Taking care of employee wellness isn’t a factor to be taken care of only while working from office. Remote work comes with challenges for meeting employee wellness needs . To begin with, there are challenges like feeling lonely working alone from home. Furthermore, with remote working, people can find it difficult to create boundaries between personal and professional life, building a mess for themselves.
Protecting your employees' mental and physical health needs to be at the top. You can always call upon organizational health services such as Theracure Personalized Care Clinic to help you arrange wellness programs for your employees. However, in case you are looking to conduct a wellness program by yourself, we bring you a few options that you could inculcate within your company.
According to Talentlyft, almost 20% of remote workers struggle with isolation. Employees who have shifted to working from home in the last few months are vulnerable to this. After all, our colleagues are often the people we spend the most time with. It can be a massive shock to have this network taken away. Chatting and sharing laughter with our colleagues helps us relieve stress and anxiety. One can recreate the same experiences virtually as well, by giving employees coffee breaks and encouraging them to coordinate the same among themselves. You can also host informal sessions on zoom for your employees, where they can chat about things outside office as well. One can also host online gaming sessions such as Mafias or Among us with the entire office team, or have an expert conduct online cooking sessions or even musical events to keep the bond among the employees strong and lively.
Conducting seminars on health and wellness, for your remote employees, will provide them a sense of support and comfort and also give them exposure to health benefits that will boost their work productivity. Companies can conduct such virtual wellness programs where employees can learn meditation, learn about making better nutritional choices, physiotherapy/ ergonomic tips to move better and sit at their desks with proper posture, stress management, online yoga/ workouts.
Companies can offer incentives/ rewards for participation in such programs such as certificates, monetary benefits; and much more. Organizing such wellness seminars will keep the employees informed on their company's employee wellness policies and also encourage them to be a part of it.
Getting remote workers to switch off from their office work is a challenge that many people fail to anticipate. When you work in an office 9-5, it’s much easier to disconnect from the office once the employee leaves the office. There is a very clear demarcation between office and work. However, while working from home, creating this mental distance and demarcation is a lot harder. Remote workers are far more inclined to stay online and do an extra hour or two of work from home. Companies and management need to encourage and reward behavior where employees do disconnect from work at a reasonable time. Companies need to provide both their employees and management training around time management during remote work. Such training and cultural change will allow employees to find the right balance between their personal and work lives.
Hope this article could intrigue you enough to instill the ideas mentioned above in your workspace. The motto is to create a healthy environment where everyone can thrive to be their very best. But executing such programs can sometimes be very cumbersome. Thankfully, we have organizational health services such as Theracure clinic, to help you out with your employee's wellness programs