A business is only as good as its employees- and their health. Healthy employees are more productive and create a happier work environment. Healthy employees also mean lower costs for medical and mental services, which means a lower cost for you and your business.
Recently, there’s been a dramatic increase of studies that show how drastically a person’s work habits and work environment can affect their health. Books such as Sitting Kills, Moving Heals by Joan Vernikos, Time Magazine claiming “Sitting is the new smoking” and thousands of other articles show how the working world’s eight hour day is slowly killing them.
As a business owner, you can make small changes to break up the workday and make sure your employees are living a healthy lifestyle. Here are some ideas to create a healthier workplace:
- Host health and wellness programs where health experts can educate your employees, and help them to foster a healthier lifestyle
- Exercise together! You can create an office team and join a local sports league such as the Pittsburgh Sports League, or a running group that meets daily after work.
- Encourage employees to periodically get up throughout the day. A good way to do this is for them to set a timer to go off every few hours and remind them to get up and walk around.
- Break up the work day by having walking meetings
- Host friendly competitions revolving around healthy living. For example, you could track everyone’ steps and whoever has the most at the end of a month wins!
- Swamp the usual junk food and sugary beverages for healthy alternatives. A great way to do this is by signing up for a monthly program that delivers healthy snacks to your office, such as NatureBox.
- Measure your progress by taking surveys, and adjusting your strategies according to the results
- Lead by example. Show your employees that you care about health and wellness by living a healthy lifestyle, and they will follow your lead.
Want more ideas on how to stay healthy in the workplace? Check out our other blog post on how to stay healthy in the workplace here.