Do you think about your employees’ wellness much? If not, you should. Workplace wellness is not only the latest corporate trend, it can have a massively positive impact on your company. Put simply, the healthier and happier your employees are, the more engaged and productive they’ll be. With better productivity comes better results.
Workplace wellness generates an upward spiral of increased high-quality work. More work means more profits. It also means decreased employee health care costs, as well as decreased recruitment costs brought on by high employee turnover.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What specific benefits can you reap from making workplace wellness a priority? Keep reading to learn more!
Increased Productivity
Like we said earlier, when your employees are healthier, they’re happier. And when they’re happier, they’re more productive. It’s much easier to focus on work tasks when you’re not sick, in pain, or bogged down by stress and anxiety. In fact, poor health is one of the primary causes of presenteeism, i.e. physically going to work but not actually working.
By prioritizing workplace wellness, you’re also prioritizing productivity!
Reduced Company Health Care Costs
When employees get sick, it’s often their workplace that bears the brunt of the cost, both through health care and the loss of revenue from employees either missing work or from decreased productivity while on the clock. And in countries like the United States, where health care costs can be astronomical, being able to prevent illness on the job can save your company tremendous amounts of money.
It’s like the old saying goes: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Healthier Company Culture
Remember that upward spiral we mentioned earlier? Enacting positive changes within the workplace can aid in your employees’ overall health by encouraging them to make more positive changes they wouldn’t have otherwise. When your company enables workers to make healthier choices—for example, choosing water over soda—those employees will often start making other changes to their behavior on their own. And, as your employees become healthier, they become happier, which makes them more productive, and so goes the cycle of positive change.
Even more exciting, healthy changes can be contagious! The more your employees utilize the wellness programs available to them, the more those positive changes will spread across your whole company.
Better Employee Retention and Recruitment
It’s no surprise that employees who like their job are less likely to quit. Incorporating workplace wellness programs—especially programs that support positive mental health and stress reduction—can significantly increase employee engagement. Employees who feel cared for by their companies are far less likely to quit than employees who feel disengaged or ignored by their employers.
Workplace wellness programs also make it much easier to entice potential employees while recruiting.
Enhanced Employee Morale
When your employees feel like you care about them, they’ll care about you right back. Workplace wellness programs can give employees the mental, physical, and social boosts they need to work at the top of their game. And not only that, workplace wellness programs encourage employees to connect and communicate with each other. This strengthens the bonds between coworkers, which can foster a happier and healthier work environment. It also makes employees feel cared for and appreciated, which in turn increases productivity and reduces missed workdays.
The Importance of a Comprehensive Workplace Wellness Program
An easy trap to fall into is thinking that a few yoga classes and a bowl of fruit in the breakroom will completely transform your company’s workplace culture, but that simply isn’t true. According to a Gallup poll, only about 24% of employees actually participate in the workplace wellness programs their companies offer.
Why? Partially because employees simply don’t know what’s available to them! But another major issue is that workplace wellness programs are often not comprehensive enough. Many of them focus exclusively on physical wellness but taking a more well-rounded approach to employee wellness can reap much greater dividends. Fabulous for Work is multi-faceted and holistic; it focuses on employee wellness from all angles, teaching users how to build habits that will increase their mental health as well as their physical health.
Any wellness program is better than none at all, but when you approach workplace wellness from both a physical and a mental perspective, the whole of the benefits you get in exchange becomes greater than the sum of its parts.