How To Improve Staff Wellbeing In 5 Easy Ways

The wellbeing of your workforce should be a top priority for employers as it is proven to be beneficial to a business in terms of productivity and bottom-line profits, but also in terms of morale and the company culture, employee turnover and attracting the best talent. Fundamentally, your employees are your biggest asset and it is essential that their health and wellbeing is supported and that they feel valued and looked after. This will undoubtedly help them perform better in their individual roles, but it is also a basic duty of an employer in terms of their legal roles and responsibilities.

Promoting wellbeing amongst your workforce is not just about reducing absenteeism, it is about supporting your employees in their day-to-day lives and, ultimately, this will bring rewards for the business. Here we have outlined five easy things a good employer can do to ensure that wellbeing is a priority for employees.

1. Promote mindfulness

It is common for employees to get dragged down by negativity at work, whether this is dwelling on errors made or poor performance, or being impacted by working relationships which are difficult and are not working. It is important that employees are able to move on from the past, and also that they don’t worry too much about the future. What employees need is to feel okay in the present. So how does an employer achieve this?

Regular appraisals can seek to establish if the employee is happy in their work and can identify issues that are troubling them. These only need to be informal discussions, but they can help to unearth the root cause of issues before they fester and become bigger issues. Conflict management is a huge factor in improving employee wellbeing, but ensuring an employee is feeling okay in the present can also be achieved by:

• Making sure tasks and responsibilities have clarity and objectives are clear
• Not overloading an employee with work
• Providing plenty of breaks
• Job rotation
• Introducing wellness talks from experts
• Promoting healthy eating and fitness

Prioritising wellness ensures that employees understand that their health and wellbeing is important to the business, and that the underlying reasons for problems occurring at work can be identified and managed for everyone’s benefit.

2. Offer flexible working

The work-life balance is regularly cited as a major factor in workplace stress and poor performance. Every employee has different circumstances, different coping mechanisms and different thresholds for being able to manage. It is common for employees to struggle with the demands of a growing family, faltering relationships at home, a long-distance commute or extra-curricular activities with big demands on time or energy. Offering flexible working can remove a huge amount of pressure and effectively says to the employee ‘it is important that your home life and work life can co-exist harmoniously, so here is a way to manage this’. Flexible working can mean working different hours in the office, job sharing, or working from home either all the time, or part of the time. The key is flexibility and working with employees to find a solution that works for everyone. In this respect, it is important in terms of maintaining morale and being true to the company culture, that flexible working is fair and inclusive and that all employees are treated the same and given the same opportunities, or at least where flexible working patterns are put in place, everyone understands why this is and what the objective is.

3. Foster social connections

Employees are healthier and happier if they have strong social connections at work. This is good for morale and productivity and people feel energised and motivated if they have positive relationships at work. This not only impacts on performance, but can be the difference between an employee staying in a role or deciding to leave the company. Good social connections can be fostered through:

• Providing communal social spaces in the workplace
• Offering team building exercises and events
• Offering volunteering and charity events
• Celebrating company achievements
• Setting communal goals and objectives

It is impossible to create a situation where every employee is friends with one another, but social connections are about cohesion and ensuring there is a positive environment in the workplace which breeds respect and understanding and results in employees being fully motivated.

4. Offer training and development opportunities

An employee who is happy in their work often wants to progress and achieve things, therefore empowering employees with training and development opportunities is a good way to make employees feel valued and to improve their self-esteem. This doesn’t necessarily need to be about promotions, seniority and earning more money, but can be about learning new skills and knowledge and a person making themselves more valuable and offering more to the business.

5. Introduce workplace employee health checks

Ultimately, an employee can only perform their job well if they are present at work, and even then, if they are fit and healthy. Many people have underlying health conditions which can affect their work, but which are undetected, such as a vitamin D deficiency which can drain energy levels and result in an employee losing focus, but has no obvious symptoms. Other health issues such as diabetes, blood pressure or thyroid function can affect a person at work but can be undetected for years. Regular workplace health checks on-site and during work time can help to identify employee health issues before they become a bigger problem. Employees can also receive professional health and fitness advice to help their everyday lives, as well as their work lives.

If you want to introduce employee health checks into your business, contact HealthClinic2You and we can make arrangements for personalised health checks for your employees that minimise disruption to your everyday operations.