Employee Wellness: How to Ensure It in the Modern Workplace?

According to a survey, employees across the globe feel that the pandemic has negatively affected their physical and mental well-being.

From changing work patterns to burnout, anxiety, isolation, and stress, everything has had a profound impact on the workforce.

Although the importance of employee wellness is growing, it isn’t addressed at a large level. Now that offices are re-opening and employees are trying to adjust to the post-pandemic workplace, organizations should prioritize their wellbeing.

They can implement a well-thought-out wellness program to support their employees’ mental and physical health. This will also increase workforce productivity and morale, leading to more efficient working environments.

This article explains some effective strategies organizations can implement to support employees’ wellness. Let’s begin with some basics.

Significance of employee wellbeing in an organization

Source: emedihealth.com

The overall well-being of the employees goes a long way toward ensuring the growth, sustainability, and success of an organization. Therefore, developing a dynamic wellness program for your employees that caters to their needs will benefit your business in many ways.

First, the development of well-being programs can help reduce health risks by creating a positive environment for employees. When employees’ well-being is well taken care of, they take less leave. Thus, absenteeism is reduced significantly. Second, it promotes positive attitudes among the employees, improving their morale and making them more productive.

Moreover, employee wellbeing programs decrease job turnover, stress levels and improve job satisfaction. This will ensure staff retention since employees feel their needs are catered effectively.

Thus, it is clear that a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. Therefore, companies should start adopting employee wellness programs to survive and thrive. Now, let’s look at the effective ways you can implement it.

5 effective ways to ensure employee wellness in the modern workplace

According to a survey, Companies with highly effective health and wellness plans are 40% more likely to report better financial performance.

Thus, organizations should devise employee wellness programs that cultivate a positive work environment.

Here’s how: –

1. Allocate the right person to the right job

Source: inc.com

It is essential to ensure competent allocation across various projects, as it increases business efficiency. When a manager assigns a less experienced employee to a high-level task, it becomes overwhelming and hampers their performance and morale. Additionally, assigning a skilled worker to a simple task leads to disengagement.

Using the resource management tool, managers can get insight into employee availability, schedules, and skillsets and then assign resources to suitable projects. It will reinforce employee engagement and reduce employee stress, which will improve their well-being.

2. Optimize workforce utilization across the enterprise

When the workforce is overutilized, they face burnout, which is one of the significant factors behind employee stress. To combat this, managers must ensure that every resource is optimally utilized. For this, they can leverage the resource management software and view the real-time utilization heatmap.

It will let them compare the forecast vs. actual reports of the employees and see whether a resource is being over or underutilized. These data-driven insights help in implementing various measures that ease the workload. This will reduce stress and contribute to employee wellbeing.

3. Foster a supportive & inclusive workplace

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Exclusion in the workplace leaves the employees feeling marginalized and devalued. This can lead to a toxic work environment and cause unnecessary stress in the workforce. To prevent this, managers and leaders must create a collaborative workplace culture, which will benefit the employees by fostering engagement, productivity, and retention. In addition, it creates a sense of belonging in the resources and ultimately leads to employee wellness.

Organizations can implement flexible working hours options for employees to work according to their preferences, which will also contribute to their well-being and enable them to maintain a good work-life balance.

4. Implement effective employee wellness programs

Disengagement can result in frequent absenteeism among employees. By implementing effective employee wellness programs, managers can help create a healthier workforce and a positive workplace.

To do this, leaders or managers can organize yoga retreats, regular breaks, nutritious meals, etc. These will contribute to employees’ psychology and physiological well-being. Also, organizations can provide one-on-one counseling, health coaches, etc., that will alleviate their stress, ultimately leading to employee wellness.

5. Facilitate rewards & recognition to employees

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If a resource does not feel appreciated and their work is not recognized, it causes lower morale. Therefore, organizations must offer rewarding programs and appreciation to their employees like – gifts or increments, gym memberships, paid time off’s, etc. This will make the employees feel that their contribution to the company is appreciated.

Ultimately, this promotes a positive work environment and encourages high performance and increased engagement, resulting in their well-being.

Now, let’s look at how resource management helps in fostering employee wellness.

How can Resource Management Software help improve employee wellness?

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Saviom’s resource management software facilitates efficient allocation of resources by giving managers 360-degree visibility of all resources. It filters out resources based on employee skills, experience, capacity, availability, etc. This allows managers to find the best-suited resource with the right skills for the projects.

Moreover, managers can understand how resources are utilized using the utilization reports generated from the tool. In case of overutilization, managers can implement optimization techniques such as resource leveling and smoothing to streamline workloads. This will increase the resource health index and employee wellbeing.

In addition, managers can use the resource management tool to publish open positions and specify requirement detail such as skills, qualifications, and experience. Employees interested in the open positions can then indicate their desire, and the best resource will be assigned to the task. When employees take part in projects they are interested in, they are more engaged, resulting in higher productivity.

The bottom line

An organization’s workforce plays a very crucial role in its growth. Hence, adopting wellness programs that cater to their needs has become the need of the hour. The above-mentioned best practices, paired with the right resource management solution, will help you implement effective employee wellness programs and increase employee engagement. Thus, reducing stress and increasing work efficiency.