As today’s workforce continues to evolve, businesses of every kind are choosing to introduce health and behavioral wellness in the workplace. Wellness programs are more popular than ever for companies who are striving to create a happy workforce. In fact, many corporations are enticing employees with wellness program benefit packages to promote a healthier lifestyle that positively impacts worksites.
When done correctly, these wellness programs incentivize employees to maintain healthy behaviors, achieve health-related milestones, and incorporate learned tools and social support into their working relationships to fend off chronic diseases, fatigue, and burnout.
You benefit by knowing your employees are taken care of, and employees come to work fresh and ready to provide your customers with better service.
Creating an Enticing Work Environment
Employers may offer a variety of retirement, healthcare, and other benefits to entice employees to stay with that company. Given the current state of the world, workers are craving employer-sponsored wellness programs and mental healthcare support more than ever. Companies can genuinely improve the lives of those who work for them by implementing a better plan to support their employees’ needs to create a happier, more efficient workplace.
RELATED: learn a few actionable steps you can take to improve your workplace environment.
6 Surprising Benefits of Health and Behavioral Workplace Wellness Programs
Companies that enlist health and behavioral wellness programs within their workplace can reap numerous benefits for years to come. Explore some of the positive outcomes of these programs below:
1. Healthier Employee Behaviors
At the core of wellness in the workplace is positive behavioral change. Employees can learn how to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors with the proper education, tools, motivation, and community support. Healthy behaviors lead to significantly lower health risks and healthcare-related costs.
Think back to an ambitious New Year’s resolution. While it may be easy to stick with a healthy behavior for a few weeks or months, it takes more than just ambition to maintain that healthy long-term behavior. Employers who offer wellness programs create a more supportive system for employees to establish long-lasting healthy behaviors, like:
- Eating more nutritious foods
- Exercising often
- Smoking less or not at all
- Learning to manage stress
- Understanding anxiety and depression symptoms
- Improving heart health
2. Reduced Health Risks
Employees who are encouraged to be more active and eat a more nutritious diet can significantly reduce their negative health risks. It’s hard to work long hours, but over time, the combination of poor diet and a hard workload can lead to serious health and work risks. You don’t want your employees to have high blood pressure depression, in their personal lives, or on the job. You can help by implementing a “wellness in the workplace” program of your own.
By helping employees reduce their health risks, companies can prevent many chronic diseases and increase work productivity. It can genuinely be as easy as establishing a healthier routine to eliminate the risk of severe health-related problems. It’s also worth noting that the goal of these programs shouldn’t be to promote weight loss but to promote healthier lifestyles and a reduction in chronic health issues brought on by poor habits, stress, and over-activity.
3. Fewer Overall Health Care Costs
While the occasional wellness retreat or educational lunch outing is nice, it’s not enough to substantially decrease overall medical care costs. Employers need to introduce comprehensive worksite wellness programs to elicit a positive impact. The more in-depth and consistent these programs are, the more health benefits will appear for employees. As seen above, a reduction in chronic and preventable health problems also translates to fewer hospital bills.
We found some easy-to-implement ideas here. Search Workplace wellness programs and see what else you can find!
4. Increased Productivity
Trying to boost employee productivity is a challenge many employers try to overcome. Did you know that low productivity can actually be due to poor health? Presenteeism is when workers are physically at work but not working. There are a lot of reasons why presenteeism is occurring at work, such as:
- Distractions from other employees
- Uncertain or incorrect equipment use
- Unclear instructions
- Smoke breaks
- Tiredness or fatigue
- Social media browsing
- Poor health
While all of these issues can occur in even the healthiest work environment, poor health is the primary cause of presenteeism in the workplace. Recent findings also suggest that those who don’t regularly eat nutritious foods or exercise regularly also have decreased productivity because they are consistently low-energy, suffering from neck and back pain, and feel brain fog throughout the day.
Encouraging good general health and wellness habits within the workplace can help decrease mental fatigue, limited productivity, and sluggishness. Plus, your employee will thank you for your concern and their benefit.
5. Boost Employee Morale
Poor employee morale is bad for everyone in a work environment. Some common warning signs of low employee morale include:
By offering more health and wellness incentives at work, your employees will not only feel better but will feel more supported by their company as well. Adding wellness programs are also a great way to manage conflict resolution in the workplace because they actively encourage communication and social support. When there is miscommunication or a lack of information, this can lead to tension within the workplace.
6. Help Employee Recruitment and Retention
Businesses with unhappy employees are more likely to experience high turnover rates, low productivity, and increased staff conflicts. These days, keeping highly skilled and desirable workers can be challenging if they don’t feel like they’re working in a great environment and receiving valuable incentives. As people’s work and personal lives become more intertwined, some individuals are willing to trade pay cuts for a company that shares their values and invests in their general wellbeing.
It’s in every business’s best interest to invest in health and wellness programs to create a healthier work climate, happier employees, and a more productive team environment. Simply put, the next generation of workers desire a company that cares about their health and general wellbeing. In order to recruit and retain future employees, employers need to seriously consider adding wellness programs to their benefits packages and company core beliefs.
Implement Health and Wellness into Your Business
When you prioritize your employee’s health and happiness, you create a more motivated, healthier, and loyal team environment. Gone are the days when benefits packages could only include retirement or some healthcare services; the next generation of workers needs more consideration in order to be eager to come to work. By implementing health and behavioral wellness in the workplace, employers are showing an investment in their workforce. This helps to increase employee retention and general good morale.
When your employees remain at your company long-term, it dramatically reduces the stress of dealing with turnover and hiring new skilled workers. Employers should aim to establish a happy workforce, and they may even be surprised by how much their own happiness increases as a result.