If you’re a manager or a business owner, you are constantly thinking about ways to increase your company’s productivity and profitability. With many complex challenges to face on a daily basis, it gets easy to overlook the basics. But I’m here to remind you that one of the best ways to increase your company’s overall productivity is investing in your employees’ health.
This includes physical, mental, and financial wellness. Taking care of your employees’ health pays off not only because of increased productivity, but it also pays dividends on the cost of high turnover due to low employee satisfaction.
As a leader, you have the power to impact other people. So make sure to do it in a positive way.
That should be enough reason to take action, but you’re still unsure if investing in your employee’s wellness is worth it, take a look at these reasons:
Healthy Employees Have a Higher ROI
Your company is moved by people. If your people are mentally and physically healthy, they can perform to their full potential. This means that your company will get a high return on the investment you are making on your employees.
When your employees don’t have to worry about their health issues, they’re more capable of solve problems, which means a greater return on the investment that the company made in hiring, training, and paying the employee. It’s also more difficult for employees to be excited about a job if they’re worried about the health of family members or their own. When employees have everything that they need, they’re more capable of tackling the company’s problems.
This also applies to employees’ mental health. When employees are struggling with mental health, they’re less likely to be able to solve problems at work. Mental health is often overlooked, but it affects many people in the United States. Stress and anxiety can seriously affect relationships, motivation, and productivity. As a leader, you have the power to help employees to handle these challenging situations.
Wellness Benefits Attract Talent
Everyone wants to have access to high-quality healthcare for themselves and their family members. When you provide opportunities to stay healthy to your employees, you’ll attract a higher caliber of people and a greater variety of prospective employees. This lets you have your pick of the people that you would like to hire.
However, wellness benefits aren’t confined to the employee insurance plan. Wellness perks can include many other perks that can be cheaper, and sometimes even more helpful. For instance, you can offer free healthy snacks, an on-site gym, and access to counselors. Additionally, social opportunities within the workplace can also improve employees’ mental health. These social events can be casual parties, or they can be more structured workshops that are on topics that your employees simply have an interest in. For instance, your company could host a cooking lesson followed by dinner, or a workshop on how to write a book, for example.
Nowadays, people have been seeing a lot of value on work-life balance. Millennials are not following the old habit of working long hours on a corporate job. They want a job that values their wellness. Therefore, you must offer that if you want to attract talent.
Wellness Benefits Boost Morale
People don’t simply want to feel alright. They want to feel like they’re making the most of their lives and that their company cares about them. Wellness programs are an effective way to show employees that the company cares about their well-being.
Also, many wellness programs have a social element to them. This can make people feel a sense of community with their fellow co-workers, which can ward off negative feelings and even aid employee retention.
The ultimate goal is to make employees feel good about themselves and about the company they work for. People must feel valued at all times.
Unhealthy Employees Cost Money
Chronically sick employees can hurt your company in multiple ways. First of all, employees who are sick will need to take more time off of work, which will result in unproductive downtime. Sometimes, companies even have to invest in temporary employees, while still paying for the sick person’s while they’re gone. This represents a high cost.
Besides leading employees to being physically absent, unhealthy employees are less productive. Stressed out and anxious employees will not produce to their full potential. This will lead to less return on the company’s investment.
Healthy Employees Stay Longer
We all know how expensive turnover can be. High employee turnover represents high investments in hiring and training added with the time lost in productivity for several months. Replacing an employee in a company can cost up to 33% of their annual salary.
Employees that don’t care about the company they work for will look for greener grass on the first big challenge they face. On the other hand, employees that love the company they work for will always do their best to deliver good results. At the end of the day, they can’t be sure that they’ll get the same quality treatment from their next employer. When your employees feel good about coming to work and know that it’s because they work for a company that cares about them, then they’re more likely to stay longer.
It Is Your Duty of Care
If you expect your employees to care about the company’s mission, you must take care of your employees first. Leaders have the power to make a positive influence on their employees’ lives. It is more than an opportunity to make a better company, it is a duty to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
You wouldn’t want to hire someone who doesn’t have the qualifications and skills that are necessary to complete a job. Similarly, employees wouldn’t want to work for a company that doesn’t offer the desired benefits.
Healthy Employees Lead to a Healthy Company
You can’t expect to have a healthy company when your people are unhealthy. A company’s employees are the backbone of the organization. In fact, a company’s success hinges on its employees, and employee health affects many other portions of the company’s infrastructure.
Health, productivity, employee retention, and many other aspects of running a company are interconnected. If you’re interested in improving your employee retention, you might want to work on boosting morale, which might require you to put more effort into wellness incentives. When you put effort into aspects such as boosting your wellness programs, creating a healthy environment to come to work to, and ensuring that the company is providing employee health insurance, you’ll be building a stronger pool of employees. This is a smart way to increase loyalty and to make them more enthusiastic about the company’s goals, which will result in more productivity and fewer unnecessary expenses.
Keep in mind that the impact will be bigger than the profitability consequences. By investing in people you will be fulfilling lives. As a leader, you have this power in your hands. And at the end of the day, that’s already a good enough reason.