Why should your staff’s health be of interest to you? Because it helps to maximise the engagement, productivity and happiness of your employees.
Encouraging healthy habits
The key is to think about how you can nudge your staff into repeating a desired behaviour today and in the days which follow. As with resolutions, we usually want to stick to something that is beneficial for us, such as more exercising or saving money.
However, we fail to pick a resolution that we could actually sustain; therefore, we should not choose the most challenging aims. Often our beloved habits are what make us fail to follow through with the goals we chose.
An article on the website of the INSEAD business school focused on how to sustain healthy habits. For the best results, we need to promote healthy habits and simultaneously drop the unhealthy ones.
Offer rewards and make it fun
Providing people with information is not enough. To change the habits of your employees, you need to create opportunities for the consistent repetition of healthy behaviours. Furthermore, these behaviours should be rewarded.
You might offer incentives to cycle to work regularly by partnering with a bike-sharing enterprise. You could also subsidise what your staff eat in order to make delicious and healthy food the standard option.
Make healthy actions easy and enjoyable: it can be something as simple as providing fresh fruit. When both conditions are met, your employees will form healthy habits.
By making repetition easy, you will help your employees to sustain their habits. You can also try to tie a new healthy behaviour to an already existing habit. You could, for example, encourage people to schedule walking meetings or teach them how to recognise signs of stress in themselves.
To promote more sport, many firms offer competitions and challenges, thus adding a fun factor to the programme. Rewards need to be immediate; they also work better if they are not always automatic but sometimes given at random intervals.
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