Along with clients, employees are the lifeblood of any corporation. For the well being of your company, you should be concerned about the well being of your employees. Their health is vital to keeping your company the well run machine that it is. Healthy employees use less sick days and are more productive.
There are many different creative ways to look after the health and well being of your employees. One of the easiest ways to have employees think about their health is to incorporate health related tips into your employee newsletter. To make the tips more meaningful to employees, encourage them to submit their own. This can foster a feeling of caring throughout the organization. Another idea in the same vein of newsletter tips and or articles would be a wellness board posted in a central location. The wellness board could expand upon wellness tips to include articles, pamphlets related all facets of health and wellness and information for employees to take away. Don’t forget to include flyers of local health and wellness events!
If you would like to take a more active part in the wellbeing of your employees, consider an onsite employee gym. It does not have to contain expensive equipment. A television, DVD player, exercise DVDs, a few free weights, bench and resistance bands and you have a simple gym. Workers could also donate exercise videos and other equipment that they no longer use from home. An alternative to an onsite employee gym would be to subsidize employees who join a gym up to a certain amount.
Looking out for the health and well being of your employees does not only mean their physical health, it’s important to look out for their heart and soul. A quiet room where employees can meditate allows time to think and regroup. To improve the state of your employee’s feelings of goodwill, allowing time off to volunteer can be a great boost to their morale by allowing them to give back. For instance, allowing employees to take an hour once a week to tutor children at your local school fosters goodwill throughout your local community.
Another way to foster goodwill with the community while allowing employees to give back (improving their mental well being) would be by sponsoring a team. There are many organizations that raise money for a good cause while allowing team members to sneak in some exercise. The American Cancer Society sponsors Relay for Life while the Alzheimer’s Association sponsors a Memory Walk find an organization that has a health related cause close to your company’s heart and sponsor an employee team.
Last but not least, as a way of improving your employee’s health and wellbeing would be to have informational sessions. These sessions could have professionals such as a nutritionist or elder care attorney speak to employees on topics that directly and indirectly affect their health such as balanced meal planning, stress relief, caring for your aging parents or appointing a health care proxy. These informational sessions will provide your employees with additional tools to improve their health and well being.
It’s not difficult to help your employees improve their health both you and their health will benefit.