Every boss in America wants to have a workforce of happy, healthy, and productive workers. However, if you aren’t prepared to take specific measures yourself to encourage their happiness and wellbeing, it isn’t going to happen by magic.
Here are a couple of simple ideas that any business leader can take and run with in order to encourage the health and wellbeing of their workforce.
Encourage Self-Care
Prevention is often the best treatment for illnesses, both physical and emotional. If you want your workers to be as healthy and happy as possible, you will need to give them the tools that they need to ensure their own health.
Even seemingly small and insignificant measures that you take can actually have a dramatic effect on your workers’ attitude and wellbeing. For example, making your workers aware of the importance of healthy eating, while providing them with a canteen full of healthy options, might just get them to rethink their diet.
Similarly, you should encourage your workers to be aware of their emotional and psychological state and to not allow themselves to be overworked to the point where their well-being is at risk.
Destigmatize Mental Health Issues
It can be very difficult to encourage those who are suffering from emotional problems from speaking out about them. Part of the reason for this is that there is still a great deal of stigma in our society around issues of mental illness. No one is expecting you to single-handedly reverse these sometimes deeply-ingrained attitudes, but you can make your business a place that is safe and welcoming for workers who have mental health issues.
It is also important that where you encounter examples of the prejudices or stigma that can discourage workers from acknowledging and reporting on mental health issues, you make it clear that these are not views you support at a company level.
Show Them You Care
Many Americans will base their decision about who to seek employment with on the quality of the health coverage that the employer offers. There are workers who have had bad experiences in the past, either because a previous employer didn’t care for their welfare or actively made their health worse.
Show your workers that you care about their health, don’t just offer a health plan and leave it at that. In fact, you should actively seek out employee feedback on the health plan you offer. When a worker takes time off work, they want to know they are covered. This article about how to close gaps in care highlights that health plans need to be monitored constantly by providers to ensure that they are always delivering the best for workers and businesses. Look for a provider who you trust to evaluate and re-evaluate.
The good news is that if you are prepared to make the effort, you can easily improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your workforce. Find your workers a health plan that allows them to rest easy, safe in the knowledge that they will be covered if something happens. Look for healthcare providers who actually care about patients, not just numbers. If you can do that while also encouraging your workers to remain vigilant around their own wellbeing, everything will fall into place.
