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The average full-time employee spends over one-third of their day, five days per week at the workplace. Sometimes, this leads to prioritizing jobs and not health. Things like skipping or eating later lunches, burning the midnight oil, missing exercise, and rarely calling in a personal day.
Although admirable, in reality, it hampers productivity. It’s crucial to consider employee health at work with workplace wellness and prioritize personal health and wellbeing which contributes to better outcomes in the work environment and leading long fulfilling lives.
So, how to promote wellness in the workplace, maintain great health, and ensure adequate work-life balance for your team? Here we’ll discuss ways to promote wellness in the workplace in-depth.
What Is Workplace Wellness?
The term workplace wellness has countless meanings. In a general sense, it refers to a work environment that is conducive to the health and wellbeing of all employees and others within it.
Elaborating on this, workplace wellness relates to all aspects of working life, from the climate at work and the work organization to the work environment to how employees feel about their work and the quality and safety of the physical work environment.
Beat remote workplace challenges
Achievable quick fixes for impressive results
How To Promote Wellness In The Workplace?
Did you check out the checklist above? If yes, you would have seen ample challenges and actionable solutions to beat them. In addition to that, promoting wellness in the workplace is also essential.
Promoting health and wellness in the workplace can result in less time lost due to illness, higher productivity owing to improved attendance, and better morale.
Read more: Why Health And Wellness Is Important For Employees?
You know it’s important, but only by promoting wellness in the workplace, you can encourage employees to participate in the wellness program. You must advocate its benefits both health-wise and financially, so employees can reap the true benefits to the fullest.
Let’s look at how you can do this.
1. Get leadership on board
An effective workplace wellbeing program needs a both bottom-up and top-down approach.
The first step is to get the leadership, senior executives, and managers on board for promoting wellness in the workplace. They will help enforce the program by letting employees know about it, encouraging them to participate, and being early champions of workplace wellness.
Their enthusiasm will draw more involvement, and engagement and improve workplace culture.
Besides engaging employees, managers must also actively build trust with the team. Being supportive and encouraging will allow team members to open up and willingly discuss employee health, both physical and mental. This also helps employees feel comfortable in the workplace and get more involved in workplace wellbeing initiatives.
Workplace wellness playbook
Effective and easy to implant strategies to reduce absenteeism
2. Provide social support
One of the key factors that impact happiness (an aspect of overall health and wellbeing) is a strong social network.
This doesn’t mean prodding into your employee’s personal or family life. Even with setting this aside, it’s possible for an organization to encourage and influence social wellbeing.
It’s more about taking the time out to connect with colleagues about non-work-related stuff like upcoming travel plans, weekend plans, etc. What you can try is mingling for a few minutes before and after meetings during remote work, going for team outings, or taking coffee or water cooler breaks together.
Even a game or two can keep the fun alive! Try one of the activities from our top 10 fun Friday games and activities for employees in 2023.
3. Practice preventive care
Another answer to how to promote well-being in the workplace is to make your employees aware about preventive care.
To understand preventive care thoroughly, read our blog on what is preventive care and what it covers, and then come back here.
When you take early action to prevent serious health issues from developing, it saves money in the long run and decreases absenteeism and the loss of employee productivity caused by the illness.
It has simple logic, really. A healthy employee displays better performance, and the chances of them suffering from health issues that require days off are lesser. Plus, healthy employees are happy employees.
Read more: The many benefits of preventive care
Rather than having single people come in for flu shots or health check-up camps, you can team up with a trusted partner like Loop. We’re advocates of preventive care.
Our in-house team of medical doctors is available 24X7 to help you better your health care journey with simple solutions you can incorporate into your everyday life. We make preventive care accessible and easy, so your employees can take full advantage and help make your workplace healthier.
4. Highlight the importance of mental health
No doubt, physical activity and well-being are vital. But, keep in mind that employee health at work does go beyond physical health. Mental fitness is equally important to your workplace and workplace culture.
Stress management and mental exhaustion may seem manageable today, but in due course, it causes much bigger problems. Apart from burnout, it can result in depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, sleep deprivation, heart disease, and more.
Besides, employees who are mentally unfit can’t do justice to their work or positively influence the company on the whole.
With the stigma attached to mental health, sometimes employees may be afraid to speak up. This, teamed up with the lack of understanding and education about issues as well as treatments options, makes employees remain in their shells.
It’s important to take time to generate awareness about mental health if you’re looking to successfully promote health and wellness in the workplace.
You can start with mental health consults, sessions on sleep, one-on-one counseling, etc. as a part of your health benefits package. Couple this with group health insurance and you’ll have an inclusive wellness program that’s more meaningful and goes beyond focusing on only one element of well-being, like physical activity, for example.
Further reading: Why Employees Should Participate In Wellness Programs
5. Provide opportunities for health education
Getting educated about health sounds silly, right? How hard can it be? Wake up, workout, eat healthy, sleep well, and you’re done!
But there’s soooo much more to employee health than meets the eye. For starters, you can read about the seven dimensions of well-being in the guide below.
Employee Wellness Handbook
A quick and easy-to-read guide for improving your employee wellbeing efforts
Just like how you went to school to learn about trigonometry or the Indus Valley Civilization, health education by expert health coaches will guide you and help you learn how to leverage the time you have to live a healthier life even amidst a packed schedule filled with work, family, and extracurricular activities.
6. Organize mentoring opportunities
Along with comprehensive health insurance, a mentoring program is a proven and powerful way to encourage employee wellbeing.
A mentor guides, advises, and supports a mentee in their personal and professional growth and development.
Mentorship programs come in a variety of forms, like one-on-one mentoring, peer-based mentoring, group-based mentoring, etc. You pick a program that you think will work best for your company and feel free to make amends to meet the objectives of your company. Such programs help with:
- Emotional support system for mentees during critical phases of their career.
- Act as a support system for employees who feel isolated with mental health issues like anxiety or depression.
- Help increase the self-confidence of employees and boost morale
Mentoring encourages employees to learn from each other and makes them feel that their company is investing in their well-being.
7. Promote dialogue around the challenges of workplace wellbeing
Whether it's something as simple as migraine, stress management or something more serious as mental wellbeing, it’s not easy to speak about your personal issues. However, if one person is struggling, it can affect the entire team. Hence, speaking to others at work makes a difference.
Dialogue at work about healthy eating and lifestyle like nutritious food and snacks, mental health consult sessions, social interaction about non-work stuff, etc. all helps boost workplace culture and workplace wellbeing!
Building Great Culture
Learn the best practices to build a prospering culture in your organization.
How Promoting Wellness In The Workplace Can Impact Your Company's Bottom-Line?
At first glance, it’s hard to see the benefits of an employee wellness program. However, the truth is that a healthy workforce brings a multitude of advantages to your business. Here are just a few.
- More productivity - The bottom line is a healthy lifestyle correlates with increased productivity. Find it hard to believe? The next time you face a rut, get your heart rate up with physical activity and you’ll likely get back in the zone.
- Less office stress - Workplace stress has become a norm. But in the long run, it causes burnout, which results in increased employee turnover. An effective wellness program helps with efficient stress management.
- Fewer illnesses - It’s well-known that healthy practices prevent sickness. For your business, operations run smoothly with fewer interruptions with less absenteeism.
- Happy and healthy employees - Employees who get a chance to focus on their wellness are happier and healthier. Overall, they’re positive and satisfied, which shows in their work.
Well-Being For The Win!
A group of happy, healthy employees will create a better work environment for you—and a better life for them beyond work.
Download a quick and easy-to-read guide for improving your employee wellbeing efforts in 2023.
If you implement and maintain a workplace wellbeing program, it has considerable advantages for both employees and employers. For the program to be successful, you mustn’t just provide it, but also promote it as well as understand employee motivations and behaviors, and encourage employees and support them.
Find out all about Loop’s wellbeing initiatives and how we take your workplace to the next level!
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