You might not need your workforce to be elite athletes, but physical health forms the foundation for mental wellbeing, self-esteem, and employee satisfaction. As an employer, there’s plenty you can do to support your people in leading healthier lives during work hours and in their own time.
Promoting a culture of employee wellbeing doesn’t have to involve huge investments. Small changes to environments and attitudes can encourage habit changes that have far-reaching impacts on health and fitness.
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What are the best ways to help staff be healthy and active?
Provide flexible options for physical activity
People like to engage with fitness and physical activity in their own way. Give your employees plenty of variety so they can find something they’ll love. A corporate gym access benefit is a great start, but don’t stop there. How about a company running club, walking group, wellness workshops, or simply a Slack chat for finding a workout buddy? Listen to what your people want and try – as far as possible – to facilitate it.
Encourage healthier eating in and out of work
Healthy eating is a critical part of the employee wellness piece, and can make a big difference to obesity rates, long-term health issues, and even mental wellbeing. How can you encourage people to eat better on site, in meetings, whilst travelling, and even in hybrid or WFH situations? You can’t dictate what adults eat, but you can educate, incentivise, and gently support habit change.
Employee fitness benefits and discounted corporate gym access
Offering gym access as an employee benefit is a must, but it must match the way your people work. It won’t work to simply offer discounted access to a single site gym in town (or have an on-site gym). Give staff plenty of choice and options about when, where, and even how they want to exercise. A good way to do this is using a partner like Hussle to unlock access to a huge network of gyms and fitness centres around the country.
Provide education about fitness and healthy habits
There are lots of reasons to explain people’s poor eating habits or aversion to exercise. Gaps in education or understanding, no support at home, lack of role models or positive examples. Sometimes people simply don’t know where to start. You can help by providing education around healthy eating, exercise, and generally being more active. This could be in the form of resources, groups, workshops from external partners, or your own corporate benefits programme.
Celebrate movement milestones and champion activity
Within your workforce you are likely to have keen exercisers and total beginners. Can you leverage the enthusiasm and achievements of those already engaging in physical activity? Use your newsletter, socials, or internal comms to spotlight fitness achievements or remarkable stories. Have peer to peer activity champions who could support others. Create a culture of health and activity that enables everyone to take part.
Think beyond birthday-cake office culture
Office culture can be a barrier to healthy eating. Look at ways to move away from birthday cakes, free doughnuts, and the 11am coffee shop dash (complete with flaky pastries). Encourage healthier food choices, or side step food options entirely and bring in new, non-food ways to celebrate birthdays and client wins.
Less sitting, more movement office design
Architects and interior designers are becoming more interested in building healthy spaces that encourage wellbeing, because they recognise the impact our environment has on our health. How can you redesign your office layout – or the way your people work – to minimise sitting and maximise movement? Encourage delivering messages to colleagues in person rather than by email, or walk-and-talk meetings rather than a boardroom option.
Bring fitness and wellbeing to the top of conversations
The best way to encourage a healthier workforce is to create a corporate culture that promotes health and wellbeing. Encourage conversations about fitness, healthy eating, activity, and healthy habits. Ask for ideas about changes people would like to see implemented. Make it easier, more enjoyable, and more beneficial for people to make healthy choices. After all, it’s the small habits that build up to make a big difference.
Why is it important to encourage health and wellbeing at work
Promoting a culture of health and wellbeing not only benefits individual employees, but enhances your company’s performance and reputation. Encouraging healthier choices, both in the workplace and outside of it, will contribute to the health of the nation as a whole and ultimately lead to the success of your business.
Corporate gym membership that your workforce will actually use
It’s no longer acceptable to treat corporate fitness benefits as a tick box exercise. Your staff members have so much choice outside of the workplace – from budget gyms to leisure centres, sports clubs and online fitness offers. You need to design a corporate fitness benefit that accurately reflects how, when, and where your people want to engage in fitness.
Hussle offers access to a varied network of 1,000+ gyms, pools, fitness centres and online fitness options for a single membership. Talk to us to see how partnering with Hussle for your corporate fitness benefit can give your people the choice and variety they need from a discounted gym membership.
