Creating a Healthy Workplace: Practical Tips for Wisconsin Employers

Maintaining a healthy workplace is a win-win for employers and employees. It helps employees stay focused and productive, can lower their stress levels and lead to a higher job satisfaction, among other benefits. It also shows employees that you care about their well-being.

Are you looking to make your workplace a better environment for your employees’ health and well-being? We’re here to offer some tips. Even if your employees work mostly remote, there are things you can do to help them live a healthy and balanced life when working for your team.

Promoting Physical Wellness

As an employer, you can help your team strike a healthy work-life balance by promoting physical wellness. Often, this can be as simple as letting them know it’s OK to take breaks to walk around, get moving or stay hydrated. But you can also implement some of the following ideas.

• Offer healthy snacks and meals in the office
• Provide ergonomic furniture and equipment
• Conduct regular ergonomic assessments of employee workstations
• Organize wellness challenge or fitness program
• Start a company sports league for softball, golf, etc.

Employees who are physically well will feel better at work, which can help with morale and productivity. It might also mean lower health care costs.

Of course, the bigger part of this is it shows your employees that you care about their well-being. It shows your employees that they are seen as a person rather than just a number.

[Read more: Six Steps to Maintain Fitness During the Work Week]

Supporting Mental Health

Wellness goes beyond the physical, however, and supporting your employee’s mental health can be equally as important. Addressing mental wellness can sometimes feel more abstract than physical wellness, but there are steps you can take to help your team with their mental well-being.

It all starts with your company culture and values. As it is, work already adds stress to your employees’ lives. When a team feels like they aren’t getting support from their boss, every mistake gets magnified or like they have reason to be in a constant fear of failure, it’s going to negatively impact their mental health and work performance.

So, the first thing to do is establish a strong and positive company culture. This starts with having established company values that everyone at all levels is health accountable for. This should then lead into fostering open communication, showing value to employee feedback and recognizing achievements, among other things. You can also offer benefits like flexible work schedules or provide an employee assistance program.

Encouraging Healthy Communication

Perhaps most important of all is maintaining healthy communication between leaders and the rest of the team. None of the decisions discussed above need to be made in a vacuum. Employee feedback should always be considered.

This means keeping communication lines open, so that team members feel comfortable not only talking to their direct leader but also with those higher up. Plus, the communication should go both ways.

One way to do this is by having regular all-staff meetings or forums. It could be monthly, quarterly or whatever cadence you think works best. Use it as an opportunity for the leaders in the company to share initiatives and results, while also giving the team a chance to ask questions and discuss possible solutions.

So, if you want to turn your workplace into a healthier environment, try these tips and talk with your team.