Improving employee wellbeing has become a central focus for many businesses, with companies across the world wanting to increase happiness in the workplace. There are numerous benefits of happier employees, including reduced employee turnover, increased productivity, and boosted employee engagement.
What’s more, investing in employee wellness is almost always a positive investment for businesses. The average ROI of employee wellness programs is 6:1, with 72% of employers seeing a reduction in healthcare costs after implementing a wellness scheme.
From holistically improving the working conditions of your employees to implementing better a better approach to work-life balance, there are many ways that your business can improve employee wellbeing. In this article, we’ll dive into the leading strategies that will help you dramatically increase employee wellbeing and make the workplace a wonderful place to be.
How Can a Business Improve Employee Wellbeing?
Employees spend large portions of their lives at work. The average worker will put in around 35 hours of work each week, many of these hours being directly from an office. Due to the extent to which work is a central part of our weeks, wellness in the workplace can bleed out into all areas of life. With that considered, it’s an employer’s responsibility to ensure their employees are healthy, happy, and enjoying the work they’re doing.
Employee wellbeing has steadily increased over the past few years, greatly in part to the efforts made by businesses. Around 79% of employees are happy with their roles. That said, these figures can drastically vary by sector, with some areas of business, like finance, having lower rates of employee wellbeing.
Diving further into these statistics, the leading causes of happiness at work are: good colleagues, feeling appreciated, flexibility, and learning new things. On the flip side, 69% of unhappy employees state that they don’t feel valued by their company.
While not all companies can make sure that everyone gets along with their colleagues – apart from focusing on hiring like-minded people – they can directly improve these other areas. Let’s break down some of the most effective ways businesses can use to improve employee wellness.
Employee Wellbeing Improvement: Better Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance used to be a clear-cut issue. While you were at work, you would focus on work. The moment you leave the office, you leave all work problems behind. As technology has continued to integrate itself into our lives, the lines have started to blur. Additionally, the tendency to work from home has further abstracted this balance, with people not knowing when to switch off and check out.
Work-life balance is vital when accounting for employee wellbeing, as a poor balance can lead to stress, overworking, and feeling burnt out. Yet, despite how important this balance is, around 83% of Gen Z and Millennials consider themselves to have poor work-life balance. In order to change these figures within your own organization, here’s what you can do:
- Change the Culture – Don’t ask employees to download work applications or messaging systems onto their personal phones.
- Encourage Flexibility – Allow employees to take a more flexible approach to work where they define their hours and timeframes.
- Lead By Example – Ensure managers and higher-ups promote flexible working and encourage employees to focus on life just as much as work.
By increasing the flexibility that your employees have, they’ll be able to focus much more on creating the work-life balance that works for them. Over time, this will radically improve employee wellbeing, increase engagement while at work, and reduce burnout. Make sure to read our extended article about reducing workplace stress.
Employee Wellbeing: Growth and Development
One of the leading factors that contributes to a positive sense of employee wellbeing is the feeling of growth in a job role. If an employee feels stagnant in their role or doesn’t see any learning opportunities ahead of them, they’ll build resentment for their job role.
An effective way of boosting employee wellbeing is to create learning opportunities for your employees. There are several ways you can do this, including creating a learning system where employees can access courses they’re interested in. Creating an education budget for your workers will also help them foster additional business interests.
Going beyond this, you should also endeavor to have conversations about future development with your employees. Managers should help employees to plan out promotions in the company, fostering a sense of upward mobility that can inspire them on a day-to-day basis.
Your employees aren’t just cogs in a profit machine; they’re real people with aspirations that you need to foster.
Employee Wellbeing: Compensation
Finally, we come to the most significant way of improving employee wellbeing – better compensation. Compensation at work can come in many different formats. Some businesses opt for shifting working structures to accommodate Paid Time Off (PTO) while others offer other benefits to workers.
Alongside external initiatives, providing more flexibility, and improving work culture, the biggest compensation you can make to improve employee wellness is boosting salaries. Studies show that across the board, workers that earn more money are more likely to feel satisfied with their job role.
If your company is in the position to do so, then offering competitive raises to your employees that go beyond inflation will help everyone to feel more content at work. While this isn’t the system that every business wants to opt for, it’s often the one that makes the biggest difference to your employees.
Final Thoughts
Improving employee wellness is the single most effective investment that a business can make in its own workforce. While the simple fact that creating a better, happier place to work should suffice for many businesses, there are also a plethora of other benefits available.
Businesses that want to improve employee wellness will receive heightened levels of productivity, efficiency, and focus. Beyond helping your bottom line, investments in employee wellness can radically transform your company from the inside out. Going into 2024 and beyond, make sure to prioritize your employees and support them wherever you can.