What’s The Key To A Healthy Work Environment?

One of the best ways to motivate employees is to give them a great working environment. Google has its office slides. The Lego HQ has its interesting and funky workspaces, designed to cater to the needs of different employees. And even Deloitte is doing its bit to counter the monotony of accounting and making its offices into places where people can have fun.

So what makes a great working environment in the 21st century? Let’s take a look at what some of the experts have to say.

Make Wellness A Priority

Lauren Lastowka is a manager at American Specialty Health. She says that health and wellness projects are associated with better worker productivity, lower medical costs, and reduced absenteeism.

One of the things that she recommends is to promote preventive medicine. This means getting colleagues out of the office everyone in a while and doing meetings on foot. She also suggests that businesses promote things like on-site flu jabs for their colleagues so as to reduce the number of absences when the flu season hits.

She also suggests that employers work very carefully to lessen the quantity of junk food available at their locations. Lastowka’s advice is to make healthy options as accessible as possible, meaning that if employees do want something that is bad for them, they’ll have to put in the effort to leave the office and got and get it themselves.

It’s also important to implement adequate dust collection, using parts like Nord fab QF, to reduce the number of respiratory problems suffered by employees.

Have Fun

Research has shown according to Amanda Gore, the author of the Joy Project, that happy workers who are having fun are much less likely to take days off sick and will each have higher profitability. In fact, she says, it’s this attitude that lies behind companies like Zappos which have seen considerable success thanks to their “have fun” take on work.

So what does this mean in practice according to Gore?

First off she says that there needs to be a culture of permission to have fun. Many workplaces are stuck in the past where working and having fun were seen as two separate things. If you want your place of work to be a fun place to work, then employees need to have permission to enjoy themselves from both management and their other colleagues.

It also means collecting data on the happiness of the people in your organization. Gore suggests collecting happiness reports and tracking happiness rather like you’d track any other metric in your business. Knowing what makes people happy and when things are going wrong, enables you to take action and remain in control of a situation.

Finally, she suggests that businesses work hard to let go of the past. Often businesses get stuck in a rut, thinking that they have to do things the same way that they always did them. But there are plenty of ideas to help small businesses spice up their workplaces a little bit. One idea is to have a happy hour on Friday afternoon to play games.