7 ways to keep employees (and productivity) healthy

Businesses need to address all of these issues to ensure their employees remain healthy and productive and to attract and retain the best talent. In 2022/23, approximately 35.2 million working days were lost in Great Britain due to work-related injury or illness. 

Unfortunately, keeping your employees at work is only half the story. 'Presenteeism' (where employees attend work while sick or injured) is also on the rise, and it’s hurting your bottom line.

Here’s our top tips for improving the health and wellbeing of your employees to create a more productive and efficient workforce.

1. Feed into the wider business strategy

In recent years, this has been made easier due to the development in research, linking wellbeing to performance. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet when it comes to health and wellbeing.

Organisations need to take a strategic approach if they want to improve the health and wellbeing of their workforce, and this must be clearly linked to the wider organisational strategy.

In 2019, Research by Oxford University and BT found a conclusive link between employee wellbeing and productivity. In a study of almost 1,800 BT call centre employees, they found that a 'one-point' increase in happiness (on a scale of 0 to 10) was associated with a 13% increase in productivity.

2. Help employees take charge

You can invest tens of thousands into wellbeing programmes only for employees to pass up on all the benefits on offer. Make it easy for employees to take charge of their own wellbeing by providing onsite facilities and services that save them time and effort.

Provide healthy food choices

Diet is a key factor in a well workforce. Start by making sure employees have access to healthy food onsite. Consider collaborating with nutritional experts to develop a balanced offering that they’ll enjoy and will help them manage their own health and weight. Employees who are overweight or obese are more likely to get sick or injured and take time off work.

Build an onsite gym

Some of the most common excuses for not attending a gym regularly include a lack of time and intimidation by muscle-bound athletes on the gym floor. Take those excuses away by making a gym available exclusively to your employees right where they work. Believe it or not, an onsite gym can cost less than purchasing gym memberships for your staff at an external site.

Bringing the health professionals in house

Many forward-thinking businesses now provide onsite clinics staffed by health professionals a few hours a week. An onsite GP makes afternoons off to visit the doctor a thing of the past while physiotherapists can help employees recover from injury during their lunch break.

3. Take a data-led approach

The UK has a productivity problem.

For over a decade, the UK’s labour productivity growth has been lagging behind its peers. In the three decades that followed the Second World War, the UK’s average annual productivity growth was around 3.6%.

Over the following three decades this declined to around 2.1%, and since around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, the average annual productivity rate has plummeted to around 0.2%.

Thankfully, data can help, but first you as an employer need to know what you want to achieve by improving the health and wellbeing of your workforce.

Using data will help you understand your pain points, what your employees need and want, and what you need to measure. Use internal data (both objective and subjective) and external insights to help inform your strategy and the initiatives you introduce. Using data is the only way you’ll know whether you’re having the desired impact.

4. Make healthcare packages available

Typically, musculoskeletal problems like back and neck pain result in more disability cases than any other cause, with minor illnesses like coughs and colds presenting as the most common reason for workplace absence.

When employees do get sick or injured, help them to get back on their feet as soon as possible by encouraging early invention with an appropriate professional, which could include providing a private medical insurance package and partnering with a private provider of clinical services.

Choose a partner that offers a holistic end-to-end service to make sure your employees are fit and ready to return to work. If you're wondering where to start, find out more about private workplace insurance and how it can help you look after your employees.

5. Make wellbeing a board priority

Getting buy-in from the very top of your organisation will help drive the necessary changes to help improve the health and wellbeing of the workforce.

As mentioned above, being able to clearly demonstrate how improving the health and wellbeing of the workforce will help the business achieve their goals, is vital. Without this link, employee wellbeing becomes a “nice to have”, rather than an integral driver of business success.

6. Address organisational 'pain points'

Adopting a systematic approach to employee health and wellbeing interventions is key. 

Identify barriers and challenges with the way work is structured and delivered, that may be having a negative impact on your employee’s wellbeing. Taking action to identify and address root causes will prevent employees from harm.

7. Ensure support is fit for purpose

Whilst a proactive and preventative approach to employee health and wellbeing should be a priority, it’s important to ensure that your benefits and support services are fit for purpose too. 

Use data and listen to your people to ensure your support services are in line with the wants and needs of the workforce. Focus on benefit awareness, accessibility and user experience. 

Having a mixture of reactive support such as mental health services, and preventative benefits such as health assessments and gym membership, is key to helping your employees maintain their health and wellbeing.

Last updated Wednesday 30 October 2024

First published on Monday 16 May 2016