How to make your workplace good for your employees health

One in five workplaces in the U.K. are bad for workers’ health, according to a new study by Atomik Research. The study, which surveyed some 2,000 full and part-time U.K. workers, suggested that work is continuously ‘encroaching’ on the personal time of workers with 17% of employees saying they had trouble sleeping due to work. Some said they were under-performing, were stressed, and felt that work was having quite a negative impact on their general mental health. Worryingly, only 6% of workers felt that work actually had a positive impact on their health and well-being, indicating how few UK employees find work a positive and enjoyable experience.

We pulled together four points to help you turn your company into a high fiving, positive environment and face worker issues head-on.

Take a stand against stress

Work is stressing people out, there’s nothing new there. Work is stressful, it wouldn’t be called work if it wasn’t. You have deadlines, internal politics, budget caps and all the rest. As a manager, you’ve a pretty hefty amount of work to get through in a single day and even when you finish for the day you may still have work following you home on your mobile devices. According to Forbes the average manager has upwards of 30 projects on the go at any one time and they suggest a number of strategies to deal with the modern work environment from proper workday scheduling to eliminating interruptions. The recent popularity of workplace yoga and mindfulness meditation programs points to a workforce that are seeing the value of addressing these stressors head on.

Promote a positive working environment

The study doesn’t go into the advantages of a positive working environment but, as a manager , creating an open, progressive, positive culture should be something you strive towards. Just last year, the Queen Mary University in London looked at the positive aspects of working life. It found that a good support system from within your company like high levels of control at work, good support from supervisors and colleagues, and feeling cared for were linked to higher levels of life happiness. What is interesting about this study of over 5000 London workers is that companies have to fight on two fronts, ie, cut out the negatives in the workplace but also, crucially, improve the positives.

“We believe any policies designed to improve the workplace should not just minimize negative aspects of work, but more crucially, increase the positive aspects, such as a creating a greater sense of control and support among employees.”

Improve Under performance

The Atomik study said that 23% of employees were under-performing at work, due to poor health or well being. So what can you do as an employer? A good place to start would be the reasons for why a particular staff member gets distracted over the course of his/her work. As we can see from the Queen Mary University study providing a working environment where there is a high level of control as well as good support from supervisors should allow workers to shed the stress of the work and focus on their performance.

Junior workers, those Millennials that we hear so much about, are at higher risk of a loss in productivity due to workplace stress, some 30% according to the study. It might be an idea to provide a buddy system for these workers so that they do not feel dissociated from management. Finding ways in which to communicate and support workers will not only improve under-performance but it will also build a strong company culture that younger workers especially can buy into.

Give Your Employees a Break

Richard Branson made headlines again last year for instituting a no-holidays policy at Virgin. This means that they do not have a policy on how much holidays their permanent staff can take! This follows from a number of high-profile companies like Netflix adopting this ‘non-policy’ in order to improve morale, hand control back to the worker and respond to a world in which places of work and hours of work are now more fluid than ever before. It may not work for all companies but allowing workers decide themselves how much holidays they need in a year is a powerful message from employer to employee that says, we trust you.

Tackling workplace stress and the toxic work environment sometimes requires a grand gesture and we applaud Virgin and Netflix for trying to create a somewhat different approach to the conundrum of how to get the best from worker while also treating them right.

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