The well-being of employees in the workplace is essential as it affects their performance. A healthy workforce can increase productivity, decrease absenteeism, and improve customer service. On the other hand, stressed workers often result in high employee turnover and poor employer branding.
As a business leader, it’s your role to provide a safe space for your employees. This means that your top priority is ensuring their physical, emotional, and psychological safety. Whether you’re managing one hundred or ten thousand employees, a healthy workplace is always an advantage for all.
This includes prioritizing workplace diversity, inclusion, justice, and equity. Some examples of equity in the workplace involve considering the different needs of individuals with diverse backgrounds.
Here are seven steps you can follow to cultivate a healthy workplace:
- Identify The Barriers To Safety
Before implementing changes, you must be aware of all the barriers. These may include physical barriers, such as poor lighting, uncomfortable temperatures, or geographical distances. There can also be psychological barriers, like low self-esteem or social anxiety, that make an employee feel nervous around superiors and colleagues.
Any of these barriers cause stress in your employees and keep them from performing at their full potential. Once you know what they are, removing them from your workplace becomes easier.
- Get Rid Of The Barriers
Once you’ve identified all the barriers, it’s time to create a safe environment for your employees. This can mean adding more comfortable chairs so they won’t develop back problems. You may consider changing the lighting conditions to avoid eye strain while working.
You may also hire additional security personnel to ensure that no night-shift employee feels threatened. Whatever it takes to make your employees feel safe is worth investing in if it means increased productivity and lower turnover.
- Establish Clear Communication
After eliminating barriers to safety, start implementing clear communication. Clarify work expectations with your team members so that they understand your company’s goals. You can better drive them toward achieving targets by making them feel more engaged in their tasks.
You can do this by holding group and one-on-one meetings with your employees to discuss their roles in the company. If you have many workers, talk to departmental supervisors first so they can disseminate the information. This ensures everyone is on the same page before starting any projects together.
In addition, consider implementing an open-door policy, which enables your employees to discuss issues, such as performance reviews, promotions, and salary increases. They can express their concerns openly without fear of retribution from higher management. This creates an environment where they’re comfortable enough to say what’s on their mind, giving them a positive experience in the company.
- Provide Growth Opportunities
Most employees don’t want to stay stuck in the same role forever. Many aspire to be promoted and increase their knowledge to reach their highest potential. If your organization doesn’t support growth, you’ll lose your employees.
Fostering a healthy workplace is also about encouraging career development among your workforce. However, this isn’t only limited to providing them with opportunities for training and certifications. You can also give them chances to grow personally through coaching and feedback sessions from their departmental supervisors.
Implementing these results in employee satisfaction, translating to higher retention rates. Valuing top performers can help your company grow and succeed.
- Set Up An Employee Wellness Program
If you have a sickly workforce, it creates high absenteeism rates. And if you can’t handle this issue right away, it affects the bottom line due to unscheduled days off. In short, your company won’t meet the demands of your customers on time, leading to lower sales and a bad reputation.
But with a holistic employee wellness program, helping your workers stay healthy is possible. This includes offering health screenings and free preventative services like flu shots, annual physical check-ups, and blood pressure checks.
You may look into adding multiple wellness rooms on the commercial premises. Your employees can take a few minutes off work to attend to their health needs in these areas. For instance, if they feel overwhelmed by a project, this wellness room is their safe break space. They can recharge their minds and energies before returning to their desks. Creative ideas may come up after a short but refreshing break, helping departments solve problems.
- Offer Flexible Work Arrangements
Technological advancements are providing people with opportunities to access information wherever they are. Thus, many tasks don’t require employees to be in the workplace to get the job done. This opens the door to flexible working arrangements and work–life balance.
However, adopting this type of working environment requires proper planning and implementation. This includes providing your employees access to functional devices. As such, consider shouldering at least 10% to 20% of their laptop or tablet expenses.
Set up policies to respect your employees’ boundaries. For instance, if their shift ends at six in the evening, then they don’t have to respond to any messages after their shift. This can help increase your retention rate.
- Seek Out External Support
In case you manage thousands of employees, providing them with emotional and mental support is challenging. This is especially true if your company is under a lot of stress due to the increasing demand.
You can look for additional external support to help your employees cope with the pressures and stress that come with work. For example, consider outsourcing counseling services that support managers and other employees struggling with their mental health.
The same goes for workers who become physically sick due to stress. For instance, they’re experiencing difficulty breathing, fatigue, panic attacks, high blood pressure, or heartburn. You may need to outsource medical support from a team of nurses and doctors. They’re trained to attend to the physical health needs of your staff so that mild symptoms won’t lead to hospitalization or even death.
Summing It Up
Leading a workplace requires fostering a healthy workplace. For your employees to be happy and productive, you must care about their overall well-being. This includes attending to their physical, psychological, and emotional needs. Consequently, they can give the company their energy and creativity.
The above steps can help you get started. If you can’t provide support alone, consider outsourcing these tasks to external organizations. They’ll know how to handle your staff’s physical and emotional needs, especially during stressful periods.
