Time to Get Physical with Employee Wellness

Wellness is more than just feeling healthy. It’s about making conscious decisions on a daily basis that empower you to live a healthy, happy, and fulfilling life. But how do you make the right choices in a world where thousands of companies offer the “perfect advice” on how to live well?…….You ask Corporate Sports for help and advice to put you and your company on the right path.

When many people think of workplace wellness efforts, likely the first area to come to mind is physical well-being.

Physical well-being is one of the five widely recognized elements of wellness, however at times UAE based employers fail to implement a holistic and engaging program, resulting in their well-intentioned efforts falling short. Many traditional companies tend to focus on the number’s aspect of physical health…. the standard gig of Employees filling out HRAs and/or participate in cholesterol, blood sugar testing and/or blood pressure readings. These results are often used to direct individuals to reduce possible health issues, leaving many heads spinning with more questions than answers. Not much fun at all, and most definitely not the way to encourage and motivate your workforce to participate in their own health journey.

Corporate Wellness efforts and support need to focus on arming employees with the tools to enhance and maintain health and energy… so they can actually and realistically engage in daily life activities, and live their lives in a full, meaningful-to-them way.

There are lots of ways that employers can help employees up their health and energy levels — and therefore improve their overall quality of life — but, two really important areas that may be a great place to start are physical movement and adequate rest/sleep.

According to “Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements”:

Of the 400,000 people surveyed:

• only 27% get the recommended 30 minutes or more of exercise five days per week.
• Those who exercised at least two days a week are happier and have significantly less stress.
• People are getting less sleep than they did previously. The average is 6.7 hours during a weeknight — short of the recommended 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night. Less-than-adequate sleep means people move slower, have trouble concentrating, become forgetful, make bad decisions, are more irritable, and show visible signs of sleeplessness.

Corporate Sports can help your company implement a fun and engaging program. What will a program with a focus on exercise and sleep look like?? Few ideas:

1. Simple yet effective but providing employees with useful information on the key topics, presented in a fun, interesting and entertaining way. Powerful stats, infographics, eye-catching images, and attention-grabbing short videos are great examples.
2. In House sessions and programs that introduce employees to various types of physical activity that make it easy for them to make physical activity part of their daily routine.
3. Being aware of employee workloads and keeping those workloads within manageable parameters so employees aren’t working all hours of the day and night and/or losing sleep due to stress.

These are just a few ways to help employees realize physical well-being. None of which involve filling out boring assessments or being poked or prodded by doctors. It is essential to make physical wellness as easy, as accessible and as fun as possible. Employees are more likely to participate and more likely to improve their overall well-being if this is done correctly.