In order for any business to flourish, it is imperative to have thriving employees. For a company, it is always important to have employees who are fit, healthy and happy. In order to make this happen there is a need to create a work culture that promotes health through all aspects of their lives. Employee health and wellbeing contributes heavily to their overall engagement within the business. Health promotion ensures that your staff actually want and like to be at work. Over time, this has a drastic effect on the businesses performance. Often health improves many areas of the business. Areas that not only improve production, but make money. Companies can stay ahead of competition with the help of a well-crafted corporate health programme.
This global trend is also starting to take root in Singapore. “Business leaders are beginning to recognise the importance of investing in corporate health,” says Patrick Teow, Chief Executive Officer of AIA Singapore. “We want to encourage healthy behaviors in companies. When repeated, these behaviors become healthy habits that boost company profitability.”
In today’s article, we look into how companies can benefit by investing in employee wellness. Yet more importantly, why it should matter to management.
1.Lower turnover
As mentioned earlier, in order for any business to flourish, it is imperative to have thriving employees. So it’s no surprise that when an employee is developing, engaged and enjoying their work, they’re less likely to look for another job. This in turn leads to more work being done, saves the time and money spent on searching and hiring someone new especially when there can sometimes be a shortage of talent, in the local talent pool. Also, if like many other businesses, you can’t find the best person, you’ll have to settle. This means hiring someone who can only do parts of the job, then training them up.
2.Improve your employee engagement in less than two minutes
According to Gallup, research shows that employee engagement is positively correlated with better health as engaged workers are less likely to be obese and have chronic conditions, as explained by Harvard Business Review. Numerous studies point to the fact that highly engaged workforces result in more profit for their employers; engaged and healthy employees miss work less often, are easier to retain, and are significantly more productive, says Keas’s Stevens, and that organizations with highly engaged employees achieve greater net income than organizations whose employees lag behind on engagement.
3.More productive and hard working
Promoting health at work can do more than just make them happy, it can make an employee more productive, too. Happier and healthier employees are shown to regularly outperform those who are in organisations which do not promote health and wellbeing. This is important to note, because for a long time, management believed investing in employee health schemes to be a waste of money, yielding little rewards for the business.
In recent years, this has changed. Through people like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and other influential figures advocating corporate health and happiness, health has become a more widely accepted part of the corporate culture. However, beyond this anecdotal evidence, studies are showing that the healthier your employees, the more productive and harder working they become. It reduces several issues like absenteeism, workplace accidents and errors go down when employees are engaged.
4.Bottom line benefits
As stated previously, it was once thought that promoting health didn’t necessarily add to the bottom line. However, we now know this to be false. Research shows that there is a new trend in business, today. A trend that says good health is good business. When it comes to the bottom line, few tactics is as beneficial as implementing a health scheme. Proving that employee health and wellbeing can improve the businesses ROI, all businesses could benefit.
Thickening out the bottom line is generally what most businesses want. And given that most employees want to be healthy and happy at work, it appears to be a win-win situation. Still, there are many businesses that don’t implement health into their business.
In Conclusion
A large part of adding value to your employees comes from their engagement within the company. Providing employees value and a culture that supports them mentally and physically is vital whilst getting the best work from them. This can come through many employee engagement tactics, including paying for employee’s to upskill, providing a nice place to eat or by implementing health schemes.
Singaporean workers also ranked wellness programmes–such as on-site fitness centers, health club memberships, and stress-reduction programmes–as one of the most important health and wellness work-life element. In terms of productivity, employees of organisations with effective wellness programmes are twice as likely to outperform their peers financially, with per employee revenue improving by up to 50%.
Because implementing powerful employee health and wellbeing schemes into the workforce can bolster the bottom line, improve general employee engagement and afford you less turnover. It’s fair to say that the health and happiness of your employees matter. Remember, providing value is what you do as a company. Allow your employees the same courtesy and watch them flourish as they find more meaning in their work.
If you would like to know more about how to maximize one’s wellbeing and achieve flow maximising human potential, do join us in our next “Living in Flow” event on 11 Mar as we bring Poonacha Machaiah, for an exclusive session on how you can leverage the latest research/technologies from genomics, digital health and lifestyle analytics to maximize their wellbeing.
For more information, visit our event page @ https://herlivinginflow.peatix.com/
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