Physical, mental, and emotional health are synchronistic. If one is out of balance, the rest can follow. Fortunately, there are simple and empowering practices that you can immediately put into place for your workforce that cover all bases.

Discover how you can empower your employees to stay active, vital and healthy by:

  • Providing access to healthy snacks in the office
  • Creating feedback cycles where they can express their needs
  • Taking measures to reduce physical complaints (especially whilst working from home)
  • Providing a flexible corporate sports membership to enable them to become healthy and resilient.

“Health in a company is defined as employees who show up on time, ready for work and ready to do their best work every day.”

1. Inspire healthy eating

Lead by example: make healthy snacks more accessible in the office. Put the sugar and creamers by the tea making facilities out of sight and swap the bulk buy of chips with a fruit box; bring more colour into your office by adorning each room with an abundantly full fruit bowl.

When you put healthy snacks within reach, you make it easier for your employees to choose the healthy option. It takes 18 days to build a habit and 66 days for a behaviour to become automatic; your employees will, after a while, have a tendency to crave the fruit over the chips. Having a well-balanced diet prevents a myriad of health conditions and can lower company health costs. You are what you eat, after all.

2. Initiate feedback cycles

It is finally being recognized that mental health goes hand-in-hand with physical health. Physical health issues lower morale over time and someone struggling with stress will experience physical symptoms.

Worrying statistics reveal that 80% of employees feel stress on-the-job. Although a little bit of stress can keep us motivated and engaged, if 34% of your workers are experiencing sleep issues due to workplace stress, it’s time to address these. Are your employees being heard? Do they feel listened to and do they feel comfortable enough to feedback on their experiences in the workplace?

If your answers to these questions are any less than a yes, it may be worth investing in a tool that can help kick-start regular, honest feedback cycles. OfficeVibe allows your employees to feedback anonymously on a variety of subjects on a weekly basis. This makes giving feedback accessible to everyone.

How does feedback improve mental health? If we think about some of the workforce’s ailments, lack of recognition and lack of clarity are two that have a large impact on people’s levels of engagement, and overall job satisfaction. This can impact mental health. Increasing the amount of feedback from your employees and actioning it can help alleviate this. As HR Manager, you can see which department the feedback belongs in and notice patterns over time. Through this, you can begin to understand the true feelings, needs, and goals of your employees.

3. Address physical complaints

Everyone realizes they take good back health for granted the moment they get a niggling pain in their neck or shooting spasms down their spine; it affects our overall mobility and emotions more than we’re prepared to think.

Any small signs of inflammation are signs that something isn’t working. Ensure that if your employees are working from home, they have the same ergonomically friendly setup as they do in the office; working at the dinner table without a proper office chair isn’t beneficial for long-term physical health.

As well as ensuring your employees have supportive office chairs or wobble cushions at home, for example, you can initiate an extra perk for your employees in the office by organizing a masseuse to do corporate chair massages once a week. As well as relieving muscular tension and pain, corporate massages have a whopping number of other benefits such as relieving stress, headaches, and improving sleep. How’s that for an attractive company perk?

4. Implement corporate fitness memberships

A flexible sports membership reduces absenteeism: fact. There is a higher mean duration of absenteeism of approximately 20 days over a period of 4 years among employees who do not practice sports. This is something that you cannot ignore.
Providing a flexible sports membership package/perk to your employees may do more than activate your workforce; it can improve physical and mental health and reduce absenteeism.

With a OneFit membership, your employees can choose from a huge range of different sports: yoga, HIIT, bouldering, spinning and much more. Cardiovascular exercise boosts gut health and the immune system, yoga increases general feelings of wellbeing and mental health, strength training improves musculoskeletal health; all of these support the overall synchronistic wellbeing of your employees. Thankfully, this support is made simple with the OneFit for Business packages. Through these small but mighty means of support, employees improve their working attitude and engagement, and confidence in their employer grows: they feel acknowledged and invested in.

So, what does reducing absenteeism mean for you? What is your goal? Is it to increase productivity, wellbeing, employee engagement, and satisfaction, or a mix of all 4?
Either way, the real question is: can you afford not to?

If you’d like to know more about our corporate fitness offers, visit our website or schedule a meeting.

Tags: