Employee Health | A Word to the Employers
You may have seen my recent employee health post on social media, but I wanted to add a little something to it for the employers to chew on.
Employee health has been a top topic of discussion these days with the pandemic and work from home policies. It goes beyond FitBit challenges, BootCamp classes or putting a bowl of fresh fruit in the break room - it’s supporting your employees by giving them the resources they need for work-life balance - it’s mental health, it’s physical health, it’s emotional health. They all play a roll in one another.
What if you invested in their health and your company by bringing on a corporate health coach?
Not just any coach, but one that has worked in the construction industry for over 20 years - for owner/developers, for general contractors, for subcontractors . . .
Enrollment is now open through the end of January 2021. Let’s talk about what I can do to help your employees get to solid ground during this difficult time.
E-mail me at coachro@woderation.com for a quote.
In the meantime, here is some facts about the workplace that could be affecting your employees health:
- On average, a full time worker will spend more than one-third of their day, five days a week at work. In the construction industry, we all know it's more like 60 to 80 hour weeks and should that be required or acceptable? This often leads to burn out.
- A corporate health program is more than losing weight, quitting smoking and exercises. A lot of times this is just checking boxes when companies decide to implement some type of wellness program. Are you fully vested in your employees? After all, their performance is directly related to their health and your bottomline.
- A person's health is a result of both individual actions and the context or environment within which those actions are taken. Employee health has to be part of the company's culture, policy's and practices. The workplace should be where making a change starts even if we are working from home, even more so as a matter of fact because your employee doesn't have the option of physically partitioning their day between work and home life - now it's all one. How will you help them balance that?
- Think about the physical working conditions of your workplace and the social aspect of it. Are workstations and seating one size fits all or are the employee's individual physical needs to do their job efficiently without soreness or injury taken into consideration. Are there breakout areas for teambuilding? Are your employees encouraged to support one another in personal and professional endeavors? Changing the environment affects large groups simultaneously and makes adopting healthy behaviors much easier if it's considered the norm.
- Having worked in the industry for as long as I have, I saw that many times employees were commended for working through all hours of the night and never leaving their desk during the day. They were considered "hard workers". How about productive workers? Efficient? What does this kind of work ethic say about their emotional and mental health? Many times, individuals that work in this context have a poor evaluation of their skillset and are in a perpetual cycle of feeling inadequate.
- Speaking of mental and emotional health - when was the last time you actually had a performance review? It can be very stressful on an employee if they are not told what is expected of them.
Now here's what you can do to start working towards improving employee health:
- Assess the areas that need to be addressed through informal conversations, surveys or questionnaires with your employees.
- Formulate a plan to address those needs and set overall personal and professional goals for each employee.
- Implement the program in phases so that each phase can be fully integrated before moving onto the next.
And this is where I come in. A third party, with first hand experience in the construction industry. I can have that unbiased open conversation with your employees. I will create a customized plan to address their concerns and I will help you implement the plan. That last part, I can't do myself because at the end of the day, you as the employer need to be on board with everything - leading by example.
If you are the owner of a company, you probably want your employees to have the same work ethic as you and this is often times where all of this starts. Your neglect for your personal health to make the sacrifices you feel are needed to make your company successful should not be theirs to bear - another popular trait of business owners, big or small, in the construction industry.
Let's make health a priority.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/model/index.html