Have you ever come to the office and found your employee looking like under the weather, but they are still at work? Are your employees frequently absent on sick leave? Does their absenteeism affect your organisation’s productivity and efficiency? If your answer to these question is ‘Yes’, chances are, you need to immediately design wellbeing policies.

Smart organisations realise that employees are the ultimate driving machine to keep the company’s business running. Therefore, they implement the old business mantra ‘we put our people first’ and plan wellbeing policies accordingly. The main objective of this program is to enhance employee performance by improving their health and safety.

When the organisation is filled with vivacious energetic employees, the work culture automatically reflects positive vibes and workers feel motivated to perform better, become more productive and supportive as well.

However, a growing concern among employers in this fast-paced digital era, is that a lot of people do not understand the importance of employee wellbeing in a workplace. Unhealthy lifestyle such as eating too much fast food, lack of exercise, sleep too late, and smoking, pose significant risks to health condition and reduces stamina.

Coupled with bigger workload and higher life demands, maintaining health and wellness becomes one of the major challenge faced by the modern society. Seeing this phenomenon going widespread, business leaders should take concrete steps to formulate wellbeing policies that actually work. Here’s how you build the culture:

See: Presenteeism at the Workplace: Physically Present, But Not Counted

Define the wellbeing goals

Before deciding to launch the wellbeing policies, you should conduct a thorough research on what needs to be defined in the program. Find out your employees’ current health condition by conducting regular health check-ups. You also need to analyse health risks and diseases that may infect employees during certain periods, such as seasonal flu or fever.

In addition, you also need to consider employees’ mental health. Make sure that they do not burnout caused by stress from overload tasks. Undetected stress suffered by employees might lead to obvious absenteeism. However, this will further lead to more unproductive workings, namely presenteeism.

Socialise to all employees

Communication is the key to successful implementation of wellbeing policies. Spread the word across the organisation, about the need for implementation of a wellbeing policy right from top management to lower-levels. Be it through face-to-face communication or online social channels, you have to clearly communicate the reason why the program is created in the first place, what are the functions and benefits, how it works, and how employees should engage in the program.

This process should be carried out continuously and consistently, until all employees are aware of the significance of wellbeing policies in the workplace.

Be the role model

Don’t just ask employees to live a healthy life without being a real role model to them. Demonstrate your support and commitment for wellbeing policies leading by example. You need to showcase how you practice healthy lifestyle and work-life balance. For example, you can go to work by riding bike or on foot, as a part of exercise.

Offer rewards that align with wellbeing policy

Material offerings such as bonuses and incentives do not always serve the purpose of being the best motivator in driving employee wellbeing programs. However, it never hurts to appreciate employees’ efforts by offering certain rewards. To make it seem more meaningful, you need to slightly modify the reward in accordance with your wellness policy.

Such as for instance, you can offer lunch vouchers for a week in a vegan restaurant close to the office, for employees who were never absent in the last 3 months.

Be it offering employees reimbursement for joining fitness or yoga classes, giving wearable tracker, or allowing break time to catch power naps, wellbeing policies today have increasingly become popular perks offered by companies to ensure employees are fit and healthy to be able to deliver their best at work everyday.

If you too can organise and implement the wellbeing policies correctly, then creating happier, healthier workplaces, with more productive employees is no longer an unachievable goal or a distant dream.

Read also: Technology Should Help Companies Worry Less about Workplace Safety and Health of Employees