What is a Healthy Workplace?
What is a Healthy Workplace?
Investing in the physical and mental health and wellbeing of your workforce creates a healthy workplace and is simply good business.
A healthy workplace is one where making the healthy choice is the easy choice. It works with its team to ensure all aspects of its operations are not harmful. It helps its people be as healthy and strong as they can be.
No longer is health in the workplace viewed as merely as topping up the fruit bowl or allowing one to have an hour for lunch.
A healthy workplace knows healthy businesses need healthy communities. It recognises that helping keep families and communities’ strong benefits its own business through a healthier workforce and a more invested, loyal community.
What affects Workers’ Health?
The world has come under great pressure and strain in 2020 which has impacted all aspects of our overall health. People’s health and wellbeing is shaped by several social, economic, and environmental factors, including:
•How businesses work and lead – The workplace culture, how a business organises its work and how that affects the workers' ability to make healthy choices.
•The workspaces and facilities provided – The physical conditions people work in, the kind of work they do and how that affects their ability to make healthy choices.
•Individual lifestyle factors – What people bring to work from their homes and communities, such as how they eat and drink, health conditions, personal stresses, family issues, what they think and value.
A Healthy Workplace:
Essentially, a healthy workplace puts the health and wellbeing of its people at the centre of everything it does.
A healthy workplace:
•Values its people and promotes trust
•Promotes and encourages good relationships and collaboration
•Has good communication with and between all levels of staff, and is open and transparent
•Wants its people to be creative, and encourages innovation
•Is aware of, and flexible about, changing work-life commitments and balance
•Is aware of different cultures and religions, and supports a diverse workforce
•Encourages a healthy lifestyle, does what it can to make the healthy choice the easy choice.
Good Work is good for us:
Good work is best for us – working under stressful conditions is usually good for no-one.
Good work means there is:
•A balance between work and rest
•A variety of tasks
•A sense of personal control
Swift resolution of poor relationships
•Good communication at all levels
•Confidence in workplace leaders.
The Benefits of Building a Healthy Workplace:
Workplaces should invest in becoming healthy because it is:
•The right thing to do – a successful business looks after its people and community
•The smart thing to do – employees prefer a positive workplace culture where they can be happy, safe, and productive, and so are less likely to leave (and more likely to join)
•The legal thing to do – legislation says employers must provide a healthy and safe workplace.
