5 benefits of healthy employees for your organisation
If you were to calculate how many hours in a lifetime a person spends in an organization, you would quickly come to the conclusion that it is best if it is a place where they can be happy.
Physical health is closely linked to mental health and research has repeatedly shown that both have a positive influence on each other. Healthy people appear to be happier and, conversely, happy people are more likely to pursue a healthy lifestyle. So how can this be seen in the workplace?
Employees who lead healthy lives tend to have more energy, are less likely to be ill and enjoy what they do more. As an organisation, this is reflected in more productive employees who are also hardly absent through illness and often work longer hours than employees who lead an unhealthy lifestyle.
Let’s have a closer look at 5 major benefits of healthy employees for an organisation:
- Less absence
- More productivity
- Less staff turnover
- Better business results
- Better brand image
Employees who try to live healthy lives by exercising enough and eating healthy will be less likely to be sick and therefore less likely to be absent from the workplace.
A Dutch study even shows that exercising employees have a much lower rate of absenteeism. The average sick leave of 9% even drops to 2% among exercising employees.*
A sick employee means an additional cost to the employer. The exact cost for the employer depends on the country you are working in* and the degree of indirect costs. For example, the frequent absence of employees due to illness can result in customers receiving a poorer service, resulting in complaints and a bad image for the company.
*: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:11873cee-f08a-44b9-9e10-9ad8b047e6ec
*: Out of office: An overview of workplace absenteeism in Europe is an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report
As an employer, it may seem trivial what your employees eat throughout the day, but it has a greater impact on their performance than you might think. Some may skip a meal or drink gobs of coffee with the accompanying cookies, which also causes them to suffer from moments of fatigue and energy dips.
The impact of healthy eating affects the brain. Try to avoid a fluctuating energy balance, but rather ensure constant energy. This ensures alertness and clarity and these are noticeable the very day. A healthy diet improves concentration, problem-solving ability, creativity and productivity. A quick win can be a weekly fruit basket or the opportunity to grab/buy some healthy snacks.
More than ever, feeling "happy" at work is important. With everyone having to work long hours, employees are looking for factors that make them happy while doing their jobs. An important factor that a lot of companies in the "war for talent" are capitalizing on by offering employees benefits that have a high "happiness" value. Examples include flexible working hours, healthy lunches, a good work life balance, free company fashion, etc.
The advantage here as an organization is that happy employees will be committed to their job and will not be inclined to look for another job and therefore leave the company. Staff turnover is a major cost for companies, so it is certainly worthwhile to focus on happy employees and thus avoid a potential major cost.
We already know that a healthy lifestyle influences productivity. But does productivity affect your business results? It does!
Simplistically put, higher productivity leads to higher profits. This is because employees who are productive can produce a higher output with the same or even fewer resources than employees who are not productive. This generally leads to greater cost-effectiveness and higher profits.
Therefore, improving productivity is a key factor for the success of your business.
Last but not least: a company that is viewed as a "healthy company" pointing to the healthy, sporty employees employed there are automatically perceived positively.
For example, companies that focus on employee well-being regularly organize sporting events or offer healthy team lunches. Images of these events often pop up on social media channels or word-of-mouth advertising does its job. Promoting healthy employees by focusing on their well-being is often even a trigger for candidates to work for a certain company. In other words, promoting healthy employees definitely benefits you as a company and helps build a positive brand image.
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