Health awareness in the workplace can be a great and relatively cheap way to boost morale and productivity in the office. Employers are feeling the squeeze of the economy, and cutting back in order to save the business, but one area of utmost importance to both employers and their employees is staying healthy.Employees that are coming to work sick will have an effect on their co-workers and can cause them to get sick as well. Once an illness enters the workplace, it is pretty hard to stop it from infecting the entire office. If you don’t offer sick leave to your employees, you are still looking at losing a lot of money in production costs. Plus, your other employees are being forced to pick-up the slack of the sick employee and this places extra stress on them. Here are some creative and fun ways to keep your employees healthy:
Offer health advice.
Invite a local hospital or medical clinic to host a workplace health fair. They can have simple screenings for blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. This is a great way to encourage employees to take care of themselves. Invite some local gyms and health food stores to come and share some diet and weight loss tips. You may even be able to work out an arrangement to serve some of their healthy food in your office and provide your staff members with gym passes.
Have a Fitness Day
Encourage your employees to stay healthy by participating in a run/walk. Hold an all-day fitness day where your employees can participate in yoga, Pilates, aerobics, weight training, and several other exercises. Invite a local gym to come and offer passes to your employees. Have a personal trainer come and give a speech on exercises that strengthen your heart and your overall physical condition.
Serve Healthy Office Snacks
Exercise alone will not help people lose weight and stay healthy. They have to have a good diet too. Since they will be at your facility for 8 or more hours a day, take a look at the food your employees will be eating during this time. If you have vending machines, replace the salty and sugary snacks with healthy foods like vegetables and fruits. When you have meetings, don’t bring in doughnuts and soda, offer whole-grain breads and cereals and milk instead.
Stay Positive
If employees are constantly being reminded about their health, they will remember it. Send weekly recipes and exercise routines to your employees with your newsletter. Place newsletters in the kitchen, break room, and even in the bathroom. You want your employees to read the health tips and stay motivated about staying healthy.
Organized Weight Loss
A great new competition hitting the workplace is the organized weight loss competition.Team up your employees and hold some of those employee activities for a little healthy competition. Sponsor a walking challenge to see who can walk the furthest in a given time frame or set up games that encourage physical strength or activity in the break rooms.
Divide your employees into teams and have them work together on their weight loss goals for 6 weeks. At the end of 6 weeks, reward the team that lost the most weight. When people have a little motivation (like money) they are usually willing to work hard at dropping the weight.
Health awareness in the office can take on many faces.Creative fun is not only a great motivational tool, but also can increase productivity in the workplace. In the end, you’ll have a healthier, happier office and you may even see turn over decrease.