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Welcome to our first theme that focuses on Health & Well-being. We'll be covering quite a few things this month including how you can plan to pep up profits with parsnips, peas and peppers and cut costs caused by staff sickness. In this post we'll take a close look at just what health and well-being can mean for the employee as well as the employer, and explain why businesses are what their employees eat.

Your business is… what your employees eat?

Yes, you are what you eat. Or so the saying goes. And it’s hardly a secret that what we eat affects our overall health. Today we can’t escape the never ending guidance from the government about just all of the many (many!) food sins that we should avoid and we face constant reminders that we should be filling our faces with five a day… veg not fry-ups. Yet we face an obesity crisis that is costing £47 billion a year (which is more than is spent on war and terror) with the outlook for those with poor diet and nutrition seeming pretty terrifying in itself.

Corporate wellness: Is your business suffering from a corporate cold?

The issues that come along with obesity are clear. Yet for both the employee and the employer the problem doesn’t even need to be as serious as this. Instead it can just be employees who do too little exercise and eat a poor nutritional diet. And the result? Employees who yawn their way through afternoons with work output levels that are anything but healthy. Couple this with staff sick days that cost the UK businesses £29 billion and UK businesses most certainly have caught the worst of the corporate cold.

Presenteeism: When present staff are anything but!

The problems with absent staff are pretty obvious. But staff don’t need to be absent for productivity to decline.Presenteeism, a new-fangled word, represents those workers who crawl into work to sniffle, cough and splutter their way through the day. They are present in body, but far from present in mind… at least to any productive extent.

The healthy employee and the happy employer

The difference between an unhealthy workforce and one that is focused upon diet and well-being is pretty staggering. For the healthy employee there lies boosted energy levels, fewer illnesses and even a longer life span. For the employer there is promise of boosted profits and productivity through workers that are confident and less stressed. And it doesn’t end there. Beyond productivity and absenteeism businesses can also look forward to reduced outgoings on healthcare expenditure, and for companies where dangerous equipment is operated the potential of tired, exhausted and ill employees injuring themselves or others is vitally decreased.

77% of employees believe that health and wellness programmes impact positively upon their work culture.

How businesses can nurture healthy staff for healthy profits

With recent research finding that a third of European employees suffer from lack of sleep, just over a quarter experience stress-related conditions and around a third consider their nutrition to be poor, it seems pretty clear that employers are slacking in their support for staff who are happy, healthy and indulging in diets that are as good for them as they are for the employees themselves. And this is despite the answers being so simple: diet-focussed wellness programs, employer-subsidised gym discounts (like Perkbox!) and frequent reviews of the pressures that are placed upon the employee seeking a better work-life balance are all examples of ways in which employers can support their staff.

Perkbox is a DPG partner that helps fresh-thinking UK businesses of all sizes boost the financial, emotional and physical wellbeing of their team with on-the-go access to a range of perks, an online reward and recognition system and a wellness hub. 

Sources:

The Guardian 2014
PwC 2013
VieLife 2013
Virgin HealthMiles Inc./Workforce Management Magazine

This article was originally published here