9 Easy Ways to Maintain a Healthy Workplace

As a small business, it’s important to run as efficiently as possible and look for cost savings. Maintaining a healthy workplace can save you some big bucks in the long run. Developing a workplace culture set around health can help improve work performance and cost you less in healthcare and sick days. Here are ways to incorporate wellness and promote health in your business.

Create a Healthy Culture

First, create a culture that focuses on health. This might seem big-picture but it involves a lot of small, incremental changes. Creating these changes can make a huge difference in the lives of all of your employees.

Bring In Healthy Snacks

Try incorporating healthy snacks into the workplace. That might mean making sure your vending machines have flavored sparkling water rather than sugary soda. Do you typically bring donuts in? Try bringing fruit and healthier pastry options instead. There are recipes for healthier options online, or many bakeries offer healthy versions of favorite snacks.

Encourage Less Eating Out

Also make sure you have a staff workroom that gives your employees the space to cook and eat their own lunches. Encourage staff to cook their own healthy meals at home and use the space to reheat and enjoy them for lunch. People are more likely to make unhealthy choices if they go out for lunch, resulting in a late afternoon sugar crash. That energy-sucking sugar crash means less productivity and less work getting done.

Eat Outside

You get bonus points if you design an outdoor eating space as well. Having options for outdoor eating can improve well-being and overall wellness. Spending time outside is good for the mind and the body.

Incorporate Group Challenges

Does your team seem interested in weight loss? Create a group challenge where the whole team is focused on losing weight. This doesn’t have to be about shedding pounds either. You can track movement together, measure steps taken or track healthy foods that you eat.

Insurance Benefits

Like challenges centered around losing weight, some insurance companies will give employees a discount if they take part in fitness challenges or other educational and wellness opportunities. See if the plans you’re offering have any of these benefits. If so, encourage employees to take advantage of them.

Some insurance plans offer benefits like discounts at a gym as well. If you can offer these to your employees, you should. Gym memberships are a great way to show your employees that you want them to be healthy.

Take a Class Together

Educational classes on health and wellness topics can also be beneficial. Do your employees know how to cook healthy meals at home? Do they know what their food consists of and how to create the changes in their life that will make them well? Give them the tools they need to learn. Have an instructor come in and teach them how to make healthy meals, or look for a webinar online. Then, watch as a group.

Encourage Movement

Something else you can do as a group is take walks. Encourage walking and movement throughout the day. Take breaks and go on walks or see if anyone wants to go on walks at lunch.

Instead of sitting at a desk for a meeting, take your meetings on the road and head out for a walk. Not only will this encourage healthy movement, but walking while meeting can help encourage creativity and new thinking too. In fact, Steve Jobs and other creative minds were known for having walking meetings.

Make Mindfulness a Habit

Aside from group walks, develop group mindfulness habits as well. Practice breathing exercises as a group. Spend a few minutes each day in group meditation. Or, offer group stretching or chair yoga. Any time you’re encouraging your employees to get up and move around, you’re helping create a healthier work environment. These types of classes can help incorporate healthy habits into people’s lives, especially if they take them outside the office.

No matter how you do it, you should find ways to make your small business healthier. Health leads to overall wellness and happiness, which creates a happier and more productive workforce. Work to get your staff healthier and happier today.