How Your Employees Stay Healthy

"People who feel good in a company are more committed and productive. In addition, satisfied employees are less sick." This is what Health Promotion Switzerland writes. So it's worthwhile for you as a boss to invest in the health of your team members! We tell you what promises success.

Create a Healthy Working Environment

You can promote the physical health of your employees by creating a work environment in which people feel at ease and can work comfortably. Look for these things:

• Ergonomic office furniture – now a given. To make sure your team isn't always sitting down while doing office work, you can organize some height-adjustable desks.
• Practical and user-friendly technology.
• Different workspaces for different activities: for silent work, sharing, meetings, creative activities, etc. Make sure there are retreats as well.
• A pleasant atmosphere through appropriate lighting, colors, plants and room temperature.

Ensure a Positive Working Atmosphere

The working atmosphere in your team has a decisive influence on the well-being and productivity of the team members. It is essentially shaped by the relationships in your team.

Here's what you can do to create a positive work environment:

• Stay in dialogue. Communicate openly, simply and honestly.
• Establish clear and comprehensible rules for communication and behavior that everyone can agree to.
• Deal with conflicts quickly and resolve them according to clear rules.
• Give your employees a say in decision-making and allow for differences of opinion.
• Create an inclusive work environment in which people of all colors feel at ease.
• Ensure psychological safety: employees are allowed to make mistakes, express opinions, give feedback and show vulnerability without being judged or condemned by the team.
• Organize events and activities outside the company for team spirit.

Lead with the Goal of Motivating

As a leader, you have many opportunities to motivate and win over each individual employee:

• Give clear and achievable goals, which you ideally work out together with the team member concerned.
• Challenge your employees, but don't overburden them. In dialog with them, you will find out what is the right measure.
• Give them trust, and they will trust you.
• Show that you care about your employees.
• Give praise and recognition, show your appreciation.
• Give regular feedback and seek feedback about yourself and your leadership.
• Give constructive criticism.
• Actively encourage your employees and discuss their development opportunities with them.
• Avoid micromanagement and instead grant autonomy: Don't control every detail of your team members' work and tell them how to do it better. It only causes trouble. It's the result that counts!
• Be fair and a role model yourself.

Provide the Necessary Resources

Insufficiently available resources for their work trigger dissatisfaction and stress among employees or even make them ill. Ensure that these resources are allocated appropriately:

• Interesting tasks in which employees can contribute and realize their potential.
• Enough time to get the job done.
• Enough time for recreation in the form of breaks and vacations.
• Flexible working time models, thanks to which they can better manage their work and leisure time.
• Remote work: home office or coworking.
• Free space: grant your employees time off from the daily grind, time to be creative.
• Information: Make sure that the information to get things done flows and is available. Technical tools such as Teams or Slack support you in this.
• Knowledge and learning: never skimp on the training of your team members and let them do their training sooner rather than later.
• Appropriate and reliable tech tools. They should serve your employees, not the other way around.

Seek dialogue when you observe that employees have health problems. The web app "Etwas tun?!" developed by Employees Switzerland together with Workmed helps them to stay mentally healthy at work (link below).

Are you overwhelmed by all the suggestions? Don't get stressed, even your resources are limited! You have certainly already implemented a lot 😊. Go through the other advice point by point and you'll see: They are implemented faster than you think.