Employees need more than just a salary to be happy in the workplace. More and more people are realizing that the stress and unhappiness caused by work aren’t worth any paycheck and are quitting jobs.
With work-life balance becoming more prioritized, businesses that focus on employee wellbeing find they have happier, healthier, and more productive employees. People need to feel optimistic about their careers and work-life to be successful. Productivity and happiness don’t have to be exclusive from one another. However, the happiest employees are typically the most productive.
What is employee wellbeing?
Employee wellbeing is the experience of being supported in achieving not only physical but also psychological and social health. Employee wellness impacts all facets of a person’s life and isn’t just limited to their workplace satisfaction.
When considering employee wellbeing, consider taking a holistic approach.
Future Workplace identifies employee wellbeing through seven pillars:
- physical
- emotional
- career
- financial
- social
- community
- purpose
How to implement employee wellbeing?
Create an action plan
Your plan should state your goals along with milestones you would like to meet, how you will achieve your goal, key employees and their responsibilities, and a time frame for when your plan will be completed. Ultimately this plan needs to benefit your employees’ quality of life and wellbeing both inside and outside work.
Build a wellness team
Your wellness team should be consulted and provide their input on potential strategies and objectives. The team should consist of representatives from various departments to ensure all opinions and perspectives are heard. Some companies will even hire a professional specializing in employee wellbeing. Without a team to back you up, you’ll have no way of truly knowing what your employees need.
Outline and find necessary resources
This involves creating a budget plan for any equipment, rewards, or activities you choose to partake in and figuring out training and time needed for each task.
Track progress
Track your progress and get continuous feedback to ensure you meet your objectives. This can look like giving out surveys or conducting focus groups to understand if your action plan is working or needs to be adapted.
11 Strategies for employee wellbeing
- Focus on a comfortable work environment
- Emphasize personal development
- Introduce health and wellness perks
- Prioritize social outreach programs and volunteer days
- Offer flexible work hours
- Remote work-days to refresh
- Fitness challenges
- Virtual weekly mindfulness sessions
- Incentivize preventative care
- Encourage breaks and vacation
- Utilize a recruitment agency
Focus on a comfortable work environment
Our environments reflect our mental state and can also significantly impact our productivity. If we aren’t comfortable in our work environment, we probably won’t give our best performances. Consider overhauling your workspace with ergonomic furniture and alternative workstations like standing desks.
Emphasize individual development
No one likes the idea of a dead-end job.
Employees, especially those just starting their careers crave professional development and create a company culture that values its’ employees through aiding their professional and personal growth. There are multiple ways to do so, like prioritizing upskilling, providing access to learning resources or funding education.
Another option is to have employees create individual development plans. Have your employees create their own goals, and together you can discuss strategies and pathways to achieving these goals.
Introduce health and wellness perks
A major change for many companies is adding coverage for mental health resources. This strategy has the potential to be costly but is so beneficial. If the company has the funds to, consider revamping your health benefits package.
If a benefits package overhaul isn’t in the cards right now, there are other ways to offer health and wellness perks at a lower cost. Stock the kitchen cabinets with healthy but tasty snacks or offer catered lunches once a month. Offer employee discounts to local gyms or other health product vendors.
Prioritize social outreach programs and volunteer days
Community outreach and volunteering is the secret ingredient to satisfied employees.
Research has proven that volunteering is loaded with health benefits, both psychological and physiological:
- Volunteering increases self-confidence and life satisfaction
- Combats depression
- Creates and solidifies social ties
- Can improve physical mobility, stamina and flexibility
Offer employees days off for volunteering or organize annual company outreach events.
Volunteering is a great way to team-build and boost overall health.
Offer flexible work hours
Employees aren’t just robots. They have families, friends, and other commitments to attend to. Sometimes work can get so demanding that they miss out on outside opportunities or struggle to meet other obligations.
Flexible work hours might just be the fix. Getting rid of the usual 9 to 5 and opting for flexible hours creates a healthy work-life balance and enables employees to give their 100% in their personal and professional lives.
As long as employees still hit deadlines and deliver results, you will also build mutual trust and respect, and when is that ever a bad thing?
Remote work days to refresh
Sometimes we need a change of scenery, even for just one day. A day out of the office can refresh focus and get the creative juices flowing. Along with flexible work hours, give the option of a hybrid work style if possible.
Like flexible work hours, offering remote work instills that you trust your employees to be self-disciplined and improve emotional wellbeing.
Fitness challenges for the win
Fitness challenges are one of the best ways to get started on your employee’s physical wellbeing. Challenges can be daily step counts or tracking daily water intake. Fitness challenges are as practical as they are fun. While encouraging some friendly competition, these challenges will get your team whipped into shape and promote team bonding.
Introduce virtual weekly mindfulness sessions
Get the good vibes flowing with weekly or regularly scheduled wellbeing sessions. Whether it’s meditation, yoga, fitness class or team-building sessions, your employees will thrive. Implementing mindfulness benefits overall wellbeing by reducing stress and aging, better sleep, improved metabolism, and better mood and cognitive functioning.
Incentivize preventative care
At one point, going into work feeling under the weather was the norm. What seems like a harmless cold can spread like wildfire through your office. And with the ongoing pandemic, we can see how harmful a minor cold really can be.
Hopefully, this mentality will cease with the ongoing pandemic, but incentivizing preventative care still doesn’t hurt. Offer gift cards, small cash bonuses, or other small tokens to employees who get their vaccines come flu season.
On top of this, urge sick employees to stay home, even if it is just a measly cold. For those feeling good enough to work but don’t want to pass their runny nose onto colleagues, offer remote work options.
Encourage breaks and vacation
This is a strategy that any company, big or small, can implement. The best part is that it costs absolutely nothing.
Encourage your employees to take their breaks and use vacation time. Remind your employees that it’s okay to unplug after the work-day and set work boundaries. There is an expectation of needing to be on all the time, but you’ll eventually burn out if you don’t take a pause.
So while these are benefits that are already offered, sometimes your employees need a little nudge every now and then.
Utilize a recruitment agency
Keeping your organization adequately staffed is a great way to maintain employee wellbeing without even realizing it. Each employee has a role, and when you are missing team members or hit a busy time of year, it causes remaining employees to take on extra work resulting in additional and unnecessary stress.
Working with a recruitment agency makes sure you aren’t understaffed and can get temporary workers when those busy seasons come around.
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