6 Important Changes That Improve Employee Well Being In Your Business [Contributed Blog]

July 26, 2019 - 9 minutes read - Blog, Business Management

As an employer, it’s your job to motivate your employees and ensure that they are working to their full potential. Helping them to develop their skills and providing them with the right tools is a part of that, but it’s also important that you look after their welfare. We’re becoming a lot more aware of how stress at work impacts people and makes them less productive, so it’s important that you take an interest in your employee’s well being. If your employees are happy and healthy, they’ll work a lot harder and your business will benefit, but if you overwork people and don’t give them any support, they’ll just burn out and they won’t be effective. If you haven’t put much thought into your employee’s well being, here are some simple changes that you should make around the workplace.

Offer The Right Benefits

Benefits are important if you want to attract the best talent and reduce your staff turnover, but they can also be a great way to improve employee well being. Good health insurance is the most obvious benefit that you can offer if you want to improve well being, but things like a gym membership or a cycle to work scheme are equally as important. If you can help your employees to stay active and physically fit, that will have a big impact on their mental health as well. Some companies are also offering things like unlimited paid leave so if people feel that they need time off, they can take it. Don’t just think of benefits as a way to attract the best people when you’re hiring, use them as a way to improve the well being of all of your employees.

Enforce Breaks And Time Off

Taking enough time out of work to relax is important, but a lot of employees are quite bad at it. It’s becoming more common for people to work through their lunch hour or stay late and that’s not good for stress levels. If you want your employees to be happy and healthy, it’s important that you enforce breaks and time off properly. If your employees often work through breaks, your team might benefit from a timesheet app which helps to track hours easily. They can clock in and out on their phones and you can see exactly what hours people are working. That way, you can see whether people are skipping breaks or working late a lot of the time, then you can encourage them to take some time off or have a break.

You should also try to encourage everybody to take all of their leave, rather than trying to let it build up or just not taking it at all. Without proper time off, your employees are going to get stressed and burn themselves out. But if they take a week off every now and again, they’ll return to work feeling refreshed and they’ll be a lot more productive.

Host Social Events

Another way to make sure that people are taking the time to relax and blow off steam is to host social events. It’s a great way to help people get to know one another outside of the workplace which is great for improving communication and encouraging collaboration amongst your team, and it creates a more positive work environment overall. On top of that, you can make sure that people are spending time doing something relaxing rather than constantly working.

Open Up Communication

You can’t help an employee that is struggling if you don’t realize that there is a problem, which is why communication is so important. If your employees feel that they can’t come to you with their problems and they think that they’ll be thought of as a slacker if they tell you that they’re feeling overworked, they’ll sit in silence and it will start to impact their well being. That’s why you need to foster a culture of communication in the workplace and let employees know that your door is always open if they have a problem. That way, you can deal with an issue when it is small, rather than waiting until it affects an employee’s health and their performance suffers.

Invest In Your HR Department

Your HR department is arguably one of the most important parts of your business because they help to ensure that your employees are looked after properly. But they can only do their job effectively if they have the right resources, which is why it’s important that you invest heavily in your HR department. You need to have enough members of staff in the department so they can deal with their day to day duties and offer extra support to employees at the same time.

Provide Training On Mental Health

Mental health awareness has increased a lot in the last few years and people are better at spotting problems in themselves and others. The stigma around mental health problems has also reduced quite a bit and people feel more comfortable talking about it. However, it’s a steep learning curve and a lot of people still don’t really know how to deal with it, which is why you should offer some training to your employees. Give them some information on the causes and symptoms of mental health issues, particularly stress-related ones, so they’re more aware if they’re overworking themselves and they need to take a break. You should also give managers training on how to spot a problem in their employees and what action they should take if they do. These are difficult conversations to have and if your managers don’t know how to approach them properly, they won’t be able to help your employees effectively.

It’s also important that you give them information on how to find support if they need it. Sometimes, discussing the problem with a superior and finding ways to manage their workload is enough but in some cases, they may need more professional help and you need to show them how to access it.

Being a good boss isn’t just about making your employees work hard, it’s about making sure that their well being is looked after so they can be happy and healthy in the workplace, and these are some of the best ways to do that.

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Tags: Business Growth, employee management, HR