A corporate culture that promotes health and wellness is essential to being an employer of choice.
At MultiTable, we know that a healthy work environment attracts talent from job seekers, drives employee engagement, retention, performance, and plays a key role in personal happiness and career satisfaction. However, despite its proven significance, creating a healthy workplace culture is often lost in the hustle and bustle of the workday.
So how do you move “healthy living” off of the to do list and transform it into an actionable priority for your team? We did the digging for you and identified the most effective measures for joining the healthy workplace movement.
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, to remain aware of where you are and what you are doing, and to not be overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around you. According to a Workplace Stress & Anxiety Disorders Survey provided by the ADAA, employees say stress and anxiety most often impacts the following areas:
- workplace performance (56%)
- relationship with coworkers and peers (51%)
- quality of work (50%)
- relationships with superiors (43%)
Any job can have stressful moments, even if you love what you do. The American Psychological Association suggests that learning techniques such as meditation, deep breathing exercises and mindfulness can help melt away stress. Encouraging your employees to take a few moments in their day to breathe deeply can reduce stress and energize creativity. Mindful, a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring people to enjoy better health, more caring relationships, and a compassionate society by being more mindful, provides a great online source for starting and practicing easy, effective and beneficial mindfulness exercises that can be easily implemented in the workplace.
Work related stress can often lead to eating unhealthy foods and overeating. However, the workplace can be an important venue for influencing dietary patterns. Consider creating healthy contests to boost your team’s endurance during lunch breaks, and then allow the winner to choose a healthy lunch for the whole team.Whether you provide filtered water, healthy snacks or healthy lunches, taking the initiative to introduce stress coping techniques while providing healthy food options will help to create a superior workplace environment for everyone.
3. Offer the Choice to Sit or Stand
Providing ergonomic options for your employees will effortlessly drive worker engagement and performance. A recent study from the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health concluded that “Transitioning from a seated to a standing work posture every 30 minutes across the workday, relative to seated work, led to a significant reduction in fatigue levels and lower back discomfort in overweight/obese office workers, while maintaining work productivity.”
Whether you start with providing your team with ergonomic accessories like a Keyboard Tray, Monitor Arm or a new Manual Hand Crank Standing Desk, offering the simple yet effective choice to not just sit less, but to move more, will most certainly raise employee performance. Healthy decisions like these benefit you as an employer by increasing productivity and energy in the workspace while helping you to garner high employee satisfaction.
We hope that these few easy tips will inspire you to start creating a healthy work culture for you and your employees. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and let us know what you are doing to create a healthy workplace for your team!
