Back to basics – introducing wellbeing in the workplace

It has been said that a healthy workforce is a happy workforce, and a happy workforce leads to greater productivity. Health and wellbeing is currently receiving a lot of air time, but what can you do to ensure that you pay more than lip service to creating a healthy working environment?

To engage, motivate and inspire your team, you need to lead by example and here are some simple steps you can take to create a healthier workplace.

Step one: drink more water – on average you should drink two litres of water a day. Among other side effects, attention and memory can be severely affected if you are dehydrated. Two good reasons why you should encourage your team to drink more water. Providing a water cooler or water bottles might be just the motivation they need.

Step two: exercise more – 10,000 steps is the daily healthy target we should all aspire too. It’s harder to do than you might think. But providing your team with pedometers or setting up an office walking challenge are simple ways that you can encourage your team to move more. There are also a whole host of exercises you can do at your desk. 

Step three: easy on the eyes – eye strain is an issue that affects anyone who spends all day at a computer screen. It creates short term symptoms like dry eyes, blurred vision, headaches and more. To avoid you or your team developing these symptoms, encourage everyone to schedule in a couple of minutes away from their screens every half hour. This time could be used to make some telephone calls, hold a short meeting or even go and get yourself a drink (encouraging step one and step two while helping step three!).

Step four: work/life balance – enabling your team to achieve a positive work/life balance will go a long way in ensuring health and wellbeing. Building flexibility into the working day and managing your customers’ expectations will help with this too.

Step five: digital detox – many of us have become reliant on modern technology. In some cases, this has led to an ‘always on’ culture, where people send, receive and respond to work-related emails via their mobile devices at all hours of the day and night. Discourage your team from checking their work email in their own time. This in turn will lead to a refreshed and motivated workforce during the working day.

And rest: don’t forget to take a break – research has shown that everyone needs to take a break from work – whether this is a lunchbreak, an evening off or a proper holiday – some downtime is vital.