Many companies evaluate productivity, KPIs, and long-term strategies and objectives. However, many times, employee health takes a backseat in the business landscape—despite its role in a company’s overall success.
That said, as an employer, it’s your responsibility to prioritize health in the workplace, making it just as important—if not more—than other initiatives. But how?
The goal is to create a plan that prioritizes overall well-being. This means not only focusing on current physical health but also providing mental health resources, emphasizing preventative care, and creating a health-conscious work culture.
Keep reading to explore the benefits of improving employee health, common health challenges, and strategies to ensure your team gets the care they need.
The Importance of Workplace Health
There are many benefits of keeping your employees healthy—advantages that go beyond just physical well-being.
By prioritizing workplace health, your company can:
- Reduce absenteeism: Your team members carry a lot of responsibility. That said, when they miss work, it can be an issue for the entire company, often leading to workflow disruptions. By reducing sick days, you can ensure your team is available to handle all necessary job functions, therefore guaranteeing you always meet deadlines.
- Lower healthcare costs: By implementing a comprehensive health program, your company can enjoy long-term cost savings. Why? Because healthier employees mean fewer health insurance claims. In addition, by reducing missed workdays, you can save on costs associated with lost productivity—a win-win for everyone involved.
- Increase productivity: By reducing absenteeism, your company can improve overall productivity. Even more, when you show your employees that you care about their health, it improves their job satisfaction and motivation, therefore improving the quality of their work.
- Enhance reputation: No company wants to be known for having high turnover rates and unhealthy work conditions. By ensuring your employees have better physical and mental health, you can improve employee morale, attract top talent, and stand out as a company that cares about its employees.
Common Employee Health Challenges
Employee health challenges can be broken down into 3 categories: physical health, mental health, and lifestyle-related challenges.
Physical Health
Physical health is a huge concern in every industry. From chronic conditions and cancer to diabetes and high blood pressure, there are so many conditions that can affect a person’s physical well-being.
However, many people ignore physical conditions until they escalate. For instance, have you or one of your employees ignored symptoms because you were “too busy” to schedule a medical appointment?
Unfortunately, this is a big issue in the business world, as it’s become the norm to put work before our own health. This mindset, though, can have an array of long-term consequences, such as something small like a simple backache turning into chronic pain.
Preventative health is also a large concern, as many conditions can be better managed if they are caught early on. For that reason, it’s important to consider preventative health as a long-term investment, as it helps keep team members healthy for years to come.
Mental Health
Stress, burnout, and excessive workloads—working for a high-pressure company comes with many responsibilities. And while we’re confident that our employees can manage the stress that comes with their position, it’s important to remember that we’re all human and can all face mental health challenges.
There are many factors that affect mental health at work, including long work hours, limited support from colleagues, and poor working conditions, among others. However, while many people struggle with mental health, it’s still not a common topic in the office.
In general, many companies lack peer support networks, have limited resources for mental health, and struggle with the unfortunate stigma associated with it. For these reasons, employees are less likely to reach out for help, therefore internalizing issues and creating an unhealthy work environment.
Lifestyle
Unhealthy lifestyle choices have a huge impact on overall health. Factors like a poor diet, excessive sedentary behavior, and an unhealthy work-life balance are all common struggles in the modern business world.
This is because many companies are not designed to promote healthy lifestyle choices. For instance, long hours mean workers don’t have time to exercise, get adequate sleep, and spend time with their families. Rather than a nutritious lunch, workers are skipping meals or rushing to eat in order to get back to work.
This is the unfortunate reality in many companies today.
The challenge that businesses face is knowing how to create a more balanced environment, encouraging their employees to take care of their health in and outside of the office. In the long run, these changes can actually improve productivity while reducing burnout, making it highly beneficial for companies.
Tips for Managing Employee Health
Now that we know the common challenges associated with employee health, let’s take a look at how your company can prioritize health in the workplace.
To improve employee health, you can:
- Create a physical health program: There are various ways to encourage physical health in the workplace, such as providing onsite gym facilities, creating company-wide fitness challenges, and offering gym membership plans as an employee benefit. The goal of these programs is to encourage employees to stay active, thereby helping them mitigate the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle.
- Encouraging annual health checkups: Annual checkups help detect health issues early on, therefore increasing the likelihood of successful treatment outcomes. By providing on-site health screenings, allowing employees to take time off to go to doctor’s appointments, and offering wellness incentives, you can highlight the importance of these checkups.
- Offer mental health support: Provide your employees with resources and tools to help them better manage stress, anxiety, and other mental health concerns. This includes hosting workshops on how to manage stress, training company leaders to recognize signs of mental health challenges, offering counseling services, and overall, normalizing conversations about mental health in the workplace.
- Encourage a healthy work-life balance: There are many ways to encourage a healthier work-life balance, such as respecting work hours (no late calls or emails), insisting on breaks, ensuring your employees have a manageable workload, and encouraging them to take advantage of their paid time off.
- Partner with an on-site healthcare provider: By taking advantage of telemedicine solutions, you can provide your employees with healthcare services no matter where they are. For instance, if they get injured on the job, they can receive immediate medical advice and specialist care coordination to ensure they get the assistance they require. This helps them address health issues quickly and fosters a culture of wellness at the job site.
Final Thoughts
Productivity and health are both important, and luckily, these two things are closely related in the workplace. By encouraging better employee health, you can ensure your team reduces missed days due to illness, improves overall work quality, and is more satisfied with your company.
While there are multiple challenges, such as knowing how to navigate physical, mental, and lifestyle concerns, having a comprehensive wellness plan in place helps you stay on track and address all your employees’ needs.
From fitness challenges to providing concierge doctor services, every initiative you implement contributes to a better work environment, which offers both your company and your employees long-lasting benefits.
