The Healthier Your Employees, The Bigger Your Profits
Employee burnout has become a scourge of the 21st-century economy. Workers push themselves to the limit week after week and eventually break, leaving organizations to pick up the pieces. The pressure to meet deadlines and produce high-quality work is ever-present and growing.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that employee health has dramatic knock-on effects on productivity. When workers feel happy and fresh, the value of their out rises significantly.
New University Research On Health And Productivity
Last year, Brigham University investigated whether healthy lifestyle habits, such as diet and exercise, had knock-on effects on workplace productivity. The data suggested that people who ate their veggies and got plenty of physical activity were 25 per cent more likely to be high-performers on the job. In addition, they were 20 per cent more productive.
The returns to employers, therefore, are potentially enormous. If they can get their employees chowing down on fibre-rich food throughout the day or get them to go to the gym in the evenings, they could get the equivalent of an extra working day from them every week. That’s like every employee coming into the office on a Saturday!
How To Make Your Employees Healthier
So what can you do to make your employees healthier in the workplace?
Your first port of call should be to give your staff a medical checkup. Bulk billing doctors will often provide these on-site at workplaces, providing you with a baseline for your employees’ current state of health. While they might seem well on the outside, tests like these can reveal deep and hidden problems on the inside (like high blood pressure).
Once you’ve got a benchmark in place, you’re then able to start the next phase of improving employee health. We tend to compartmentalize wellness into different categories, like diet, stress, and exercise. But the truth is that all of these factors feed into each other. The better you eat, the less pressure you feel. And the more relaxed you become, the more likely you are to spend more time preparing healthy meals.
Businesses, therefore, need to take a multi-pronged approach that deals with all aspects of wellness at once. Ideally, you want to grab the low-hanging fruit first - the stuff that’s easy to do - and then build from there.
What you don’t want is to overload employees with loads of information all at once, as this can cause high levels of additional stress. Teach them the basics. Start with just three simple things that they can all do to improve their health.
Here are some ideas:
Eat fruit between meals instead of processed food
Walk or cycle to work or go for a twenty-minute walk in the evening
Stop eating junk food after 6 pm
Download a stress management app
Perform five minutes of daily meditation before taking a shower in the morning
Once you’ve fleshed out the basics, you can build from there. When employees feel like they’re making progress, their hunger for further benefits grows. And that’s when you can introduce them to a fully-fledged wellness programme.