How Promoting a Healthy Lifestyle can Lift the Workplace
When thinking about their lifestyle, many workers cite their jobs as being one of the main impediments to being able to maintain a healthy exercise routine. This can be because of the excessive commuting times they have or perhaps they have to do extra work in the evenings just to stay on top of things and this hampers their ability to undertake exercise.
If you are able to move work from being part of the problem to part of the solution, this will have an excellent effect on workplace morale as well as improving the general wellbeing and health of the staff around you.
Promoting a Healthy Lifestyle
You will see increases in productivity and a decrease in fatigue from your employees when they begin to exercise more and access a healthier lifestyle and this can only be a good thing for your organisation. There are several ways that you can encourage this further and we have included some of them below.
Encourage Flexible Working Practices
If the main problem that stands in the way of most people being able to access sufficient exercise is work and the commute there and back, take that out of the equation. Let your employees know that they are allowed to leave early or start a bit later so they can go to the gym, as long as the work that they need to do is getting done. Explain that this is a privilege and that you are doing this to help with health and wellbeing across the organisation.
Tread carefully though, the nightmare scenario would be if one person assumed you were specifically targeting them and misunderstood it as bullying because of their weight. You need to be clear that this is something being offered to all employees, rather than targeted at anyone in particular.
Alternatively, institute hybrid working or remote working, which offers much greater flexibility and can eliminate the harsh commute altogether, allowing them to spend some of that time on going to the gym or otherwise exercising if they wish. Hybrid and remote working are two of the most popular ways of working now, having been some people’s main experience of working during the pandemic lockdowns.
There is definitely an appetite for more of that kind of flexibility and normalising it across your organisation can make it more attractive in terms of employee retention. There have even been surveys that suggest some people would rather change jobs than work from the office full time again, so that is actually a lot of upheaval that people are prepared to tolerate in order to continue this more flexible form of working.
Suggest Doing a Work 5K Run for Charity
Doing sports together is a great way of team building as people who run around together will bond more easily because fitness activities produce endorphins, the feel good drug that the human body produces after exercise. Associating the feeling from the endorphins with being in certain people’s company can help to create more of a close-knit team together and make it easier to become friends as well as colleagues.
Suggesting doing a 5K run for charity is an excellent move, as long as the boss is prepared to put the hard yards in as well. It is a great chance to literally lead from the front and you can practise with willing participants or encourage others to find their own running buddies to keep them accountable as the big day approaches.
Nobody wants to let a charity down, so a team effort can see a significant amount of money raised for a local charity that can benefit from it. This can also provide excellent newspaper coverage and enhance the reputation of your company locally.
You could even suggest doing the “Couch to 5K” challenge that is available for free from the NHS, helping colleagues build up their strength and running stamina little by little until they are ready to run 5k later in the year.
Offer Fitness Perks
Some companies offer free or reduced gym memberships to their employees as perks for working with them and this can serve to be an attractive perk for existing workers as well as serve as an additional attraction to people you may wish to recruit in the future. In some surveys, up to a half of employees would value such a perk so it is something that is definitely worth considering as an aid to employee retention and recruitment, as well as the obvious benefits that will accrue from having fitter and happier employees.
Some larger organisations have even funded their own gym facilities for employees to allow them to exercise on-site for free and this is something that is nearly universally welcomed. It is a way for workers to save money while having access to excellent exercise equipment that may have been out of their price range if they had to pay for a gym membership.
Other perks like healthy cooking classes can help people to develop the life skills that they need in order to make a selection of healthy and nutritious meals. One of the things that stops people from eating more healthily is feeling really tired after a long commute so the idea of coupling these classes with more flexible working can really help employees to increase their health and wellbeing.
Reward Schemes
Another way to encourage health and wellness at work is to offer incentives and rewards for those who walk or cycle to work. Obviously, this is something that can’t be done for every employee but you can maybe instead agree that if they hit their daily step total of the recommended 10,000 steps they could earn the reward for that day. This can be something like if they manage to make it a whole month doing the activity then they can qualify for a reward or it can be based on the top three or top five employees. You could even keep a scoreboard in the office to foster a little healthy competition between workmates.
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