Organisations can be innovative in entrenching a culture of wellness among staff beyond the medical cover and regular check-ups.
BY ELIZABETH MUGUCHU
While having my lunch today – a serving of unhealthy chips and a quarter fried chicken – I couldn’t help but wonder, how over the years I had accumulated the kilograms and grown dependent on so many pills to regulate the lifestyle diseases I had acquired. I cannot complain because the situation is of my own making, but I wonder, beyond the health seminars and medical cover what else can an organisation do to ensure its employees’ health and wellness requirement is well covered? Helping your employees get healthy takes more than those monthly challenges or once a year screening. To truly make a difference in the employees’ wellness and sustain those results, employers need to create a culture of wellness. A culture of wellness makes health part of the company’s mission and empowers employees to get healthier, happier and more productive by creating healthy habits.
The years do add up, and our habits become us.
Unhealthy habits form over a long period of repetition. Repetition of bad habits forms behaviours and ultimately, it forms the culture. Let us consider scenarios in the workplace. Employees get in the office as early as between 6:30 am to 8:30 am and leave between 5:00 pm and 8:00 pm, which means they spend between 8-12 hours in the office, influencing each other and being influenced by the organisation and its environment. Due to financial constraints or just bad decisions, the average employee will have a quick breakfast of tea and a snack to begin the day, hunched over the desk for most of the morning, drinking numerous cups of coffee and staring at the screen for most of the morning. For lunch, due to the logistics, and the environment, he will get to the nearest cafe or hotel for a cheap unhealthy lunch, and back to the office for more hunched stress over the screen, and more coffee. In the evening, if he is lucky he will have his one nutritious meal of the day, at some late hour and quickly fall asleep. Tight work schedules leave us with little time to exercise, to de-stress, and due to availability, our meals are fast food options with no nutritive value.
What are the long-term effects of unhealthy habits?
Long hours seated staring at a screen is unhealthy for your eyesight, could affect your back and posture leading to back problems, not to mention the lack of exercise can add up to the extra weight in all the wrong places. The long hours and high expectations translate to stress which exhibits through constant illness, toxic communication in the form of super-aggressive employees, and angry emails. It also bleeds into the performance and ultimately the productivity of the organisation.
Out of the box solutions?
Let us think about employee wellness and health holistically beyond the health aspect of having a nutritious meal, some exercise, adequate rest and a clean and safe working environment. We also need to think about mental and psychological wellness, financial health, and develop wellness initiatives that include influencing, family, friends and the environment. A great example of this is how creating a garden club in your organisation can influence mental wellness as gardening is quite a relaxing activity, it can influence the financials of the individual as they save a few pennies by growing their own food and growing an organic garden can help them focus on healthy alternatives and exercise as well!
Developing new health and/or fitness habits takes quite a while – an average of 21 to 66 days of daily repetition, I have given up on most of the health initiatives within the first 14 days, not due to determination, but because it seems that the universe is against my efforts. I am sure many feel the same way. With all the focus on health and wellness initiatives in the workplace, and the improvements made to the monitoring and controlling of the environment to ensure employees are engaged and happy at work, it makes sense to foster workplace wellness programs.
As the world of work progresses, one of the signs of a top-notch employer will be the quality of their workplace wellness program. Big or small, all businesses can benefit from some form of a wellness initiative at work. If your company’s wellness initiative only focuses on health numbers, you are missing a huge area of opportunity to cultivate happier and more productive employees. Your wellness strategy will not yield significant and sustainable results if employees aren’t able to practice a healthy lifestyle during work hours.
Elizabeth Muguchu is a Full Member of KIM, a productivity coach, a HR expert and an ongoing PhD student of Human Resource Management. Email: elizabethmuguchu@gmail.com
