Wellness: it’s quickly becoming a keyword for successful business. But it’s not just about your employees getting a break from the desk or the screen; there are real business benefits that you’re missing out on by failing to capitalise on corporate wellness programs.
Here are just 3 of them:
In the last 12 months, one in three businesses have indicated that their turnover rates have increased, continuing a cultural trend where people are far less likely to stay with a single company for multiple years. People are more mobile these days, and company loyalty seems to have become a thing of the past.
Losing good people isn’t just bad for your talent pool: it’s bad for your bottom line as well. Hiring someone costs far more than just their yearly salary; training time, a shortfall in productivity, setting up new infrastructure---it all takes time and capital out of your business.
As a result, businesses are turning to wellness programs to offer their workers something that they can’t get elsewhere. Modern workers are becoming more and more concerned about their stress levels and wellbeing in the workplace, and offering a wellness program tells them that your business cares about their health. That’s often enough to make them think twice before taking up that new job offer.
Absenteeism is one of the most obvious signs of inefficiency in a workplace. It can be sickness, a holiday, or even something like work abandonment. Regardless of the reason, it costs your business. Absence has been estimated to cost New Zealand businesses about $1 billion a year collectively.
But the real killer is far more insidious. Let us introduce presenteeism, the subtle half-brother of absenteeism. This is the act of coming into work when you’re not feeling well (either through illness or a more permanent problem), forcing your sorry carcass through the motions and generally ending up being less productive than normal. As a business owner, presenteeism costs you 10 times as much as absenteeism.
As a business owner, presenteeism costs you 10 times as much as absenteeism.
You can combat presenteeism with a well-designed wellness program. Take someone with severe back pain, for example. They may keep coming into work despite their issues, slowly making their problem worse and worse until they have to go on disability leave. If their company had a wellness program, this problem could have been brought up, identified and resolved with specialist advice and ergonomic design, making their workplace more comfortable for their needs. That would have improved their productivity, certainly, but more importantly they wouldn’t dread having to come into work. It’s a win-win.
Here’s a fact for you: about 40 per cent of workplace sick days are due to work-related stress. That’s right, almost half of the time, people are taking time away from the office because their workloads are too high, their responsibilities are too great, or their environment is generally too anxiety-inducing. It’s not just the Office Sniffles taking their toll.
Imagine if you could make that proportion 20 per cent, 10 per cent, or eliminate it entirely. A lot of businesses already are, using their wellness programs to:
Here at BRAVEday, we’ve experienced how much of a difference a good wellness program can make to our ‘office zen’: we feature a reflexology session every month which everybody looks forward to. The results are instant and you can almost feel the calm in the air!
About 40 per cent of workplace sick days are due to work-related stress.
There’s a very good reason why 40 per cent of businesses with more than 50 employees have some form of wellness program in place. It makes people less stressed mentally as well as healthier physically, and that’s a boon for everyone involved. If you’re a numbers-focused sort of person, you might be surprised to hear that every dollar you spend on a wellness program, you get three dollars back in productivity on average. Who could say no to that?
A happier, healthier, less stressed workforce isn’t just great ethically, it’s great for your business too. People are less likely to leave, saving you money, they’re less likely to get sick or get sicker, saving you money, and they are happier at work, saving you money. What’s not to like?
To find out more about the benefits of corporate wellness programs in your business,read our free ebook below.