Mental Health Awareness Week 2023
April 26 2021
Read morePromoting health and wellbeing in the workplace is sometimes low down on a business owner’s priorities. This is despite several big companies, such as Google and Facebook, investing a lot of resources into health and wellbeing programs.
You may think such initiatives won’t benefit small businesses and would be too expensive to implement.
You’d be wrong. Let’s see why it is both affordable and hugely beneficial to implement health and wellbeing initiatives in the workplace.
So what is wellbeing and why is it important? The term is quite broad, so we should look at it from an employer or HR perspective. It can cover an employee’s:
All of these can affect employee performance, and any might be the focus of measures to promote health and wellbeing at work.
The physical definition is straightforward. This is ensuring to the best of your ability that an employee can be fit and healthy.
Ensuring your employees are mentally healthy is also essential, defining this is a bit more difficult than physical health but should still be assessed.
Alongside health, wellbeing includes job satisfaction and progression. An employee should be engaged with the business and feel like they can contribute.
Promoting health and wellbeing in the workplace has several benefits for you and your business. Making sure your employees are happier and healthier will result in fewer absences because of sickness or burnout.
While it costs money to implement studies have shown that employee wellbeing programs pay back their investment. It is obviously harder to quantify than other initiatives, but you can keep track of the gains in team performance and wellbeing.
The biggest benefits of investing in employee health and wellbeing programmes are:
While 8/10 of UK organisations have no dedicated ‘wellbeing strategy’ in place, more than half have at least one wellbeing benefit in place—showing that wellbeing is a common goal for HR departments.
There are some clear benefits of health promotion in the workplace, so let’s take a look at some health and wellbeing at work ideas.
Having a health and wellbeing strategy is essential to nurturing wellbeing. Here we will describe ways to contribute to an environment that promotes wellbeing and ideas for health and wellbeing activities at work.
Health and don’t have to be difficult or massively costly, a lot of these ideas are very easy to implement at a minimal cost.
Improve workplace health with this active take on traditionally very sedentary work processes. Adding an element of physical activity to things such as meetings or sitting at desks will allow better employee health and productivity.
Having a standing desk, or even something more extreme like a Deskercise bike, will allow the work day to be more active. This will allow your employees to feel more refreshed and improve their health.
Having a focused and balanced work routine is essential for productivity. Research shows that when people are constantly picking up their phone, checking their emails and jumping from task to task they become less productive. This leads to an improvement in wellbeing in the workplace.
Many job roles no longer require an employee to be in the office to complete tasks. While it is a benefit to have employees in a working environment for productivity and generating ideas, it doesn’t suit everyone.
Those with a long commutes, childcare considerations, or those who work better at home would enjoy a flexible working arrangement. In turn, reducing stress from out of work commitments and issues.
Whether it’s a range of working hours, or the option to work from home, giving employees a choice can improve work-life balance and improve productivity.
One source of stress in a person’s life is personal financial issues. As an employer, you provide them with some security through a salary or a wage, but you can assist in other ways to improve workplace health and wellbeing.
You can help your employees with this by doing the following:
Having days or workshops set for employee well-being is a great way to improve the health of your workforce. These double as great team-building days to bring your workforce closer together.
Here are some wellbeing in the workplace ideas and example days that you could implement:
Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace is important for you and your employees.
If you are looking at implementing a health and wellbeing policy in your workplace, we can advise toy on our employee assistance programme (EAP) and other ways to energise your workforce.
Please complete the form below and we'll be in touch to answer your enquiry
Please complete the form and we'll be in touch to schedule your free consultation
We appologise but an error has occurred submitting your form. Please try again.