By cultivating a workplace environment that centers around promoting your employees’ health and well-being, you can save money on healthcare costs, reduce turnover, and improve productivity—which can all significantly affect the business’s bottom line. Use these helpful tips on how to emphasize healthy living in your workplace to create a healthier and more productive workforce.
Healthy Eating
From replacing sugary drinks in your staff fridge with healthier options to providing a fruit bowl for snacking throughout the day, there are plenty of ways to promote a healthy diet in the workplace. Encouraging healthy eating can result in fewer sickness-related absences, and accessible, nutritious foods can help prevent afternoon slumps. When done consistently, these small day-to-day dietary adjustments can produce tremendous changes and can go a long way towards the overall success of your company.
Of course, you can’t determine how or what your employees eat, but providing healthier options is a step in the right direction.
Offer Health Support
In this fast-paced and modern age, employees spend a substantial portion of their daily life behind a computer and sitting at a desk. As an employer, you can hold optional yoga classes at work or provide discount gym memberships for a fitness center near the workplace. These choices can promote an active lifestyle and encourage employees to take regular breaks away from their desks.
Another important tip is to implement healthy workplace furniture and accessories that improve sitting posture, especially when the job requires workers to sit at their desks for extended periods. There are many benefits to good posture in the workplace, but more than anything, proper posture helps employees avoid back pain.
It is also advisable to work with a qualified physician who can offer regular physical screening to check the employees’ blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol. Allowing employees to take advantage of on-site care or scheduled screenings helps your team stay on top of their health.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
Our list of tips on how to emphasize healthy living in your workplace won’t be complete without adopting work-life balance in the company. Whether in the office or at home, deadlines and tasks can eat into the evening and even the weekend. Over time, this constant stress and pressure to produce can lead to lower productivity. You may risk the company losing top-performing employees.
One way to promote work-life balance is to encourage managers and senior executives to lead by example by taking breaks, leaving the office on time, and not emailing workers beyond office hours if it’s not urgent. You can even compile a list of fun events happening around northern Arizona as a way to encourage employees to live their lives to the fullest outside of work. Another option is to ensure employees take their time off within the holiday year by capping the number of days they can cover or not allowing them to carry over holiday shifts.
