influences their happiness, performance, and work attendance. For this reason, it’s critical that employers work on workplace wellness strategies to build a responsive and productive workforce.
Today, some 75% of companies include the health status of their employees as a primary part of their risk management strategies. Moreover, many organizations also pursue wellness strategies and programs to make this idea a crucial part of their culture.
This article will discuss everything you need to know about the most effective wellness and health strategies for your work environment. Plus, we’ll also take a look at how to implement these policies within your organization.
What are Health and Wellness Strategies?
Wellness is a process of change and growth. It involves being aware of one’s health, and making intentional choices accordingly to make your life more fulfilling. In a dynamic work environment, the wellness of employees plays a significant part in this fulfillment. For instance, for an employee to perform well, their employer needs to make their health a priority. Employee wellness programs are an easy way to boost employees morale and improve performance.
Ideally, employers should work to create a workplace environment that improves the well-being and health of every individual. All the people working in an organization should feel supported in taking care of their social, physical, and mental health.
Although most organizations provide medical benefits, only a few companies promote holistic wellness strategies. Many employers assume wellness programs are expensive and hard to implement. But that’s frequently not the case as their advantages outweigh the costs.
Connection Between Wellness and Employee Productivity
An average employee is productive for only 3 hours a day in an ordinary working world. It’s an alarming statistic, but is quite significant for businesses in boosting employee performance and increasing profitability.
There are many reasons behind this poor employee engagement; the most common being stress.
Always-On: A failing technique
Do you believe in the “Always On” idea? It revolves around long commutes, back-to-back meetings, and cumbersome email marathons that keep employees on their toes all the time. Moreover, rapid technology changes and work requirements add to stress levels and keep employees alert at all times.
Unfortunately, this does more bad than good. Such an intense work environment leads to high levels of anxiety, stress, physical sickness, and overall frustration in employees. These physical and mental health detriments harm employee productivity, which doesn’t bode well for the organization either.
Alternatively, companies that implement proper wellness strategies often witness a significant increase in employee engagement. This is because such programs improve satisfaction and motivation at work. This then leads to happier and more efficient employees.
Best Company Health and Wellness Strategies
While the right wellness strategy varies for every organization, here are some things you can include in your plan to increase employee engagement:
Encourage Physical Activity
Physical activities help burn calories and improve cardiovascular health that leads to better focus, learning, and attention at work. While gyms at work are great to burn some sweat, companies often incorporate physical challenges, weight-loss competitions, and field days to help improve the fitness of their people.
Movement during working hours is great for staying physically fit and positively affects the mental state of an employee.
Build Social Wellness
Employees with a social circle at work are more productive and feel healthy. On the other hand, lonely workers are more stressed, less engaged, and more likely to quit.
If you want to see your employees happy, it is crucial to build a wellness strategy that focuses on improving healthy relations through social activities and celebrations. These efforts can make employees feel valued, and encourages them to give back to the company through better performance.
Practice Instrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
As part of your wellness strategy to accelerate employee productivity, practice more incentives and friendly competition. By giving your employees rewards for achieving specific goals, you can help employees hit all work objectives easily and encourage progress.
To make your company’s wellness strategies successful, ensure the participation of multi-level leadership. For instance, the persuasive involvement of leaders at high positions in a wellness program builds a vibrant and healthy culture at work. Moreover, it creates quality results for employee productivity.
Implementing Health and Wellness Strategies at Work
A well-curated health and wellness strategy aims to help employees lead healthy lives. It should support their financial, physical, and mental health. This, in turn, will help increase employee engagement, reduce turnover and keep your employees motivated in the long run. All in all, these strategies should also help produce better health outcomes for the people that are so critical to your organization.
How to Create a Wellness Program for Your Workplace
Here are a few steps you should take to curate effective wellness strategies for your office environment:
- Start by conducting employee surveys and health assessments to evaluate the needs and interests of your employees.
- Once you have the results, get the support of management and explain the potential value of a health and wellness strategy.
- As an employer, you can establish a committee that works towards building and maintaining a culture of wellness in your company.
- The goal of a wellness program should revolve around a specific objective. For instance, some companies aim to improve their employees’ health to reduce costs on health care. Similarly, many organizations aim to increase employee retention and reduce absenteeism by enhancing productivity and interest in work.
- To prevent any delays in executing the program, the committee should establish a budget plan. It should include all costs related to strategy design, marketing, and incentives.
- Once everything is done, create the strategy and then communicate the program to the employees.
- Finally, evaluate its success and make sure to update it every year!
The Takeaway
No workplace can flourish without a dose of engagement and motivation. So, it is imperative to create a workplace culture that looks after its employees’ physical health and helps them lead a stress-less life.
Though an organization’s wellness strategies may require efforts to run, they also help the employees make quick and correct decisions for their work, colleagues, and even themselves. Above all, these policies create a sense of self-value amongst employees which helps them thrive in all fields of life.
