How do you Promote Wellbeing at Work?

Promoting mental health 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.

What does health and wellbeing mean?

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:

• Physical health and wellbeing
• Emotional, psychological and mental health
• Personal values, such as self-confidence and resilience
• Attitudes to work, such as having a sense of purpose or job satisfaction
• Personal development at work

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.

Why should you invest in organisational wellness?

Promoting health and wellbeing 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:

• Increased productivity and motivation: being more physically and mentally healthy will allow employees to perform better. This will make them more efficient and focused.
• Brings teams together and builds morale: engaging in allows steam members to connect, both in and outside of work. This builds camaraderie.
• Decreases work-related stress: having a healthier lifestyle, both mentally and physically, can reduce stress. If you can implement mindfulness and meditation, this will also help with stress management.
• Improved psychological wellbeing: which can result in a reduction in stress and associated absence, as well as more positive feelings about work.
• Better customer outcomes: Healthier, happier staff are likely to offer better customer experiences.

Creating an employee wellbeing programme

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 for employees, so let’s take a look at some health and wellbeing at work ideas.

Health and wellbeing 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.

Standing Desks and Walking Meetings

Improve wellbeing and 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.

Encourage Balance

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 with overall wellbeing.

Flexible working

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.

Promote financial wellbeing

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 health and wellbeing.

You can help your employees with this by doing the following:

• Providing staff with information about how to manage their financial wellbeing
• Paying for work expenses, such as accommodation and travel upfront
• Partnering with financial services providers to offer payroll savings schemes, to make it easier for employees to save

Health and wellbeing event ideas

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 ideas and example days that you could implement:

• Sports days/group runs
• Group yoga sessions
• Free healthy food every week
• Mindfulness and meditation sessions
• On-site massages
• Bring your pet to work day
• Healthy cooking classes
• Arts day

Get in Touch

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.