What is Corporate Wellness, and why do we need it?
For better or worse, work is a central part of our lives. We spend about a third of our time in the office, which makes us not only professional.
This is why employees look to their company for solutions that ensure their well-being. Well-being is an open concept that has as much to do with the physical as with the psychological or emotional. But the truth is that working for a company that cares about well-being is just as crucial as working for a company that pays well.
More and more companies are considering corporate wellness programs as a key HR strategy. These are actions that significantly reduce sick leave or stress while improving the company’s image, making it a more attractive place to work without the need to increase the payroll.
Numerous initiatives have been popularized in recent years to promote this feeling among the working population: Customize the office
While there are many ways to improve well-being at work, it’s worth first considering some of the basic actions that directly affect how an employee feels better in the office.
In this sense, before thinking about taking other measures, provide your employees with a pleasant working environment with good ventilation, lighting and air conditioning.
These three elements are very important: due to poor air quality, 28% of employees feel sleepy in the office, and 28% notice symptoms such as itching or irritation in the throat. For their part, 60% of them say that their company does not offer enough light to complete their work tasks.
Think about job flexibility
For many, health is associated with maintaining a good balance between personal and professional life. For this reason, initiatives aimed at reconciliation of both sides of life triumph today.
These measures are related to the flexibility of the workforce; coordinating a work schedule with an employee can help you meet your personal needs without giving up your professional responsibilities.
Thus, practices such as remote work, work from home or smart work, a new model that eliminates the concept of the office and offers a consensus between the company and the worker, are the culmination of this search for a balance between personal and professional life.
Promote healthy eating
If we understand well-being as a biological process, the key measures to achieve it are related to healthy habits. Of all of them, food is the best we can control in the workplace.
Perhaps the cornerstone of promoting well-being is the promotion of healthy eating, a measure that is easy to implement in the office because it has a broad basis for action.
This way, as employers, we can promote healthy nutrition through a variety of channels: offering nutrition education workshops, seeking advice from nutritionists, replacing vending machine snacks with healthy options like fruit, and offering employee tickets or restaurant cards.
This is a forced measure as eating at work is a problem for many workers who choose not to eat during breaks or go to unhealthy food establishments.
With proper nutrition, we not only prevent sick leave, but it has also been proven that improper nutrition can lead to losses of up to 20% in the company due to reduced productivity.
Encourage physical activity
To achieve physical well-being in our workforce, it is convenient to deal with their sedentary lifestyle. Encouraging physical activity is the ideal measure once a nutritional problem has been resolved.
It is clear that leading an active life is a guarantee of well-being, but we must not forget that the promotion of exercise can be our main ally in the fight against sick leave.
For example, a company might offer dance or yoga classes, organize sporting events such as solidarity races and nature excursions, or provide gym memberships.
Offering these kinds of measures is an added value for the company which improves its image as these actions are widely accepted by the employees.
Consider the psychological factor
But, as we have already mentioned, well-being is a state that goes beyond the purely physical, since it has a clear psychological and emotional component.
Stress and depression-related absences can be avoided by encouraging a positive mental and emotional state among our employees. This, in turn, can have a positive impact on their sense of personal fulfillment at work, as well as their commitment to the company they work for and their level of motivation. Individual performance can only be maximized if these three components are present.