Employee Wellbeing in The Workplace

Positive wellbeing is beneficial for employees and employers alike. It can affect motivation, productivity, absenteeism and employee turnover. It is important to give employees a range of different options and benefits in order to meet their needs and interests. Employee wellbeing in the workplace should be a priority no matter how big or small your business, since absence due to illness costs businesses huge amounts of money each year. Employee well-being is also about creating a work environment which allows employees to flourish and enable them to reach their full potential.

Here are some tips to help improve the wellbeing of your workforce:

Offer Benefits to Support Wellbeing

Employers can do a lot by offering benefits that help promote employee wellbeing. Different benefits that deserve consideration could include gym membership, health insurance or even just discounts on daily shopping. Employers have been trying to offer benefits that support employees’ lives outside of the workplace like offering services that save workers’ time or help them organize their personal lives. Some employers may even choose to have a purposeful wellbeing portal, whereby they provide access to different benefits along with information and guidance on wellbeing related topics.

Educate Employees On Financial Matters

Soothing the financial burdens by offering employee discounts is one thing, but financial wellbeing is much more than just cash flow. Knowledge is a powerful tool in anyone’s money saving efforts. More and more employers are trying to educate as a way to help their employees better understand things like expenditure, childcare, debt, travel money and wedding planning and these can be blended with other money saving benefits as part of a more extensive package.

Provide Support on Mental Health

There are several steps that employers can take to provide support around mental health. Employees can be provided with the right training and education around mental health issues to reduce the disgrace attached to it and also to provide team members with the tools to deal with it. This can range from simple awareness raising initiatives to teaching managers how to spot symptoms and know how to cope up with them. Employee assistance programme are a great tool which furnish counselling and support services for employees. They help deal with professional stress and anxiety.

Encourage Employees to Take Care of Their Physical Health

Physical health is a key factor in all round employee wellbeing and there are many simple, practical steps and initiatives that employers can apply to encourage better physical health amongst their team. This could include inviting nutritionists to come and educate staff on the effect of diet on their wellbeing, assigning ‘nap rooms’ to encourage break time in the working day, organizing group exercise classes or sports related outings or even just offering an additional day’s annual leave to help avoid fatigue. Allowing sick staff to stay at home, or offering flexible working hours, can go a long way towards decreasing these kinds of issues.

Promote a System That Values Individual Team Members

Social wellness is another aspect of employee wellbeing and much of this embodies job satisfaction and workplace culture. Employee recognition can make a big difference in this context. Encouraging managers and co-workers to acknowledge the efforts of staff can have a huge impact on motivation, helping individuals to feel valued and, eventually, satisfied in their roles.

It’s been proven several times that happier and engaged employees are much more productive. So, if it’s profit that gets consideration, employee wellbeing should definitely be high on the business agenda. It’s been said that success at work leads to happiness, however we now know that this version is defective. Although success can bring happiness, to create great work employee wellbeing, health and happiness is the primary factor.