While we can’t change the fact that life is stressful, we can empower ourselves with convenient and effective tools that help reduce its impact―and boost engagement at work. Take a minute to think about your employee wellness strategy: are you using technology tools enough to manage employees’ health habits?
When done right, wellness practices can be the most powerful tool in any organization’s arsenal. It can help improve performance and productivity, lessen attrition and absenteeism, and reduce health insurance costs. Let’s look at how you can incorporate some helpful tech tips to improve employee wellness at the workplace.
1. Start the Day With Fun Quizzes or Games
Our work schedules are often packed with tasks and to-do lists, so bringing a lighthearted touch back into workplace relationships is essential. When it comes to working and finding ways to get along with an office full of different personalities, having a bit of fun is a great way to ensure that everyone has a happy time at work.
Why not start the day with ice-breaker activities, like playing trivia quizzes or a simple game?
These activities are perfect for getting you and your team to tackle some new challenges and perhaps encouraging collaboration in novel ways when it comes to actual work. Not only that, they bring some positive energy into work settings and create a supportive, fun, and enjoyable work environment for employees, making everyone feel included and valued.
2. Schedule Mini-Breaks With Reminder Apps
Employees are always on the go, whether they’re running between meetings, attending events, or working a full day.
It’s important to give yourself and your team members a break, especially when working long hours on a project. Scheduled mini-breaks can help you stay energized, focus better, and prevent brain fatigue. Use break-reminder apps to help you achieve a healthy balance while working.
Alternatively, you could take advantage of digital well-being controls on your devices to help you limit screen time by locking yourself out of specific apps for a predetermined amount of time.
3. Use a Workplace Ergonomics Checklist
Most of our jobs require us to spend long hours sitting behind desks. The downside to this is that it can affect our posture, leading to backache or worse physical ailments.
Some businesses seem to understand this already, and we’re starting to see more and more offices adopting ergonomic workspaces to help their employees stay comfortable while working.
The ILO Ergonomic Checkpoints app is a quick and convenient way to help you to introduce good ergonomic practices in your workplace.
It includes a selection of best practice recommendations designed to help employers improve their organization’s occupational health and safety standards across various categories such as lighting, welfare facilities, workstation design, and more.
There are a total of 132 ergonomic checkpoints that can be utilized in workplaces to identify potentially risky situations and modify or correct them for the comfort and well-being of employees.
Download: ILO Ergonomic Checkpoints for Android | iOS (Free)
4. Stay on Top of Your Diet With Nutrition Guides
A balanced diet is the best way to provide ourselves with the necessary vitamins and nutrients for a healthier lifestyle. This can be hard to do on a busy schedule. However, there are useful health and nutrition apps out there that help you identify ingredients and monitor your calorie and nutrient intake, besides providing you with some valuable tips.
Whether your team members are looking to lose weight or are interested in learning more about ingredients in products and their nutritional values, these apps can help them keep up with their diet tracking and lifestyle practices.
5. Reduce Eye Strain With Blue Light Filter Controls
If you work for long periods on your computer, you’ve most certainly endured the onset of eye strain at some point.
Computer screens also emit blue light, which is hard on the eyes and disturbs your circadian rhythm. F.lux app comes to the rescue by helping you work more comfortably with its adaptive color temperature feature, based on your location and time of day. This reduces the blue light exposure from your screens.
For instance, during sundown, F.lux activates automatically to adjust the colors to display a tint of amber or orange, which is easier on your eyes. You can change these settings manually as well.
Download: F.lux for Windows (Free)
6. Monitor Employee Fitness With Activity Challenges
Activity challenges are great for motivating teams to be more active and productive. Help them live a healthier lifestyle with novel challenges like “take X amount of steps in a week” or “run the most kilometers in a month,” and so on.
Ask your employees to install popular social fitness-tracking apps on their smartphones or smartwatches that can help you monitor their progress. Make sure that these challenges are something they can achieve, and try to include some fun prizes there!
7. Improve Employee Health With Smoking Cessation Incentives
Studies have shown that smoking and other harmful habits are linked directly to lack of concentration and adverse health effects. Creating a “no-smoking” work environment can have several health and cost benefits.
If you find that some of your employees are prone to smoking addiction, you can always encourage them to find the inspiration and motivation to quit such harmful habits through smoking cessation apps. Try to offer them cash rewards or other valuable incentives such as gift cards or discounts to ensure they stick to healthy habits.
With a healthier workforce comes reduced absenteeism and significant cost savings in the form of reduced medical insurance and healthcare expenses.
Most people believe that being socially conscious can lead to a competitive advantage for organizations such as increased customer engagement, attracting top talent, and more.
While this is true in many situations, there’s another benefit to this—it can help businesses improve the health and well-being of their employees too. When employees feel that their organization has a strong sense of purpose beyond financial outcomes, they become more invested in initiatives that make a difference to communities.
To create a positive work environment, you should encourage employees to bring out their philanthropic interests through engagement in community events or virtual fundraising or donation activities.
Even with your busy schedules, you can still do a little social good. The Freerice initiative allows you to do just that. Its goal is to fight hunger by letting you play multiple-choice trivia quizzes via their website or smartphone apps. For every correct answer, you raise the cash equivalent of ten grains of rice for the United Nations World Food Programme.
Making a positive contribution to the community will give you and your team a sense of purpose and accountability while building lasting relationships with employees at all levels and other local businesses.
Download: Freerice for Android | iOS (Free)
Make Employee Wellness a Priority
Workplace wellness comes in many forms—from access to tools, facilities, and resources needed for daily functioning as well as things that improve morale and foster a sense of physical and mental well-being.
Regardless of how your organization chooses to improve workplace wellness, making employees aware of how their work habits affect them is the first step toward creating a happier and healthier workforce. It’s never too late to make a change, so take some time today to make employee wellness a top priority.
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