We tend to put in more efforts to attain the best possible result out of our everyday work in the workplace. This is because we believe in working hard in order to earn our place in the organization. We spend up to 9 hours a day at our offices and needless to say, the corporate life is full of stress and mental pressure.
Sometimes, we feel like extending our shift to complete our work not only because we need to deliver it at the end of the day but also because we want to earn the faith of our seniors.
Despite the busy professional life of people like us, there are people, especially in the production line, who have mostly sedentary working hours. Since they need to oversee the work done by their inferiors, they either just sit in the chair looking around or keep an eye on individuals working around and guide them to improve their work standards. The rest of their waking hours elapse in taking care of other personal and social activities.
Health is Wealth
While working for hours in our respective workplaces, we fail to track our health and other physical activities like Morning/Evening Exercise or Yoga, and subsequently face various health problems. Cervical and Migraine are amongst the most common medical conditions, which arise out of busy corporate life.
Organizations voluntarily provide their employees with the best health insurance coverage, in order to conquer these and other fatal health hazards. Since prevention is better than cure, it’s prudent to participate in one or more of health & fitness programs to avoid the odds of health issues whatsoever.
Organizations need to implement various health and fitness programs in their workplaces. In fact, these programs have already gained much popularity in the organizational culture globally. Various multinational organizations that have implemented employee wellness programs have stronger employee satisfaction and morale, resulting in high employee productivity and happier customers subsequently.
Employee Wellness Programs
Employee wellness programs primarily have two key approaches to be implemented in workplaces.
1. The primary workplace wellness program focuses on different workplace ethics and efforts in their support. This combines various improvements that need to be done with reference to the workplace environment, leadership style and feedback/assessment sessions, organization and assignment of different tasks, different practices related to management of work, lifestyle improvement, employee engagement programs, healthy habits, behavioral improvement etc. This also includes preparing personality development lectures and continuous feedbacks.
Well, changing one’s lifestyle in the workplace is a good practice and often results in strong morale and high productivity, which eventually is the goal of every organization.
2. This strategy combines both personal wellness and organizational productivity at the same time. Organizations, nowadays, have multiple options to improve the health of their employees.
For example, they can organize various healthcare programs, aerobic sessions, yoga and fitness campaigns, and marathons at times and urge their employees to participate in these activities to improve their health significantly. Such activities mostly succeed when organized on a large scale. Naturally, taking part in physical activities improve one’s health and significantly helps them get a better physique.
Stages of Change
There are not more than two stages, i.e. pre-contemplation and contemplation, employees most likely are in, especially in terms of their health.
When we talk about pre-contemplation, we refer to employees that have an unhealthy lifestyle, behavioral issues, including those who are not ready to accept changes in their lifestyle at work and those who still need to realize that they need it. In contrast, those who are in the contemplation stage have a fair enough idea about this very need.
Such employees are always ready to accept changes in their lifestyle at work. All they need is guidelines or motivation to get started whenever necessary
And, when really necessary, they welcome the changes in their behavior in the workplace, provided they are offered the right incentive in terms of guidelines or coaching in the right direction.
However, there are big hurdles on an employer’s way of guiding such employees, e.g. inspire and engage employees that are interested in lifestyle amendment at work, thereby making them aware of supporting activities that collectively lead to sustainable health and fitness.
Employee Wellness Programs
The following are some essential tips that help employees engage in health and fitness at work:
1. Listen to Health and Fitness Podcasts
People, already, are not interested in listening to health and fitness programs available online and being telecasted on T.V. Employers can take an idea from this, and therefore, they must plan something really interesting and equally engaging. Also, the program should be organized on a large scale to ensure that each employee is benefiting from the same. Create leaders across departments and let them select their volunteers to take care of the event.
2. Take Polls Of What Employees Want
Employers need to create one or more polls to see what exactly employees want in the event. The poll may include multiple activities and sports activities, based on the interest of employees in particular. This proves to be a great idea when it comes to knowing what individuals in the workplace wants to see in the event.
3. Organize a Corporate Health Event
Employees must be given the responsibility to organize the event, as they can implement their personal ideas to support the event. There is a possibility that the event turns out to be everyone’s favorite and the company can plan for similar events in the future.
4. Explore Other Options For Event Venue
If not in the workplace, then the health and fitness events can be organized at places that are reachable and affordable (if chargeable) too. This will invite more and more employees to participate and the event can be even more admired.
5. Have Fun in the Workplace
Make sure to include the pleasure principle in workplace wellness initiatives, as people look forward to having fun while working and it helps them get refresh and continue with their work with sufficient energy. This is the reason why corporate challenges are the real challenges.
In the meanwhile, the performance of individual employees needs to be evaluated to ensure that there are continuous improvements in their productivity and work standards.
Featured photo credit: investinyourbody.com via investinyourbody.com
