Building a Health-Focused Workplace: Strategies for Success
A healthy workplace environment improves morale, productivity and wellness. Employers have a responsibility to implement effective health and wellness strategies. If you need help figuring out where to start or want to enhance your strategy, we have some tips on promoting health at work.
What are your employee wellness goals?
As a business owner or manager, you likely have personal and assigned goals you want your team to achieve. These goals could be raising sales, reaching a benchmark, targeting a new market, earning a certificate and plenty more. But how do you make those happen? How do you inspire your team towards these achievements? You must look behind the main goal and understand how best to support your employees’ unique needs to enable them to reach business goals.
Explore employee wellness. What would your employees benefit from in terms of workplace health? To achieve big-picture goals, each individual should be well taken care of. Your employee wellness goals could focus on improving day-to-day work, physical and mental health, feelings of appreciation or work-life balance.
How do you plan on reaching a healthy workplace environment?
Whether you’re starting a new business or an established organization, workplace health strategies can always be a part of your employee engagement plan. Once you’ve achieved your goals, it’s time to create new ones! You should be constantly reaching for the next level to create the ultimate healthy workplace environment.
Workplace health strategies
1. Understand how to define health
Promoting health at work isn’t just about avoiding injuries, illnesses and diseases. It’s about cultivating a workplace and culture that enables your employees to take care of their whole health. That might look like considering how you can impact your employees’ work-life balance, supporting their mental health or enabling their physical health.
2. Facilitate work-life balance
The healthiest employees are able to achieve an ideal work-life balance. This means employees should feel they have the time (and boundaries) to spend time with family, attend appointments, and live outside of work.
3. Have the option for physical activity
Offer opportunities for your team to participate in regular physical activity. It could be lunchtime yoga seminars, a gym, encouraging meetings during walks, or offering a Personal Wellness Spending Account that could support an investment like a treadmill desk. Physical activity releases endorphins and helps with overall health.
4. Build on social wellness
Separate departments and job titles can feel polarizing. Offering social activities like snack breaks, lunchtime trivia, or a wellness-focused webinar could help inspire social connections and break down barriers. This can help build a community, which is essential to a healthy workplace environment.
5. Create employee-centric schedules
Employees make the business go ’round. Try to establish routines and schedules that employees resonate with. It could look like many things: allowing for flex time to give employees the time they need to care for their families, a four-day workweek or alternating Friday afternoons off. If you’re interested in implementing an altered schedule but you’re still determining what your employees would like the most, ask them! An employee survey could help you understand their unique needs.
6. Offer training on time management and stress reduction
Time management applies to working productively during work hours, so vacations, weekends and evenings are left undisturbed. At the same time, work on stress reduction tactics with your team so burnout and tension are avoided. There are plenty of ways to address stress by offering a comprehensive group benefits plan, which could include coverage for massage, counsellors, and more.
7. Communicate available benefits
When you choose group benefits for your business, make sure you and your team understand everything available to them. Encourage everyone to become familiar with their benefits and use them as much as possible.
8. Inspire other managers
If you’re a decision-maker in one department, share your efforts to improve employee wellness to inspire managers in other departments. Sharing with others, brainstorming ideas and developing new exciting plans for healthy competition and connection are great ways to get your whole organization involved.
What impact might these strategies have on your workplace?
After taking steps to enhance wellness in your workplace, you might find that employees will be more engaged with their work and workplace as they feel valued and taken care of. They’ll have the energy and loyalty to do their best work and increase company performance.
Over time, with investment in your strategy, you’ll build a reputation as the kind of workplace people want to work in. Quality talent will be more likely to seek out the company, and existing talent will be more likely to stay. It can reduce acquisition costs and build a community of like-minded employees who can get to know each other better and learn together.
Employees will be less likely to take unexpected time off of work if they have the ability to take care of their mental and physical wellness.
Group health benefits are another great way to encourage employee wellness
There are many benefits to pursuing better and better mental and physical health for your employees. Support your team’s overall health and wellness with comprehensive group health benefits. A member of our team is happy to help you design the right plan to fit your employees’ needs at a cost that’s sustainable for your business.