Workplace wellness is essential for employee health, engagement, and productivity. An investment in wellness initiatives can pay dividends through reduced absenteeism, lower healthcare costs, and higher job satisfaction. This article reveals 20 secrets for creating a culture of wellness that will benefit both employees and organizations.
From encouraging movement to offering mental health support, small changes can make a big difference in fostering employee wellness. Read on to learn simple, actionable tips for improving wellness at work.
The modern workplace often involves long hours, high stress, and sedentary lifestyles that take a toll on employee health and wellbeing. However, a focus on wellness initiatives can counteract these issues and create positive outcomes for both workers and organizations.
What exactly is workplace wellness? It refers to an organization’s efforts to promote and support employee health, safety, and wellbeing. Elements of a strong wellness program can include:
- Health education and coaching
- Preventative screenings and flu shots
- Smoking cessation plans
- Healthy food offerings
- Opportunities for physical activity
- Work-life balance policies
- Mental health support
- Ergonomic equipment
- Flexible work arrangements
Research shows that prioritizing wellness at work leads to:
- Reduced absenteeism: Healthier employees take less sick days
- Increased productivity: Well employees are more engaged and productive
- Lower healthcare costs: Good health reduces insurance premiums and claims
- Higher retention: Wellness programs increase employee loyalty and retention
This article reveals 20 secrets that can help improve wellness in any workplace, backed by organizational psychology research. Implementing even a few of these strategies can enhance workplace culture, boost health outcomes, and protect your greatest asset – your employees.
Secret 1: Encourage Physical Activity
Daily movement is vital for mental and physical health. An office-bound workforce often spends most of their waking hours sitting, which takes a major toll over time. Just 30 minutes of walking per day can produce benefits like improved heart health, reduced disease risk, better weight management, and elevated mood.
There are many creative ways to incorporate physical activity into the workday:
- Walking meetings: Replace sit-down meetings with walking meetings when possible. Moving while talking gets the blood flowing and may even boost creativity.
- Standing and treadmill desks: Provide employees with desks that allow for standing or slow walking. This builds movement into the day.
- Stretch breaks: Encourage short breaks for simple stretches to relieve muscle tension. Post stretch routines in break rooms as a reminder.
- Walking groups: Organize a daily or weekly walking group to encourage coworkers to take movement breaks together.
- Activity challenges: Set step count or movement challenges and reward teams who hit targets. This incentivizes activity.
Making movement a natural part of each workday is an easy, low-cost strategy for elevating energy, focus, and wellbeing across an organization.
Secret 2: Promote Healthy Eating Habits
Diet plays a central role in employee health outcomes like disease risk, sickness, strength, and even cognitive function. Unfortunately, workdays are filled with traps like junk food-stocked vending machines, catered fried foods for meetings, and fast food runs due to long hours.
Organizations can support healthy eating through simple measures like:
- Healthy office snacks: Provide nutrient-dense snacks like fresh fruit, nuts, seeds, and yogurt. Lead by example.
- Healthy cafeteria choices: Ensure your cafeteria includes balanced, nutritious meal options. Place these items front-and-center.
- Nutrition labels: Post nutrition labels and calorie counts clearly on all food offerings. Knowledge is power.
- Hydration stations: Place water dispensers around office spaces and encourage employees to drink water instead of sugary beverages. Proper hydration boosts energy and brain function.
Mechanism | Example |
---|---|
Lead by Example | Provide C-suite with healthy snacks daily |
Make Systematic Changes | Ensure 50% of vending machine offerings meet health criteria |
Provide Education | Host lunch talks with nutritionists |
Offer Incentives | Reward teams who meet healthy eating targets |
With some strategic nudging, workplaces can make healthy eating the norm, driving sustainability through policy, environmental change, and peer support .
Secret 3: Encourage Mental Health Breaks
The constant connectivity of modern work can take a toll on focus, creativity, decision-making, and overall mental health. Without time to regularly reset attention, employees become more prone to burnout and errors.
Mental health breaks – whether a few mindful minutes or a full lunch hour offline – are vital. Organizations should explicitly encourage employees to take regular breaks, especially when tackling complex tasks.
Potential break activities include:
Short Breaks
- Stepping outside for fresh air
- Closing eyes to relax
- Stretching to relieve physical tension
- Doing breathing exercises to clear the mind
Longer Breaks
- Enjoying screen-free lunch
- Finding a quiet space to meditate
- Listening to calming music
- Taking power naps (where possible)
- Going for a walk outdoors
Breaks provide mental respite, boost focus, spark creativity, reduce fatigue, and buffer stress. They drive higher quality work output across an entire day. Support employees in making breaks a regular habit.
Secret 4: Foster Positive Relationships
Humans are social creatures – our health and happiness depends heavily on the quality of relationships and sense of connection. The workplace is a central community hub shaping much of life. Fostering positive, supportive relationships should be a top priority of organizational wellness initiatives.
Strategies to nurture high-quality relationships include:
Peer Support
- Encourage coworkers to collaborate
- Train employees in emotional intelligence (EQ) skills
- Facilitate meaningful connections through shared meals, events, volunteer days
Manager Support
- Coach leaders in empathy, validation and trust-building
- Train managers to spot employees who need connection or guidance
- Encourage one-on-one check-ins between reports and managers
Mentorship
- Develop formal mentorship programs to foster inter-department sharing
- Allow employees time each month for mentor coffee chats
- Support managers in becoming stewards and mentors for their teams
When employees feel genuinely connected to their peers, managers, and mentor figures – they are far more loyal, motivated, resilient and productive over the long term.
Secret 5: Create a Comfortable Work Environment
The spaces where employees spend some 40 hours each week should optimize comfort, functionality, and overall wellbeing. Aspects like natural light, temperature control, properly arranged furnishings, muted colors and textures all influence cognitive functioning, collaboration, creativity and even mental health.
Tips for designing a comfortable, supportive office environment include:
Layout
- Cluster desks to enable collaboration while allowing privacy through partitioning
- Add huddle rooms for quiet focus work or meetings
- Use plants, carpets, art to soften hard surfaces
Furniture
- Provide height-adjustable desks supporting sitting or standing
- Choose ergonomic chairs supporting healthy movement and posture
- Place couches and informal seating in common areas
Ambience
- Allow natural light through windows or solar tubes
- Give employees control over lighting levels
- Filter harsh overhead lighting with diffusers or indirect sources
While major renovations can optimize wellness, small affordable tweaks like better task lighting, noise-masking devices, and updated community kitchen furnishings also help considerably.
Secret 6: Encourage Work-Life Balance
All work and no play is unsustainable. Employees who regularly work long days, pull “all-nighters”, and sacrifice personal life for professional demands have a massively amplified risk of burnout. Encouraging healthy work-life balance is vital.
Strategies for work-life balance include:
- Protect weekends: Mandate at least one “no contact” day per week for employees to recharge without expectation of availability.
- Discourage evenings/weekends work: Be vigililant for off-hour work habits that signal poor boundaries and pre-burnout.
- Model balance: Ensure leaders aren’t sending emails at midnight, but actively use vacation time to demonstrate employees should prioritize self-care.
- Offer flexible arrangements: Permit adjustments like compressed weeks, job shares, or partial remote work to help employees meet personal needs.
- Provide proper staffing: Have adequate staff and bandwidth so excessive hours aren’t required to fulfill duties.
- Set email/notification cut-offs: Disable non-urgent notifications during evenings, weekends and vacations.
Helping employees set boundaries and meet personal responsibilities boosts loyalty, retention and wellbeing over the long haul.
Secret 7: Provide Opportunities for Professional Development
Employees who feel stagnant, bored or lacking career progression often disengage, performing the minimum required despite their talents. Alternatively, offering ample professional development opportunities captivates top talent.
Professional growth options might include:
Formal Training
- Hard skill programs like technical certifications, specialized equipment operation
- Soft skill training in communications, emotional intelligence (EQ), project management
Mentorship
- Match interested employees with internal subject matter experts for guidance
- Facilitate peer mentorship around shared passions/career objectives
New Responsibilities
- Offer stretch assignments, special projects, committee roles to build experience
- Empower employees to own processes through upskilling courses
Tuition Support
- Offer financial assistance for external college classes or nanodegrees
- Allow use of work time for professional development coursework
Employees want to continuously progress. Facilitating abundant upskilling, reskilling and mentorship opportunities empowers world-class talent.
Secret 8: Encourage Open Communication
Positive workplace relationships and culture depend heavily on open, trusting communication channels. Employees should feel safe expressing concerns, ideas and input without judgment. Fostering transparent, compassionate communications across hierarchical levels reduces ambiguity, safeguards psychological safety, and unlocks innovation.
Ways to encourage open communication include:
- Active listening: Model attentive listening without interruption from leadership down in all interactions.
- Anonymous surveys: Regularly survey staff to solicit suggestions and surface concerns anonymously.
- Open door policies: Ensure all employees can directly contact leadership when needed without bureaucracy.
- skipped
- Praise participation: Recognize employees who identify issues or offer solutions without fear of repercussion.
Giving every member of an organization voice cultivates inclusion, morale and optimal function. Smooth communications require conscientious nurturing across hierarchical gradients.
Secret 9: Offer Flexible Work Arrangements
Outdated policies requiring fixed in-office hours with rigid scheduling often conflict with employee responsibilities and wellbeing today. Offering flexible arrangements provides autonomy over how, when and where work gets done, while enabling better life balance.
Common flexible work options include:
- Telecommuting: Permit partial or full remote work for eligible roles to avoid punishing commutes and optimize home needs.
- Staggered hours: Allow adjustable start and end times, okay’ing early and later shifts beyond a core overlap window.
- Compressed schedules: Offer full-time hours compressed, like over longer days Monday-Thursday.
- Job sharing: Enable two employees to seamlessly trade responsibilities, each working part time.
- Part-time work: Offer reduced hours with pro-rated pay and benefits for various personal needs, increasing flexibility
While not all roles can embrace remote or shift work, all organizations can rethink existing policies through an empathy lens that recognizes diverse life circumstances across their workforce.
Secret 10: Provide Mental Health Support
In any sizable group, a number of employees will face mental health challenges like depression, anxiety, grief and trauma during their career. Destigmatizing and supporting mental health leads to healthier, happier and more productive workers overall.
Every workplace should provide or connect staff to confidential mental health resources like:
Counseling
- Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs): Offer free assessment and referrals to support options by qualified counselors.
- Zero-copay therapy: Provide a set amount of fully covered therapy appointments through insurance annually.
- Grief support: Host grief counseling or support groups after traumatic events impacting staff.
Coverage
- Ensure health plans include mental health services on par with physical care.
Education
- Train managers in basic mental health first aid skills like noticing red flags.
Fostering compassion around mental health difficulties as standard workplace occurrences needing accommodation empowers employees to access vital support sooner for improved wellness.
Secret 11: Encourage Volunteerism
Humans intrinsically crave meaning, purpose and opportunities to contribute beyond their formal job duties. Facilitating volunteer projects aligned to company values satisfices this craving while benefiting community causes.
Examples of volunteer initiatives include:
Group Activities
- Coordinate staff participation in charity runs/walks
- Organize teams to volunteer through local shelters
- Sponsor staff service trips post-natural disasters
Day of Service
- Provide paid time off annually for employees to volunteer with the nonprofit of their choice
Skills-based
- Offer pro-bono projects aligning staff expertise with needs
Volunteerism breeds compassion, relationships, purpose and loyalty. Enable passionate employees to give back.
Secret 12: Foster a Sense of Purpose
The most engaged, productive employees feel connected to a higher purpose beyond profit motives. Organizations should define and continually reinforce an inspirational vision that allows workers to connect individual roles to meaningful collective impact.
Strategies for purpose include:
Mission Statements
- Co-create simple, inclusive mission and values statements reflecting “why we do what we do”
Storytelling
- Share specific examples of company programs improving lives
- Celebrate employee stories demonstrating internal culture in action
Progress Tracking
- Report metrics quantifying global benefit enabled by company programs
- Celebrate milestones towards audacious goals
Alignment
- Help employees actively connect their specialized contributions to the “bigger picture”
When purpose permeates policies and communications, employees are intrinsically motivated to world-class performance in service of shared ideals.
Secret 13: Encourage Time Management
Complex jobs with ill-defined tasks, distractions and meetings that run hours over schedule erode focus, follow-through and ownership of outcomes. Mastering time management and eliminating unnecessary meetings or duplicitous efforts is essential for peak productivity.
Encourage practices like:
Focus Time
- Block calendar times for heads-down project work without meetings
- Establish meeting-free “quiet hours” for focused tasks
Task Tracking
- Use project management (PM) software for task lists
- Set reminders for upcoming deadlines
Meetings
- Ask if each meeting is absolutely necessary
- Limit meetings to 30 minutes
- Start/end meetings on time
- Set systems sorting essential communications
- Schedule specific times for replying to batch non-urgent messages
With too few hours in the day, championing smart systems preventing distraction unlocks exponentially more contributions from each employee.
Secret 14: Provide Opportunities for Socialization
Loneliness and isolation at work can severely impact mental health and performance. Organizations should nurture social connections through interactions transcending project collaboration.
Fun socialization ideas include:
Teambuilding
- Host annual retreats for casual interactions
- Play icebreaker games at meetings
Clubs
- Start shared-interest clubs around hobbies, affinity groups or sports
Events
- Throw holiday parties, host potlucks, coordinate attendance for local events
Peer Support
- Train mental health first aiders to watch for isolated colleagues
- Develop buddy systems connecting employees for regular social check-ins
While output matters, place emphasis on humans behind roles. Encourage authentic relationships and care for the whole person inside and outside formal projects.
Secret 15: Encourage Creativity
Solving complex problems and thriving in competitive industries requires regular innovation. While desks, meetings and rigid processes enable execution, creativity necessitates free-flowing brainstorming and regular chances for unstructured play.
Ideas to spur creativity include:
Brainstorming
- Host recurring ideation sessions encouraging wild ideas without judgment
- Use creative prompts to ignite thinking
Dedicated Space
- Designate fun rooms with games, toys and relaxation zones to spark free association
Job Autonomy
- Offer open-ended special projects with few constraints
- Allow employees scheduling control over when they “think time”
Horizontal Development
- Provide access to diverse experiences like conferences, collaborations, shadow days exposing workers to inspirational ideas
Great companies know genius cannot be mandated on a schedule. By making space for creativity as a cultural pillar, innovation flows freely.
Secret 16: Provide Opportunities for Learning
The speed of technological and societal change today demands that skills constantly be refreshed and expanded to avoid stagnation or replacement. Companies failing to invest in employee education will struggle to retain top talent and maintain excellence.
Impactful learning supports include:
Student Loan Assistance
- Offer generous repayment contributions allowing employees to pursue ongoing formal education
Conference Attendance
- Send staff to leading industry events splicing innovation with peer networking
Online Course Subscriptions
- Provide platforms like Udemy or MasterClass granting unlimited access to thousands of on-demand skill courses
Podcast Listening
- Create recommended podcast lists for commutes furthering workplace competencies
Personal Development Funds
- Allocate annual funds usable on any materials or experiences enhancing performance
Secret 17: Foster a Culture of Gratitude
It’s far too easy to fixate on problems and complaints, losing sight of all the positive aspects that make an organization great. By proactively fostering a culture of gratitude, employee morale, happiness and psychological safety dramatically improves.
Every leader should encourage practices like:
Recognition
- Call out contributions publicly in meetings
- Send thank-you notes or small gifts to highlight excellent work
Peer Appreciation
- Have coworkers send peer thank-yous for help given
- Share regular “shout-outs” for those who go above-and-beyond
Gratitude Journaling
- Start meetings with everyone sharing recent wins or “rose” moments
- Keep visible notepads for staff to jot down things they feel grateful for at work
Storytelling
- Have employees share testimonials on company review sites
- Feature user stories on social media showcasing human impact enabled
A little gratitude goes a long way. What we appreciate, appreciates – compounding positivity, engagement and purpose.
Secret 18: Encourage Physical Comfort
Discomfort due to poor ergonomics, suboptimal temperatures, congested spaces or technical difficulties drains cognitive resources hour-by-hour. While major upgrades cost, small comfort-optimizing tweaks are inexpensive but deliver exponential benefits by removing frustrations.
Quick comfort improvements include:
Ergonomics
- Provide ergonomic assessments optimizing workstation arrangements
- Offer standing desks, stability balls or back supports based on needs
Air Quality
- Install air filters removing allergens or pollutants
- Replace HVAC air filters per maintenance guidelines
Snacks
- Keep snacks stocked to avoid distraction of minor irritable hunger
- Make sure coffee and other mood-boosting treats remain available
Tech Checks
- Survey for and resolve any tech difficulties like audio buzzing on video calls
- Upgrade devices or software critical for role effectiveness
The smallest annoyances become infuriating over time without resolution. Make comfort, effectiveness and functionality the path of least resistance.
Secret 19: Provide Opportunities for Relaxation
Daily cognitive overload and nonstop stimulation hamper focus and drive stress over time. By actively encouraging relaxing 5-minute microbreaks woven through days, employees emotionally recenter to own priorities and tap creative insight.
Relaxation opportunities might include:
Meditation Spaces
- Designate quiet rooms for meditation, prayer, or naps
Nature Exposure
- Encourage mini-breaks staring out windows or spending time in outdoor seating areas
Soothing Playlists
- Share relaxing, lyric-free music playlists supporting deep work
Apps
- Subsidize subscriptions to top meditation apps like Calm or Headspace
- Allow short guided meditation sessions during work time
Frequent mental release valves throughout days renew clarity, innovation even amidst heavy workloads. Wellness necessitates both doing and being.
Secret 20: Foster a Sense of Community
The workplace should feel like a second family – offering unconditional belonging, support during hard times, growth opportunities, and treasured memories built over years. Leadership must nurture community uplifting all equally.
Tactics include:
Bonding Experiences
- Host annual retreats facilitating camaraderie through activities, meals and entertainment
Diversity Initiatives
- Train managers in inclusiveness and cross-cultural competence
- Establish employee resource groups united around shared identities
Milestone Celebrations
- Make birthdays, work anniversaries and life events like marriages or births special
Communal Spaces
- Design open concept spaces and community kitchens bringing people together
The strongest communities exhibit compassion across differences, mentor newcomers, and compel members to become the best versions of themselves through unconditional love and support.
Conclusion
The modern workplace brims with wellness risks from sedentary lifestyles to chronic disconnect and burnout. Yet even small efforts towards cultivating healthier environments pays dividends for employees and organizations alike.
This playbook revealed 20 research-backed secrets any workplace can employ – from empowering movement breaks to offering mental health support. Pick two to three feasible ideas to pilot. Lead by example in prioritizing self-care. Progressively build supportive programs enabling the diverse wellness needs of your people.
When the collective health, purpose and human spirit of employees multiply through conscious cultural design, extraordinary loyalty, performance and meaning unfolds – benefiting all stakeholders for decades to come. The journey begins with a single step.