By Bond Collective Staff
Now, more than ever, workplace wellbeing is vital for keeping your team productive and your business successful. With all the stress and strain going on in one place after another, it’s very easy for your employees’ health to suffer.
But you can prevent sick individuals from becoming an issue by implementing practices that relieve stress and promote the welfare of everyone on your team.
In this article, we define the three major components of workplace wellbeing and give you tips on how to improve them in your business.
What Is Workplace Wellbeing?
Before we jump into workplace wellbeing, let’s back up a step and look at the more general concept of well-being.
Well-being is the state of being happy, healthy, or prosperous, and it’s this overall condition that you want to promote in your business.
Workplace wellbeing (no hyphen) — a.k.a. workplace wellness or corporate wellbeing — is any activity or company policy designed to support and promote healthy behavior and elevate the overall well-being of your team.
It’s this latter definition of wellbeing — the activities and practices — that we’ll focus on in this article with the overall purpose of improving and maintaining the state of personal well-being in all your employees.
Components Of Workplace Wellbeing
Workplace wellbeing is about more than just preventing your team members from getting sick. As we mentioned above, it’s about ensuring that your employees are happy, healthy, and prosperous while at work (and, ideally, in their life beyond the office doors).
As such, most experts divide the practice of promoting workplace wellbeing into three major categories, domains, or needs: physical, mental, and social.
Within those broad categories lie sub-categories that support the overall concept of corporate wellbeing and provide insight into how to improve the well-being of your team (discussed further in a later section).
Physical
Food
Food and water are the basics of life, so it’s no wonder that this sub-category is at the very top of the list.
If your employees don’t consume adequate calories and hydrate enough throughout the day, their energy level and overall health will suffer.
Comfort
The comfort sub-category involves such aspects of the physical as:
Noise level
Temperature
Humidity
Furniture ergonomics
Smell
If, for example, the temperature in your office is too hot or too cold, your team members will have a tendency to focus on how uncomfortable they are rather than doing their job well.
Fitness
The fitness component of workspace wellbeing encompasses both the fitness of your team members and the active nature and design of their environment.
Fitness includes such variables as:
Active transportation
Interior active design
Exterior active design
An example of fitness as it applies to your workplace includes variables like adjustable-height desks and activity-based breakrooms.
Environment
The environment sub-category has to do with the conditions in which your team works, and includes such factors as:
Drinking water quality
Indoor air quality
Workspace cleanliness
Facility maintenance
Chemical control
Mental
Cognitive
The cognitive component of workplace wellness encompasses the way your office environment affects how your team members think, and includes such elements as:
Types of spaces (e.g., quiet space, collaborative workspace)
Technology
Equipment accessibility
Workspace flexibility
Workspace flow
Cognitive ergonomics
Emotional
Similar to the cognitive component of corporate wellbeing, the emotional component has to do with how your workspace affects your employees’ emotions.
Emotional factors include:
Control of environment
Design elements
Biophilic design (e.g., the inclusion of natural objects)
Social
Connectivity
The final component of workplace wellbeing is social connectivity.
How well does your team collaborate? How well do individual members of your team get along? What is your company culture?
The answers to these questions will help define how socially connected your team actually is.
How To Improve Workplace Wellbeing
1) Emphasize Inclusion
Emphasizing inclusion within your team goes a long way toward satisfying both the mental and social aspects of corporate wellbeing.
When you promote a culture of inclusivity in your office, team members are more likely to engage in healthy activities and behaviors, support each other in those endeavors, and stick with them for the long term.
2) Support Individual Choice
Forcing your employees to engage in wellness initiatives actually works against the goal of the process.
Instead, support individual choice and create programs that allow your team members to embrace wellness and well-being on their own terms.
3) Provide Support
There’s more to building and maintaining workplace wellbeing than rolling out a program and waiting for the results.
Once a program is in place, provide support to the team to help them reach their goals and create new, healthy habits in their lives.
4) Change The Office Lighting
The color, temperature, and brightness of your office lighting all play a role in promoting workplace wellness. And experts agree that natural light is better.
Windows often provide the best natural light, but if they’re at a minimum in your office, consider installing lighting that mimics the color and temperature of the natural light in your area.
5) Implement A Fitness Challenge
Fitness challenges are a great way to promote workplace wellbeing among your team. Best of all, they don’t have to be complicated to work.
For example, challenge everyone to walk a certain distance every day — issue pedometers to help — or take everyone for a lap around the building mid-afternoon to increase energy levels.
6) Set Up Flexible Workspaces
Flexible workspaces allow easy means for your team to customize their environment to fit their needs.
Employees can move tables, chairs, and technology to create different configurations that facilitate and streamline the type of work they're doing at the moment. This is good for the physical, mental, and social well-being of your team.
7) Carve Out Quiet Spaces
Collaboration and teamwork are integral parts of your employees’ work habits. But, sometimes, they’re going to need to separate and work on their own
Set aside quiet spaces within your office environment for focus and private work so that employees don’t get distracted and overwhelmed by the activity going on around them.
8) Add Plants
Adding plants to your office decor is a simple way to incorporate biophilic design and promote workplace wellbeing throughout the day.
These touches have the added benefit of making team members feel more comfortable. And when they’re more comfortable, they’re more focused, creative, and engaged.
9) Bring Pets To Work
Allowing your employees to bring their pets to work — or adopting an office mascot of your own — creates many beneficial effects, including:
Higher morale
Improved communication
Reduced stress
Increased productivity
Better collaboration
All of those effects contribute to the health and well-being of your team.
10) Consider Adjustable-Height Desks
Used correctly, an adjustable-height desk is a healthy alternative to the seated work life most people associate with an office environment.
They allow for the complete customization of an employee’s workspace so that they have the mental and physical freedom to work the way that suits them at any given moment.
Workplace Wellbeing Done Right
Instead of always reacting to poor workplace wellbeing (with more and more mental health days or sick days), prevent illnesses and burnout from happening in the first place.
The suggestions in this article will certainly help. But one surefire way you can promote health and well-being is by providing a clean and efficient working environment for your team.
An attractive, worry-free workspace — like those at Bond Collective — is one of the best ways to promote corporate wellbeing and keep energy, engagement, and productivity high.
Each of Bond Collective’s shared working environments incorporates inspiring design elements, such as natural light, open floor plans, tasteful and professional decor, quiet spaces, and multipurpose workspaces.
Bond Collective also provides benefits you won’t find anywhere else that go a long way toward keeping your team members happy and healthy, such as:
Daily on-site cleaning
Guest reception and greeting
Private-label mail service
Lightning-fast Wi-Fi
Concession food market
Conference Rooms
Black-and-white printing
24-hour access
Bike storage
These amenities eliminate the stress of maintaining your own office and allow you and your team to focus on the work at hand rather than whose turn it is to clean the kitchen. That’s workplace wellbeing in a nutshell!
To learn more about how Bond Collective’s boutique coworking spaces can help workplace wellness, visit any one of our many locations in the United States, including workspaces in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas.
Or call us today to find out more about everything we have to offer. And while you’re at it, schedule a tour to experience first-hand how the sophisticated and professional work environments at Bond Collective can benefit your business.