Corporate Wellness: What is it and how can you incorporate it into your work life for better mental and physical health?
Wellness is the action of promoting healthy habits on a daily basis to attain better physical and mental health outcomes in the long term. Wellness is something that we all try to achieve in our personal lives but tend to ignore it when it comes to our mental and physical wellbeing at work.
We tend to spend the majority of our day at work, and it is imperative that we understand and encourage healthier work and home place habits to boost our mental and physical states.
So how does one achieve this?
Primarily, organizations need to place greater importance on encouraging their workers to take breaks, move their bodies, interact with others and even have “nap” times so that employees don’t feel exhausted. Multi-billion dollar organizations like Google and Microsoft are infamous for their low employee turnover rate, which all stems from the fact that they heavily encourage corporate wellness for their employees. From games rooms, to nap rooms and an array of restaurants and cafes on their premises, these organizations have not cut costs on making sure their employees feel like their best selves and it has evidently paid off seeing as though they are the biggest companies in the world.
However, a lot of organizations cannot afford to splurge so greatly on these amenities, so what can they do? Corporate wellness does not necessarily mean facilities, it can come from having a zen/meditation corner or having weekly check-ins with the employees wherein they can talk about anything that is on their mind, work or non-work related. Making sure employees take sufficient breaks, eat good nutritious food, and get up and do some sort of movement throughout the day is also extremely pivotal. Even encouraging small social events throughout the year or once a month can encourage and show employees that they are cared for the organization rather than just robots working for people. Going on small, and budget friendly, corporate retreats to boost employee connections and getting to know the people they are working with could also greatly help in improving corporate wellness as the employees would have a better sense of belonging within the organization.
Corporate wellness does not just start and end at the office. It is important that after employees leave the workplace that they unwind and do not continue to take on work calls or reply to emails unless it is a necessity. Creating boundaries like this is essential in not mixing ones work and home life and will promote maintaining a healthy mental state. Many a times, we tend to check our work emails while we are at home out of pure habit or a want to check up on what’s going on. Although it is good to stay up to date on what is happening within your organization, hazing these boundaries between home and work life inevitably leads to higher stress levels and lower bonding and connections at home. This can impact your relationships at home as well which then ends up affecting your work and leads to a very unhealthy cycle of being unhappy at work and at home.
To summarize the aforementioned, an incorporation of all of these tips can guarantee you to feel better mentally and physically within your workplace and this therefore ends up having a great impact on your overall wellbeing in your life.
