Health Upp A healthy team makes for a happier team, and a happy team makes for a healthier team. As we dust off these lockdown cobwebs and begin to manage a new work-life balance, we are faced with the growing challenges of maintaining and improving both the mental and physical wellbeing of our team. For managing balance in your life or career, you can reach the experts available at monthlymethod.com they would be happy to help you.
Improving and maintaining the wellbeing of your team is more than just making sure you are ticking the right boxes as a business owner. It provides you with an opportunity to create an environment where your team feels more at home than ever, which can in turn lead to improved productivity and growth. If you get the balance right, it can create a wealth of possibilities and opportunities, like attracting new talent as you become a sought-after company to work for.
In this article, we will explore some of the many ways you can create a happier and healthier team by promoting an encouraged approach rather than pushing it as an agenda, and as teams begin their return to work, you can help them feel more at home than ever before.
Benefits Beyond The Standard
This doesn’t have to mean 4-day weeks and pay rises for the sake of it. There are a variety of ways to supplement salaries and support your employees in their everyday lives.
If you are looking to support your team, the health and life insurance claim is a great way to protect your team’s income and shows the importance you place on protecting their health and family. There are many options when it comes to selecting an insurance plan, and compared to individual policies, there are options for corporate health insurance that will cover your entire team at a fraction of the individual cost.
Beyond the immediate ‘benefits’ of life and health insurance, you can look to ancillary benefits such as transport and work travel. Regardless of whether you’re based in the city, you can offer perks for employees travelling via public transport, cycling, running, walking, or even car sharing. These benefits could look to subsidise costs for public transport, incentivising physical exercise with an earlier finish, or even provide additional facilities like showers or locker rooms for those cycling and running to work.
It’s important to provide benefits beyond the standard, and these don’t always have to be expensive or monetary. Getting creative with benefits and support also shows you’ve thought a lot about how you can help the team, which can go a long way in displaying that you truly care about them and their families.
Recognition & Reward
It’s difficult to neglect the evidence that improved productivity and value brings from happy employees. An analysis of multiple studies by Harvard Business Review shows that happy employees are statistically “more productive, more creative, and better at problem solving than their unhappy peers.” Some studies even report on average an increase in 31% higher productivity and 37% higher sales from happy employees. The real challenge lies in finding the balance in keeping your team happy and productive.
There’s no doubt that recognising and rewarding positive activity has shown to improve employee happiness, but there are some clever ways to maximise these efforts. In his book, ‘The Best Place To Work’, Psychologist Ron Friedman discusses some of these methods as summarised below;
- When it comes to rewards – frequency outweighs size. Businesses have reported that smaller, more frequent positive feedback and rewards prolong employee happiness more than larger, less frequent rewards. Those larger regards and recognition begin to wear away even within the first year, as most employees continue to respond better to recognition and rewards in smaller, more frequent bursts.
- Activating employee happiness doesn’t have to come from an event or action. Your team’s mood can be improved with external stimuli like relaxing music and nice smells (scented candles, freshly baked goods,fresh coffee). This approach has been tried and tested with ‘aroma marketing’ – where shops, bars and casinos use the above tactics to put customers in positive moods.
- Recognition and reward has a bigger impact when unexpected. When there’s an unanticipated event or action, our minds instantly pay greater attention to what’s happening, especially at work when surrounded by others. Surprising employees with recognition and reward holds greater weight (like team lunches, or afternoon outings) versus more rigid, scheduled recognition like monthly awards.
Encouraging Healthy Eating
Your employees are your most valuable asset, make their health a top priority to maintain. Not only does employee health have a direct correlation with their happiness, but it also poses implications to productivity when it comes to sick leave and workplace activity. So, In order to keep your employees healthy, Square root can help you by providing a range of healthy snacks that your employees can munch on during breaks and can avoid eating unhealthy stuff.
By encouraging healthier eating habits in the workplace, you’re not only promoting a healthier, happier outlook for your team – you’re also creating a more productive one. Unhealthy eating could cause over 60% loss in productivity based on a study published in Population Health Management. That makes healthy eating not only beneficial to the individual – but also the business!
If your business offers in-house catering, encouraging healthier menu options and even subsidising these options is a great place to start. You can even go as far as limiting the amount of unhealthy options, and take the initiative to make the healthier options more appealing.
If in-house catering isn’t a viable option for your business, there are still a variety of ways you can encourage and promote healthy eating habits in the workplace. You can start by providing opportunities for employees to bring their own healthy options in – this can be as simple as recipe guides in the monthly newsletter and providing the right facilities for the team to prepare their meals in a suitable kitchen (consider utensils, a fridge, oven).
Other quick wins can include providing free fruit with breaks and lunches in form of a communal fruit bowl, buying in healthy lunches for team meetings and days out, and ensuring any on-site vending machines or snack bars contain water and healthy snack options.