4 Practical Ways To Promote Wellbeing At Work

Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything for better or worse. -Simon Sinek

A person spends 9-10 hours of his day at his workplace. Regardless of the role, he needs a well-built infrastructure and policies that promote a wellness culture at the workplace.

It will motivate him to improve his productivity and stress less about his health. Every organization must provide a healthy working environment and promote employee health and wellness. Many businesses see this as an opportunity for growth and grab it for the better.

Today, managers need to up their game in employee wellness more than people ever demanded earlier because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

If you are looking for ways to enhance the employee experience and wellness strategies, this post is for you. This article mentions some ways that can help you promote employee wellbeing in the workplace.

Employee wellbeing and health

When you hire a worker in your firm, it becomes your responsibility to provide them with a good infrastructure. An organization must consider the employee’s mental and physical health inside the workplace.

A healthy employee is full of energy, performs well individually and becomes a good team player.

By promoting wellness in the workplace, a manager ensures clean restrooms, pantries, regular de-stressing activities, encouraging healthy communications, etc.

The little things that many businesses ignore because they think it will cost them extra money is essential to ensure business growth.

Scroll down to find out better about how you can maintain wellness for your workers in the workplace.

1. Encourage fitness

As an organization, you should encourage employee wellbeing and fitness. You can arrange for an awareness program for employees to understand the benefits of exercise, staying fit and also pave the ways to follow a fitness routine.

If you are a big organization, you can introduce an indoor gym for the employees who can use it before or after work. If you are at the growing stage, you can club with gyms, spas, and yoga centers.

Provide paid membership to your employees and encourage them to use the hamper. Motivate and educate the employees on the benefits of healthy eating.

Companies like Microsoft fund their employees to attend full-time fitness centers. Physical health is directly related to employee productivity.

2. Replace the junk with healthy snacks at the office

It is one of the safest ways to introduce a wellness culture in your organization. However, it is tough to transit through it.

So, for a start, you can begin by letting your employees know about the advantages of eating healthy and how junk food affects their health and overall performance. Later, you can send out survey links to each employee and find their favorite healthy snack options.

If your office has donuts for breakfast, the employees will binge eat them every day and gradually fall sick. On the other hand, some employees will bring healthy food from home, increasing their workload at home.

So, it is best to replace sodas with water and junk food with healthy snacks that are good for your brain like protein bars, granola bars, etc. It may seem a lot of task at first, but the benefits you reap after promoting a healthy work culture will make it all worth it.

3. Encourage connections and preparedness

A survey conducted by an organization revealed that people who have multiple connections at work stay happy and productive.

It would help if you organized office activities that encourage communication among people. When your employees are friends with each other, or at the least communicate with each other, they are more likely to stay happy and relaxed.

Another critical aspect of promoting wellness is encouraging your employees to stay prepared for the future.

Neuroscientists worldwide suggest that our brain is more likely to panic and make critical mistakes in stressful situations.

Therefore, it is essential to think of the future and understand that there will be good and bad days. Visualizing a problem helps the mind stay prepared for it.

4. Ensure employees have access to clean washrooms

Regardless of the organization’s size and field of work, you should ensure your workers’ wellbeing by providing clean washrooms.

You should hire someone to clean the bathrooms after every few hours. Also, assign timely duties to ensure that the soap dispensers have soap in them, the industrial paper towels are stocked up, and the bathroom is always smelling fresh.

An untidy and smelly washroom is a big turn-down for workers. Also, foul odor and germs coming out from an unclean bathroom make the workers sick and increase the rate of absenteeism in the organization.

So, to start with employee wellness, you should ensure clean desks, washrooms, pantry, and accessible hygiene products.

Benefits of promoting a wellness culture in an organization?

You may not see the results instantly, but after a few weeks of investing in promoting a wellness routine in your office, you will notice that your employees have improved performance and consistency.

It will offer the following advantages to the business:

• Decrease in employee health claims: Many organizations that offer active wellness programs have seen a decline in employee claims related to health and medical services. It helps save a lot of money.
• Less Absenteeism: Workers who stay healthy take fewer leaves from the office. It results in higher productivity and motivates other workers to follow a healthy regime.
• Greater job retention: When you offer a tidy working place, clean washrooms, healthy food, mental wellness programs, and memberships for physical wellness, your employees stay happy. They are less likely to change their job because of these reasons. By taking care of employees’ mental, emotional, and physical well-being, they will see it as an incentive to stay in the company and prove fruitful to the organization 

Wrapping it all up

Encouraging a healthy working environment for workers’ wellbeing proves beneficial for the organization in the long run.

A person who is happy at work and has a way to release stress tends to retain the job because he finds enough incentives to stay at the existing company.

Also, many companies fund external wellness programs for their employees but do not bother taking care of the in-house infrastructure such as pantries and washrooms.

The least a worker requires is a clean and fresh-smelling bathroom. They are small yet vital things that every manager should consider.