On the scale of 10, how would you rate your workplace wellbeing? It is quite easy – just measure the level of productivity at the workplace. Employee wellbeing is very essential for any organization that dreams of running smoothly into the future. Where there is no or poor workplace wellbeing, businesses could suffer from various setbacks such as negative staff morale, poor productivity, and a generally unhappy working atmosphere. They may also experience an increase in employee absenteeism.
Want to improve employee wellbeing at your business? Below are several simple tips to ensure that your staffs remain motivated at the workplace.
- Invest in team relationships
In some cases, the key to co-workers’ happiness comes down to how they get along with each other. Healthy working relationships can go a long way to breed a happy workforce.
To encourage good team relationships, organize more team building events, and other bonding activities such as informal meetings, and lunch/dinner outings. Such events will promote a more fun and sociable atmosphere, in which everyone is able to open up and air out their ideas and opinions.
- Encourage mindfulness
There are various simple techniques that, if incorporated into a one’s day-to-day, could boost their ability to cope with stressful situations. Your staff could be overworking without their consent – so you can consider encouraging several mindfulness boosting techniques such as:
- Meditating for a short while before work
- Devoting into one task at a time
- Staying away from digital devices (PCs, laptops, smartphones) a few times a day
- Spending a minimum of 5 minutes a day doing absolutely nothing (i.e. before/after working hours)
Such mindfulness boosting exercises could help them become aware of themselves and their surroundings, and most likely keep any type of negativity in check. This, in turn, could alleviate their stress levels, improve their interpersonal relationships, and eventually become more productive.
- Make Ergonomics top priority
From the dictionary, Ergonomics is the study of how equipment and furniture can be arranged in order that people can do work or other activities more efficiently and comfortably. This is crucial because, if overlooked, it can lead to posture-related hazards.
For instance, professions that involve sitting for long hours could negatively affect your employees’ mind and body. Similarly, jobs that involve standing for long, a lot of walking, or numerous instances of lifting could result in long term health issues if correct procedures for the each task are not followed.
It’s therefore important to ensure all of your employees are performing their tasks jobs while keeping in mind the correct health and safety measures. Improving the posture amongst your staff as they do their job is vital – this could lower chances of depression, tiredness, and eventually make them more productive.
- Encourage healthy choices and lifestyle
Promoting healthy choices of diet and lifestyle in the office is key to improving the wellbeing of your staff. Healthy lunches, keeping hydrated, regular stretching and exercising, etc. constitute some of the things you can promote amongst your employees.
To ensure sustained productivity by your employees, you can opt for some incentives in form of freebies like nutritious breakfast, free fruit, or subsidized gym/aerobics subscriptions. Such options could have a positive impact on the team morale. Similarly, the breaks play a big role in their quest of avoiding fatigue.
- Recognize every good work
In most workplaces, recognition is an obvious booster of team morale, even though it can be overlooked. Your employees will appreciate and stay motivated if you encourage and support their goals and aspirations, however small they might be. You can implement employees’ recognition in various creative ways – for instance a reward system for value-adding ideas, identifying employees who put an extra effort, or recognizing those who go an extra mile, among others. This will have a ripple effect on the employees’ morale and drive, as well as productivity because they’ll be working towards the tailored incentives you’ve set.
- Find problems
Sometimes you’ll need to employ thorough investigations in order to uncover the underlying problems that could be the cause of negative team wellbeing. For example, if you experience frequent cases of absenteeism, it’s the high time you got to the root of the issue. Most likely, your employees are overworking, or their health and safety at work is being overlooked. Consequently, lack of motivation, negative attitude, or poor standards of work are possible results of these problems.
The best way to address these problems is giving your employees the opportunity to open up on what might be bothering them behind the scenes. With such insights, you will be able to offer them a lasting solution. All employees want is to know that their problems at workplace are not being ignored.
From reed.co.uk