Employee health is on the minds of all business owners especially with COVID-19 seemingly resurging. Running a business in today’s climate is a challenge to say the least. Promoting wellness during this time needs to be a priority as you want to keep employees as healthy as possible. A small business can be crippled with a spread of the virus among the staff. Numerous businesses have had to close temporarily due to outbreaks among staff and customers. The following are tips to help promote wellness at your company to help drive productivity.
Provide Lunch For Employees
Providing lunch for employees can actually drive productivity. There are those members of the staff that will tend to take longer breaks at lunch. Keeping employees in the office with a free lunch can reduce the instances of this. This also gives the business the opportunity to provide healthy lunches that won’t lead to that crash in the middle of the afternoon. Unhealthy options are usually cheaper so think of the additional budget spent as an investment in daily productivity. The perk of having lunch provided can also help morale. Employees with student debt are looking for any way to save money to start chipping away at their loans. You can even offer employees nutrition classes as a part of an employee perk.
Remote Work Opportunities
There are a number of people in the workforce that can do their jobs remotely. Cutting down on the number of people at a business physically is important during this time. This is not possible with all types of businesses as some are client-facing like restaurants or home repair companies. Allowing people to work remotely does not mean that you should expect drops in productivity. Time tracking software should be used to ensure that all employees are putting forth an honest effort.
Mental Health Days
An employee that is able to schedule a mental health day once per quarter will appreciate it. Life is so much more than work that other areas of life when combined with work can seem like too much. Putting a focus on employee mental health is important as the stress caused by work is immense for some individuals. Even giving an employee time to work from home if they are going through a divorce or other personal issues can help drive employee retention. Employees will feel better about coming into work for a company that cares about them as individuals. \
Terminate Employees That Kill Morale
The office should be viewed as an ecosystem where a predatory person needs to be terminated. These people can kill the mood in the office and lead people to dread showing up to work. These employees spread rumors or generally talk badly about coworkers/the company. Do not tolerate this but it is important to sit down and talk with the employee. There could be a change of heart as they might have done the same thing at another job so it became a habit.
The goal of promoting wellness while helping drive productivity will take balance. This will also take trial and error as each workplace has a different dynamic.