As an employer, your employees are the core of your business, and they’re one of your most valuable investments. When you put time and monetary expenses into training and developing employees, you’ll naturally hope that they’ll stay with your business long-term so that you can benefit from having invested in them.
A great employee can make or break your business, so many employers focus on how to build and develop a team of quality, valued, and talented employees who can make positive contributions to their business.
But if employees are sick, injured, or otherwise unhealthy, you’ll see a negative impact on their performance. Employees who are out sick may frequently miss out on important updates and trainings, for example, and you may be paying for their time out sick, instead of the productivity they could lend to the business. This is particularly true of the food service industry, where an illness like the flu can sweep through a team of staff and force employees to miss days or weeks of work.
This is one of the reasons why creating a wellness program can be a such a valuable strategy. If you want to establish loyalty and productivity in your employees, a well-designed wellness program might be just the way to do it.
A Wellness Program That Promotes Loyalty and Productivity
Wellness programs have the ultimate goal of keeping employees healthy, but they result in other valuable benefits for businesses. A workplace wellness program can help to reduce employee absenteeism and boost productivity, for example. It can also increase public perception of your brand, making it easier to recruit higher quality, talented employees who want to be a part of your supportive workplace. Plus, when employees feel valued and appreciated at work, they’re more likely to stay at the company longer, which means you’ll enjoy increased employee loyalty, too.
To be effective, your workplace wellness program needs to promote a healthy culture and address multiple health challenges, like obesity and smoking. The most effective programs encourage employees to join together in working toward a wellness goal. As you design your program, incorporating the following tips can help to make it comprehensive and effective.
Design Your Workplace for Health
The design and condition of your building can directly affect employee health, so start by assessing the building and looking for issues that may need to be fixed. Improving the air quality in the workplace is an excellent place to start in order to support employee health, since poor indoor air quality can trigger allergies. Consider investing in ventilation systems, UV lighting, and even air purifiers to ensure that your staff is breathing clean, quality air that will support, rather than harm, their health.
You can also make design modifications to support employee wellness. Creating a well-lit, comfortable, relaxing space can give your employees the ability to take a break from the stress of work and recharge. A game area or nap space can also help employees to enjoy their break time and return to work refreshed and ready to focus again.
Depending on your workplace, you might also be able to incorporate a small workout space. Employees could opt to walk on a treadmill during lunch or do some weight lifting in between meetings. Exercising can be a great help in problem-solving and creativity, so adding a gym could increase employee productivity and bright ideas.
Prioritize Mental Health
Talking about mental health in the workplace has long been a taboo topic, but it’s important to incorporate mental health into your wellness program. Stress, depression, and anxiety can have significant impacts on employee health and performance, so ensuring that your employees have the support they need is key to their overall wellness.
To start, make sure that your business’ health insurance covers mental health services. If it doesn’t, consider offering a supplemental policy that can help employees to afford counselling or therapy. If your business is large enough, establishing an onsite mental health clinic can make mental health services highly accessible and convenient for employees, potentially encouraging them to use those services more.
To address the effects of work-related stress, you can help staff manage stress in many different ways. Offering flexible schedules, the ability to work from home, and paid time off can help employees to better manage the challenge of balancing their careers with their lives. Actively encouraging your employees to take mental health days can encourage them to prioritize their mental health. Providing raises, bonuses, and cost-of-living raises can help to reduce staff’s financial stress, and monitoring employee’s morale will give you a sense of other changes that you may need to implement.
You can help to educate your employees about stress and mental health management. Think about holding stress management workshops during work hours to teach employees stress management and relief technique. Yoga and meditation workshops can also be a great option.
Create Wellness Incentives
Implementing health-promoting initiatives can help encourage wellness in your staff. These initiatives can take on many different forms, but some of the most common options include reimbursing staff for the time that they spend at the gym or creating after-work exercise groups or sports teams.
Structure your wellness program so that you can encourage staff to create health goals and then achieve them. By setting a specific health goal and breaking it down into smaller, achievable pieces, employees are more likely to make progress toward that goal.
While a wellness program can encourage staff to get active, it’s just as important to encourage your employees to optimize their downtime off of work. By paying attention to how you schedule employees, you can make sure that they have plenty of downtime to rest, sleep, spend time with their families, and pursue activities that matter to them. If your business is a highly connected one, implement a no-email-after-work policy where employees shouldn’t feel obligated to read and respond to emails once they’re off the clock.
By investing in an employee wellness program, you can enjoy a happier, healthier, more productive staff. As employees see the investments that you’re making in their health and wellness, they’re more likely to be loyal, which can mean major benefits for your business.
