For organisations, your well-being programme can create opportunities within your community and can encourage employee engagement. Well-being is a soft approach to ensuring the resilience of your employees by caring for them as a whole person and group.

For organisations, your well-being programme can create opportunities within your community and can encourage employee engagement. Well-being is a soft approach to ensuring the resilience of your employees by caring for them as a whole person and group.

We’ve listed five factors that will influence the health and well-being of your employees. The aim of these factors is to provide you an insight in to what organisations can do to develop a beneficial well-being programme that can in-turn promote physical and mental health in the workplace.  Here are a few pointers to get you started on developing a company well-being programme, alongside processing a health and safety audit and workplace risk assessments.

Connect

Well-being programmes are crucial to encouraging good health and mental well-being of employees. Most employers recognise that a supportive well-being programme can increase employee engagement and as a result improve business ethos.

What’s needed?

• A carefully designed well-being programme – which should reflect business needs, consider business challenges and offer choice to individuals.

How can this benefit a business?

• Staff who are happy and healthy will be engaged and want to work for the organisation thus absence (including sickness absence) will be reduced.

Get Active

Does looking after ourselves means we should exercise more and eat more carefully?

This is quite a complex question because being active means more than just looking after our physical well-being. We should also consider mental well-being as part of being active and this is something to promote to your workers.

Modern day life can leave us with little time to exercise appropriately. Office workers are prone to this via being tied to a desk for most of the day. It’s important that office work employers promote their employees to undertake frequent short breaks, whether this includes taking the lunch hour to walk to the shops or short intervals of walking around the office.

• Exercise – It should be designed to stretch us but not be stressful. It should also consider those who may find the first step into exercise a real challenge.
• With any well-being programme we need to think about what motivates people and what can be achieved realistically – take all employees into consideration.
• Other things to consider will be cost, time and resources. You’ll need to take into account shift workers or those working remotely. Considering DSE training for employee progression is always something to consider.

Take Notice

Do you think your employees stop and take notice of their colleagues, or appreciate the facilities or opportunities your company provides for them. Or, do you they race through the day just focusing on their task, whilst being oblivious to the outside world?

Encourage short breaks

• Do all your employees take a break or their lunch break? Encouraging employees to leave their desk for lunch or short breaks is proven to boost productivity levels throughout the working day. Focusing for a long period of time is difficult.

Taking notice is about keeping ourselves mentally prepared and fresh. It’s about taking time to reflect, learn, taking some time to appreciate what is going on around us and most importantly taking time to enjoy those things we appreciate and love doing.

Keep Learning

In our lives we are bombarded with messages about keeping physically fit.

The facts surrounding mental illness

• Mental illness is a ‘hidden’ illness and is often regarded with scepticism within the workplace.
• Research shows that 1 in 6 of us suffers with some form mental illness. Specialists often comment that this figure is much higher and many of us struggle with the pressures of everyday life.

So what can you do?

• Take time to find out more about employee issues – as employers, not only should you be the driving force of work, but also provide support for your workers.
• Employers should make more effort to help managers and staff understand what mental is and how it can affect people.
• Encourage people to learn how they can exercise their mind to keep mentally fit.

There are many organisations who work to promote mental health awareness. Some, like Mental Health First Aid England provide First Aid training to help people identify the symptoms in others so they in turn can offer help and make sure they get the appropriate advice.

If you would like more information on developing your organisation’s well-being programme call our consultancy team on 020 7469 0200 or email [email protected].