Bettering Your Business through the Health of Your Employees

If you believe in the old adage a happy worker is a productive worker then youll likely agree with a study conducted by Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at Warwick Business School, which concludes that happy, healthy workers are up to 12% more productive than those that arent. In the conclusion of the study, Professor Oswald states: We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity. Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect. According to the latest statistics 131m working days were lost to sickness last year. A recent estimate conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that UK businesses lose around 32bn a year due to sickness. With the worlds financial system still in a muddle and with the spectre of recession still lingering in Europe, its now more important than ever for UK businesses to maximise their potential. One way to achieve this is to help employees help themselves, and this should inturn make your business happier and more productive.

Why should businesses care?

Introducing new systems and procedures can cost a lot of money. Some businesses may well feel that this a bad time financially to introduce changes designed to help employees stay healthy. However, the cost of having an employee off on long term sick, due to injury or depression can run into the thousands. While that person if off sick a business may well have to temporarily hire another person to do their work, or add that persons workload on to another colleague, which may then result in a negative effect, such as a drop in morale or productivity. Keeping staff happy and healthy is in the interest of all businesses. When youre staff are happy they are more likely to be productive, more likely to stay with their employer, rather than searching for a new job, and more likely to go the extra mile in times of need.

So what can you do to help your business?

Review Health and Safety Procedures In 2010/2011 over 1.8m people suffered from a work-related illness, and over three-quarters of all new work-related injuries were either musculoskeletal disorders or stress-related. So what can you do as a business to help your staff avoid injury? The government already strictly regulates health and safety in the work place. To help prevent workers from being injured at work, businesses should actively seek to remove all unnecessary dangers from the workplace. As well as pre-emptively removing or dealing with potential issues, companies should also ensure that all health and safety procedures are reviewed on a constant basis.

Healthy Equipment According to a health and safety study, four out of five people in Britain suffer from some form of back pain, resulting in 4.5m days off a year. Keeping your work force healthy is in every businesses interest, as it will result in less sick days taken per year and an increase in productivity. Office workers often suffer from posture-related back problems and these issues can often result in a long and protracted period of recovery. In the majority of cases these injuries can be prevented through the correct use of ergonomic equipment. Special chairs, foot-rests, ergonomic keyboards and wristrests can all help prevent injuries such as posture-related back issues and RSI. Solving these issues before they develop could help save your company a lot of money in the long-run.

Keep Your Staff Healthy It may seem like an insurmountable challenge, after all an employer is just an employer and not an all controlling presence in the life of your employees. However, without a doubt there are a number of things you can do as a company to help and encourage your staff to stay healthy. Most companies now offer a number of packages and benefits designed to help employees, including business health insurance coverage with private care providers, gym membership programmes and cycling to work schemes. Smaller changes, such as introducing reduced fat products to the canteen vending machine, or providing free fruit or semi-skimmed milk in the workplace can also help keep your workforce healthy.

Mental Health and Duvet Days Maintaining a work-life balance can be hard. Ultimately, the more that you have deal with, both in and outside of work can often leave you stressed, anxious or fatigued. Mental health and wellbeing often gets overlooked in the workplace, but the happiness of your employees can have serious effects on productivity, as shown by a number of studies. There are a number of different techniques companies can use to help motivate people and improve morale at work, including regular one-to-ones with staff to ensure that theyre happy and that there are no issues affecting them. Companies may also want to consider providing staff with extra benefits designed to help recharge batteries, such as regular work outings, duvet days, flexi-time on Fridays and other similar schemes.