Innovative Approaches To Employee Wellness And Mental Health

Are you a good employer?

If YES, how do you prove that?

The best way to ensure that you are a good employer is to have happy and healthy employees.

However, unfortunately, no matter how clean and honest your intentions are, the work environment and the working conditions can put significant stress on employee health and wellbeing. The employee's well-being can have a significant impact on a company's productivity, morale and success.

So, how do you work on it?

Thankfully, there are ways through which managers and employers can redesign their work and work culture to enhance employee well-being and ensure long-term organizational benefits for them. There are several innovative approaches through which employers can ensure a healthier workplace and this article focuses on such different approaches.

Allow employees to take charge of their work and offer flexibility:

Having a high workload with little job control leads to poorer mental health conditions. bring some changes in employee autonomy so that they feel independent while choosing and doing their work. They should not feel pressured to complete specific tasks. Also, giving flexibility to workers to control their work schedules gives them freedom to work in their own way. This not only improves employee health and wellness but also makes them feel motivated with the power they have. Allow employees to work from home/office while ensuring timely coordination between teams.

Focus on their mental health:

Whether it comes to a company’s productivity or interpersonal relationships among workers, organizations need to foster a mentally healthy environment. The good mental health of employees ensures better ability to do tasks, higher concentration and creativity, develops trust and mutual respect among each other, keeps them motivated and improves customer loyalty. Companies promoting mental health are considered socially responsible and attract more talents.

Organizations can ensure the good mental well-being of the employees by implementing mental health awareness programs, training managers to recognize any mental health issues among employees, and promoting values of respect, empathy and inclusivity among employees. Some stress management programs involving meditation, yoga, and mindfulness techniques can help employees manage their stress. Offering some career development opportunities also builds confidence and job satisfaction among employees, contributing to a healthy mental state.

Don’t ignore environmental wellness:

A healthy workplace environment also contributes to the employee's overall well-being. Invest in innovative workplace designs to keep employees motivated and attracted. Planning ergonomic workstations, incorporating natural elements, encouraging easy movement and collaboration and giving smart aesthetics in the interior spaces improves employee focus, reduces stress and encourages job satisfaction.

Let employees indulge in some physical activity:

With a sedentary lifestyle and long hours sitting in offices, employee’s physical fitness is greatly affected. Involve your employees in regular physical activities. A physically active employee has better brain functioning, leading to sharper memory, improved concentration and quick learning. Physical fitness leads to a healthy individual thus reducing absenteeism, healthcare costs and stress for the employees.

To boost physical fitness among employees at the workplace, allow access to on-site fitness options, offer subsidies on gym memberships, incorporate active workstations like treadmill desks or under-desk bikes, etc.

Hosting some physical fitness challenges or creating corporate sports teams is also a great way to promote physical activity among employees.

To keep the employees motivated for all such programs, develop wellness incentive programs.

Keep the organization adequately staffed to avoid workload:

Sitting for long hours at the workplace or bearing pressure to finish some tasks on time can put substantial stress on an employee’s health. Handling this workload can make employees easily burn out, leading to health issues and absenteeism. It’s better to spread out your work demands by hiring more employees. Though it seems a bit costly affair to hire new ones, losing your good employees because of poor health is a greater risk.

Train managers to support employees’ needs:

Managers training is also one of the important parts of employee wellness programs. This training involves making managers supportive, empathetic and caring for employees' needs and demands and inculcating family-supportive behaviors. A more accommodating manager lets the employee feel relaxed, cared and motivated. There are cases with higher job satisfaction and better job performance when the managers are supportive.

Leverage modern technology to support wellness:

Among the innovative employee wellness ideas, leveraging modern technology to track employee health and fitness is playing a pivotal role. Gift your employees with wearable devices and smartwatches. With such devices, they can track their physical activity, health metrics, sleep patterns and other valuable data for wellness.

Give access to online fitness programs and other mobile apps for meditation classes, health education and other employee wellness plans.

Offer nutrition and health education:

Your employees should recognize the importance of healthy eating. Policies and programs focused on nutrition are great ideas for employee wellness. Promoting employee nutrition in the workplace is not only confined to health improvements but also leads to better concentration and higher energy levels. As a result, you get better quality of work and higher productivity.

Some of the strategies that you can adopt to push employees for healthy eating include offering healthy snack options, hosting nutritional education programs, workshops and seminars and providing health coaching.

Foster work-life balance:

Maintaining work-life balance is not just a modern trend in HR initiatives, it is an essential aspect for any organization to have a sustainable and productive workplace. Juggling between work and life often makes employees lose performance, satisfaction and engagement. Thus, as an employer, you should seek ideas to promote work-life balance. Some options include allowing flexible working hours, options for working from home, paid time off policies, health and wellness programs, leave policies, childcare and eldercare resources and unplugged vacations.

Conclusion:

All these employee wellness and health programs can transform a place into a thriving space that ensures holistic well-being for the employees. However, the success of any employee wellness program depends on how it evolves. You need to be associated with all such programs and continuously evaluate them. Participate, collect health data, and ask for feedback so that you can constantly improve these plans, maintaining their relevance and effectiveness.

Organizations can foster happy, healthy, sustainable and more productive workplaces with personalized, tech-supported and comprehensive wellness programs.