How to engage staff with their physical wellbeing during lockdown
As a reaction to the lockdown measures, some of your employees might be finding it especially hard to stay active and be more tempted to make unhealthy choices. It’s therefore crucial that you promote physical wellbeing and take steps to encourage your employees to maintain, support and even improve their physical health during this time.
To engage your employees with their physical wellbeing during lockdown, here are a number of useful things you can do.
Provide information and resources
Your employees are more likely to be pro-active about their physical wellbeing, take steps to ensure they’re living a healthy lifestyle and look after their bodies if they have a wealth of information and resources at their fingertips. Knowledge is certainly power in this context because some of your employees might not fully understand or appreciate how important their physical wellbeing is, or might want to make improvements but don’t know where to start.
With a health and wellbeing hub, you can host a range of useful resources for your employees to tap into at any time. This could include healthy recipes, tips on how to increase physical activity and even tests so they can measure their fitness levels from home. There is an endless amount of useful information and resources out there that you could give your employees access to, which will help them become more in tune and invested in their wellbeing.
Run a competition
Why not add a bit of fun to the mix with a competition? A fitness competition introduces an incentive for your employees to start engaging with their physical wellbeing. Whether you get employees involved on an individual basis or put them into teams, competing to win a prize will motivate them to take part and therefore get active. Your competition could be based on daily step counts, number of exercise videos completed during the month or something simple and fun like the number of press-ups completed in one minute.
There are plenty of creative ways you can run a competition that will encourage your employees to engage with their physical wellbeing during lockdown and have a bit of fun with it too. If you have a reward and recognition programme, this could tie in nicely because you can showcase leader boards and announce winners through the platform.
Take on a challenge event
Your company could even take on a challenge event to motivate everyone in the business to do regular exercise during lockdown. You could do a marathon in a month which challenges everyone to run or walk at least one mile a day, or you could even take inspiration from the Run for Heroes challenge where one person runs 5km, donates £5 to the NHS and then nominates five colleagues to do the same. Taking part in a challenge event of any kind is a great way of promoting physical wellbeing across your business. Doing something as a team is beneficial too because everyone can support and encourage each other along the way. If you do it for charity as well, there’s an extra incentive to keep going and raise money for an important cause.
Create a support group
Many of your employees might already have found new ways to keep up their fitness levels and stay healthy during lockdown, which other employees might benefit from. Creating a support group is a great way of connecting employees and giving them a network of people that they can share tips with, and equally get inspiration and ideas from. Using a forum or your internal communication tool, they can send links to online workout videos that they’re enjoying, post healthy recipes and share general advice and encouragement that’ll reinforce the importance of physical wellbeing during this time. You could even appoint wellbeing champions to drive this forward, set challenges and keep the momentum going.
Update your benefits offering
While a discounted gym membership, for example, is a valuable benefit, it’s not relevant at the moment and won’t encourage your employees to look after their physical wellbeing. Instead, consider how you can optimise your employee benefits to include features and services that support your employees’ physical wellbeing during lockdown and beyond.
In terms of exercise, access to online fitness classes is a great benefit that gives employees the opportunity to improve their fitness from the comfort of their homes. On top of that, health cash plans and access to a 24/7 GP helpline are also really valuable benefits, especially during this time. By making it easier for your employees to get medical assistance and advice, you’ll encourage them to engage with their physical wellbeing more.
This article is provided by peoplevalue.
In partnership with peoplevalue – The Employee Engagement Company
We are a leading provider of employee reward&recognition, benefits delivery&wellbeing solutions.
