Encourage healthier eating
This may seem like a fairly obvious point to make, but ensuring that your employees are eating healthily will help with their wellbeing. From helping them to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight to improving their mental health, encouraging healthier eating should be one of your top priorities when trying to improve employee wellness.
Providing a fridge at work can help with getting employees to bring in healthy meals from home as well, and if you’ve got a vending machine in the workplace, why not stock it with healthier options, rather than full-sugar fizzy drinks and the like? These will help your employees keep healthy with very little effort on their part.
Get your employees active
Another point to improve wellness amongst your employees is to get them active. This can often be done in a variety of fun ways, such as by installing a pool table in the break room, creating and funding a sports team (several five-a-side football teams are usually popular within the workforce for letting off steam, plus they’re a great way of encouraging teamwork), or installing bike racks in the carpark and encouraging people to cycle into work.
Improve employees’ mental health
Mental health is becoming one of the biggest talking points in the workplace in recent years, with the general taboo slowly being lifted. As such, now is an ideal time to implement strategies designed to help improve your employees’ mental health, such as encouraging positive communication in the workplace between employees, adopting anti-bullying measures if these are not in place, as well as more mental health care.
Training managers on mental health strategies is also useful, and running employee polls to get feedback on how morale is within the workplace. Even just offering a meditation course can help improve mental health amongst your employees as well.
Build a healthy workplace culture
Tying into improving mental health within your workforce is encouraging a healthy culture at the workplace. This helps to get your employees engaged within their teams or departments, as well as helping to foster positivity throughout the general culture of the workplace.
This can take the form of encouraging teamwork amongst departments, ensuring that managers have access to resources for their workers, and generally fostering positive interpersonal relationships to try and improve the employees’ relationships both within the company and towards the company as well, which can often lead to an increase in productivity as employees will feel valued at work.
Encourage multi-level leadership
Whilst everyone in the company may want a wellness program in place, it’s often hard to create a program that takes everyone’s separate needs into account. That’s why it’s important to encourage multi-level leadership, so that the managers within your organisation can feel happy to tailor the wellness program to their individual team.
Employees in higher positions should all participate within the wellness program, as this style of leadership by example can often encourage the more junior employees to also take part within the wellness program.
With those five ways of improving employee wellness, it should hopefully form a good basis for a new culture within your company, one of positivity and focusing on the employee’s needs, and preventing burn-out, low morale or people leaving the company quickly. We’d love to hear of any other tips or strategies that you may have around employee wellness, so why not comment below and let us know?
