Employees are vital assets to all businesses. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that employers take care of their well-being to remain healthy, happy, and productive. Research shows that most employees will perform better if the workspace is healthy and safe. This means that employers and business owners are responsible for ensuring healthy workplaces to motivate their workers and get the best out of their skills and abilities. Additionally, there should also be perfect collaboration and communication between employees and employers to make it easier to create healthy workspaces. When employees are afraid of airing their views to their employers, it becomes challenging to improve their wellness. This leads to work-related stress, anxiety, and burnout. Today, employers incorporate employee wellness programs to improve their workers’ health and keep track of health-related issues. Employers will choose to offer seminars and training or outsource various wellness programs. The main benefits of these programs include high employee morale, breaks the monotony, increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, improved employee retention, improved work-life balance, and reduced health risks. Below are some top employee wellness program ideas:
1. Walking meetings
If you’ve been holding regular meetings with your employees while sitting in the boardroom, you can consider changing this to walk and talk meetings. Walking meetings are generally fun and help employees stretch a bit. They also prevent boredom by ensuring employees move out of their comfort zones. To make a successful walking meeting, you need to:
Tell your employees in advance
It’s essential to inform your employees about the meeting to prepare with crucial items required.
Divide your employees into smaller groups
If your company has many employees, it would be beneficial to divide them into smaller groups where you can engage properly and have productive discussions. If you choose to go with the entire group, be sure some employees won’t participate in the discussions.
Create an agenda
It would be best if you knew what discussions you want to be held in the meeting.
2. Meditation program
The scientific benefits of meditation are numerous and well researched. While some employees may be unexperienced when it comes to meditation, or even skeptical, mindfulness is something that should be taught to everyone, including management.
Meditation doesn’t require the “woo-woo” or a Buddhist monk to show up to the office. It can be taught and practiced in a way that comes unpackaged with any mysticism or religious connotation. The benefits of meditation are so well understood today that it’s even being taught to young children in classrooms, so it’s only natural more corporations are introducing this as one of several employee wellness program ideas.
Declutter The Mind is a meditation app that will not only teach people on your team how to meditate, but also provide practices specific to their particular issue or situation. There are practices and courses within our app ranging from meditation to manage stress, to meditation to improve focus at work. If you’re interested in bringing meditation into your workplace, even in a remote work environment, a meditation app offered to your entire team may be the best approach. Employees are able to meditate on their own time without requiring to carve out time from their busy schedules to attend a class at a specific time. They can also choose the practices and courses that they are most interested in from a growing library. It’s also much more affordable and accessible. Learn more about Declutter The Mind At Work and create a happier and healthier work culture.
Declutter The Mind is a meditation app for your workplace to help make your team happier and culture healthier. In an average 9-to-5 work day, just 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation can release stress, improve focus, and boost creativity. For your company, a more mindful team means better workplace culture and teamwork.
3. Online yoga sessions
Every employer wants his workers to perform their assigned duties better and give exemplary results. However, this isn’t the case in most organizations, especially where employees seem tired and stressed. As an employer, you need to find ways to improve your workers’ moods. One way to do this is by providing corporate yoga classes. These classes will assist your workers in dealing with emotional stress and improve their creativity and general performance, thus promoting growth. In addition, employers can introduce corporate yoga classes in various ways, such as building an in-house yoga room and finding necessary yoga equipment where employees can relax and calm their minds at different times. Secondly, employers can also hire expert yoga instructors to assist their workers in practicing different yoga postures to improve their wellness.
4. Improve workplace ergonomics
Workplace ergonomics play a significant role in office settings by eliminating risk factors resulting in musculoskeletal disorders and injuries and improving performance. Workplaces with poor designs often result in employee frustration, fatigue, and even injuries that can be costly to treat. For example, if you improve workplace ergonomics, you’ll be eliminating barriers that limit safety and better work performance. This will also help employees strengthen their muscles. For example, you can improve workplace ergonomics by investing in high-quality ergonomic furniture with better lumbar support, footrests, armrests, and adjustable height system. Other benefits of ergonomics include reducing costs resulting from injuries, improving employee engagement, and promoting a better safety culture.
5. Wellness vision board
Employee wellness program ideas don’t need to be overly complicated. Employers can create wellness vision boards in their workplaces to help employees focus on their health. These vision boards also improve employee accountability such that they’re able to track their health and wellness goals. When your workers see this board, they’ll develop a sense of trying to reach their goals by drawing out some positive emotions. Below are steps to create a wellness vision board:
Set the mood
The first step is ensuring there’s a relaxing atmosphere. Ensure the room is clean and uncluttered.
Get inspiration
The next step is to get inspiration on what you want your employees to be like. Ensure you determine your needs as an employer, employees’ needs, things to accomplish, and values, and create a list of priorities. For the life balance of your employees, majorly focus on areas like personal health and development.
Gather health information
It would be best if you came up with a strategy that defines your employee’s wellness. Take time and collect information and images from newspapers and magazines to improve the overall visual effect.
Create catchy messages
Come up with catchy messages from your favorite inspiration and motivation quotes or phrases and use markers or paint to ensure they’re visible.
Make the vision a reality
The last step is to make workers reflect on the board. You should also measure progress by incorporating a to-do list of various events.
6. Organize sessions with nutritionists
Employee wellness program ideas don’t only focus on mental health. It can include physical health. The primary role of a nutritionist is to counsel people about various healthy eating habits and nutrition issues. Currently, people live unhealthy lifestyles that involve taking too many foods that don’t benefit the body. In addition, due to tight work schedules, it’s also challenging for people to create time for exercise. This is the reason why obesity is increasing in number day by day. Employers can look for nutritionists from time to time to hold some sessions with employees and give them helpful insights for taking healthy foods and inspire them with new recipes that have proved beneficial to the body. These nutritionists will also help employees who are managing various medical conditions by helping them understand the best foods to take and foods to avoid that increase or trigger symptoms. You can ask for references to get the best nutritionists in your locality or find them online. You should be ready to book an appointment with them and set a date that you feel comfortable with and doesn’t interfere with your daily operations.
7. Get corporate wellness apps
Technology can also help in employee wellness. There’s plenty of corporate wellness apps that assist in administering, managing, and organizing wellness programs. These apps play a significant by motivating employees to stick to healthy lifestyles. For instance, they give the best healthy meals to take at different times of the day and exercise and fitness tips. These apps also track progress and recommend changes that you need to make to see a difference.
As we mentioned earlier, Declutter The Mind is a guided meditation app that you can offer your team to not only offer meditation practices, but also allow employees to track their progress within the app.
8. Stretching exercises
Working for too long without breaks can be dangerous to your employees. This makes employees feel exhausted, thus resulting in a loss of focus and concentration on the assigned tasks. Losing focus and concentration means that it’ll be challenging to meet the set deadlines, and also, there are higher odds of making errors that can prove to be costly to the organization. Apart from these, your employees might also experience some issues such as back soreness, neck stiffness, and general discomfort. In addition, employers can introduce two-minute stretch exercises to help rejuvenate their employees’ moods. The best stretching exercises include standing arm string stretch, reverse backstretch, and neck stretch. If you incorporate these exercises regularly in between break sessions as an employer, you’ll see a complete difference in employee performance and general business growth.
9. Set attainable goals
Every employer and business owner wants some goals met by the close of each business day. However, some employers tend to set stretched goals and expect workers to complete them within tight schedules. Although this works, it may fail to work sometimes. Employers need to set realistic goals. For example, if an organization has attainable goals, it’ll be easier for employees to perform better without too much pressure, resulting in stress and anxiety. The employer also gains a lot of popularity. When setting goals, you should ensure that they’re in line with the organization’s objectives and they’re SMART.
10. Provide virtual fitness classes
You can easily encourage your employees to follow some virtual fitness classes when they’re free and in their comfort zones using the internet. As an employer, you can implement this by hosting fitness sessions through Google meet, zoom, etc. Today, with the growth of technology, virtual fitness classes have become an industry on their own. Many companies have invested in this industry to remotely provide fitness sessions to employees. You can also introduce virtual fitness sessions to your employees through wellness apps. In this case, you need to subscribe to various packages for your employees to benefit from the fitness sessions even when at home. Lastly, you can encourage your employees to use YouTube videos with fitness experts who’ll guide them through different sessions and help them improve their health.
11. Encourage your employees to cycle to work
You can pose a cycling challenge to your employees from time to time. Here, encourage them to use bikes instead of driving to work. You can schedule the cycling challenge once per week to make it look more manageable. Cycling will not only help your employees stay fit but will also make the environment free from pollution. Apart from going to work, you can also consider cycling for outdoor activities like hiking.
In conclusion, these are the top employee wellness program ideas. You can also introduce a workout challenge to improve your employees’ personal goals, such as flexibility, cardiovascular health, and strength training.
