Long gone are the days when everyone shuffled bleary-eyed into the workplace at 8am, got semi-comfortable in their sad little cubicle with a stiff chair, and only met for chatter around the office water cooler mid-morning or while eating a grim sandwich for lunch under the halogen lights. Now employers are outdoing themselves with the variety of options on hand to bolster the happiness (and therefore productivity) of their employees. From dog friendly working environments, to office gym memberships, cycle schemes, free massages and lunch buffets-there is stiff competition to provide incentive to keep workers emotionally and physically healthy and happy during the 9-5. So how can you nurture the healthy office environment without spending a lot of dough? Try these ideas to make your workplace happier, healthier, and more productive.
Walking meetings: Who says you need to sit in the boardroom? Most meetings don’t actually need to be taken sitting down, so lace up your walking shoes and head outside. Even on rainy or snowy days, the brisk air will serve to wake you up, and attendees will have a chance to stretch and work out the kinks! A little cold never hurt anyone, after all.
Office massage: Bringing a masseuse into the office on a weekly or bi-weekly basis can up the morale of the team, while only taking a short 15-30 minutes out of their work day. For the low cost of a half or full day masseuse hire, your workers can rotate through the massage chair, finding relief from back, neck and shoulder tension (as well as eye strain brought on by hours sat staring at the computer screen), and come out feeling de-stressed and with boosted energy and concentration levels, ready to get back to the grind. Not to mention no one’s going to call in sick on free massage day, now are they?
Standing desks: Study after study show that sitting all day is terrible for your health, and can lead to a variety of problems, from obesity and higher risk of cardiac disease, to diabetes and back issues. Standing all day would seem like the obvious solution, but swapping sitting for standing has its own set of problems. So what’s a worker bee to do? Alternate sitting with standing. With an adjustable sit-stand desk that can be fixed the appropriate height of the employee, monitoring your health is a mere button push away. And if buying a desk like that is out of your office budget, take the cheaper option to get off your bottom and set a timer for 20 minutes. When it goes off, stand up for a bit. Stretch your legs, get a drink of water, walk over to a coworker’s desk-anything to get up, get moving, and stave off the pins and needles-and heart disease and diabetes.
With these simple, easy-on-the-purse-strings steps, you can easily make your office one of those progressive places that everyone goes on about. Happier and healthier employees create the kind of workforce that spend their hours doing their best and most inspired work, rather than staring at the clock and waiting for 5pm. And implementing these changes are much cheaper than you’d think. No bounce house or company yoga classes needed (although those are nice ideas too).
