Many management teams and business owners are beginning to learn the importance of a happy, healthy, and safe working environment. However, understanding is just the first step. You’ll need to make changes within your business to ensure that you can create such an environment. By enacting some or all of the practices below, you may be able to lay a solid foundation for the health, safety, and happiness of your entire team.
Medical Training
You never know when you’re going to need to help save someone’s life. If no one at your place of business has any form of medical training or even a first-aid certificate, there’s no telling what the result of that could be.
Medical clinics may benefit from putting their staff through advanced cardiac life support lessons to further their knowledge. Even if they have a basic understanding of cardiovascular emergency care, being able to master ACLS at your organization may offer even more peace of mind.
Workplaces outside of the healthcare industry may see the value in offering standard first aid courses so that employees in trouble can get the care they need before emergency services arrive.
Health and Safety Courses
Workplace illness and injury cost the economy billions of dollars annually. While you may never be able to prevent every accident or incident in your business, you may be able to minimize the risk.
Health and safety courses can enlighten you on the importance of proper training programs, investing in adequate health and safety equipment, and having a well-informed team. The more steps you take to foster an environment of safety, the safer your employees may feel.
Invest in Mental Health
You may not think that investing in mental health in your workplace is all that important, but it can be. Mental disorders affect one in four people worldwide, and they can impact a person’s everyday life and work life.
By investing in mental health, both you and your team benefit. You may notice improved productivity, better customer interactions, fewer sick days, lower health insurance costs, and even fewer accidents in the workplace.
The best part is, making mental health a priority isn’t a significant undertaking. Talk about it openly in your workplace to remove the stigma, provide counseling services if necessary, and encourage mental health days. Small things can make a huge difference.
Focus on Physical Health
A healthy workforce is a productive one, which is why there is never a wrong time to start focusing your attention on physical health. If you already offer health insurance, you’re one step ahead of many thousands of workplaces that don’t.
However, you can be doing much more. Speak to your team about the importance of moving around during the working day, taking breaks, and making healthy food choices. You may even see the value in offering free fruit, healthy snacks in vending machines, providing influenza vaccines, and purchasing sit-stand desks for ergonomic benefits.
Some workplaces even incentivize healthy lifestyles with discounted or free gym memberships and onsite gym rooms.
Eliminate Hazards
Your employees may know to tread carefully in your tiled entrance because it’s slippery or to avoid walking on particular floorboards because they’re uneven. However, any new workers or visiting guests may not.
If you have hazards in your workplace that pose a danger and you haven’t addressed them, now is the time to do so. All it takes is a moment of inattention, and those hazards could lead to severe injuries and even lawsuits.
If there are hazards you can’t fix, make sure they are visible to make them easier to avoid. Put up hazard signs and send out company-wide emails to make sure everyone is aware of them.
Using bright yellow tape around a hazard may also make it stand out. If wet flooring is a slip hazard, use wet floor hazard signs until the mess has been cleaned up.
Organize Employee Wellness Programs
Prioritizing employee mental and physical health is one of the best things you can do for your team. However, aside from the ideas mentioned above, you can also form employee wellness programs unique to your workplace.
You might organize activities like yoga or hire office masseuses for employees to benefit from massages at work. Team building activities with a focus on working together, honesty, and communication, may also be of value.
These programs can even open a window of opportunity for workplace wellness newsletters featuring health tips and in-house step count competitions to encourage healthy competition.
Make Environmental Changes
Commercial buildings built today are much more likely to cater to a business’s wellness requirements than those built decades ago. Even though your workplace may not naturally provide the healthiest working environment, that doesn’t mean you can’t make small changes to help.
Add office plants that clean the air, reduce noise, and boost creativity, and consider investing in HEPA air filters to improve the indoor air quality and remove irritants and pollutants.
Where possible, arrange your desks and tables to take advantage of natural light and natural breezes. Your team is likely doing all they can to be healthier at work, but a few minor changes in their working environment may bolster their efforts.
Be Flexible With Working Hours
Even though the nine to five working week has been a normal part of business culture for decades, it doesn’t mean there aren’t other options. For better work-life balance and to promote a healthier working life for your employees, consider more flexibility.
Allow team members to work from home if it’s possible, and even be more open to the idea of shorter working weeks or split working days. Small allowances can mean the world to your workers who don’t want to miss their children’s sporting events or spend money on childcare for sick children.
As a result of this scheduling change-up, you may benefit from lower staff turnover rates and a generally happier workforce.
As a business owner, it can sometimes be challenging to make sure everyone working for you is happy, healthy, and safe. You may not always get it right, but there is undoubtedly room for you to make improvements. The next time you consider changes to benefit your team, any of these options above may be worth your while. Surprisingly, many of them may also help your business.