Personal health, both physically and mentally, is crucial for maintaining a happy lifestyle. We all know staying active helps us remain healthy and fit, which positively impacts our mental well-being. This is always important, but even more so during a time where we’re all sheltered away during lockdowns and cannot visit the gym. That’s why this article highlights the benefits of staying healthy and gives you tips on how you can help motivate your employees to remain active during a particularly sedentary period in their lives.
Your employees are more productive and happier
Did you know that 79% of employees get more work done on the days they exercise? This was found during a study carried out by the University of Bristol. In addition to an increase in productivity, employees who exercise also see a general rise in happiness. This result was reported by the known insurer ZLM, who reported the behavior of 200 of their employees after exercising and eating healthier. Additionally, ZLM reports that setting achievable goals was crucial for seeing any results. While both these studies investigate different things, the commonality is that it is certainly worthwhile to invest in the overall health and fitness of your employees. Start small to get the ball rolling with some achievable goals today.
Encourage sports during work-hours
So, how do you get your employees to exercise? One clever way is to allow exercise during the workday. In saying this, we don’t necessarily mean they should just skip out for an hour or two to hit the gym or do some home exercises every time they feel like it. However, if time permits it, and there’s not a lot to do at work, perhaps while waiting for a customer to get back, or a meeting to occur, then encourage taking a walk or doing some light exercise in the living room. You probably already know that these suggestions rarely work unless you can make it a team effort so there’s an accountability element to it. Find out how you can combine exercise and work in a smart way, perhaps by organizing virtual sports activities as a team.
Create a challenging event
Like we previously alluded to, setting achievable goals is a nice way to get started with exercising both for you and your employees. If you want to spice it up a little, and really stress the team-cohesion and awaken some friendly competition in your team, we recommend setting a big challenge. For example, you can create an event where every member of your team has to run / bike a certain distance and see who finishes this challenge first. Make it something big that will take days if not weeks, so people can get the competition going. A good example could be a “Bike to Paris” event where you calculate the distance from your office to Paris, and then the first employee to bike/run the entire distance wins. This challenge is easily tracked and encouraged using our fitness trackers which can also be imprinted with your logo for added brand awareness!
Reimburse subscriptions for sports activities and gym memberships
Offering free fitness as part of your employee benefits package is a great motivator for many. In a lot of cases, the costs of e.g. gym memberships are covered by tax exemption depending on where your company is located – we recommend consulting your local regulations. However, even if the memberships are not exempt from taxes, it is still a very good motivator for employees and is definitely something job-seeking talent is paying more and more attention to nowadays. And as you know by know, active employees are more productive so in the end it also benefits your team performance.
Take the bike more often
Some cities are naturally better suited for taking the bike to work. If your company happens to be located in a bike-accessible location, then we strongly recommend that you encourage employees to ride their bikes to work! The daily activity to and from work helps adults fulfill a lot of their recommended weekly moderate intensive workout minutes, which happens to be around 150 minutes a week for the average adult.
Sports products as gifts
Since our business consists of helping people connect their company identity with promotional merchandise and corporate gifts, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention gift-giving as a motivational factor. So, if you want to encourage home workouts, put together a ‘corona care package’ consisting of sports products to help your employees stay healthy and fit. Think of products like gym clothes, sports bags, water bottles, etc. which are all excellent products for printing your logo on!
Health starts in the kitchen
Exercise will only get you so far, the real results happen in the kitchen. That’s why we strongly encourage you to look at ways to motivate employees to eat healthier. For example, you can host cooking workshops or make start initiatives to ensure healthier lunches are served in the canteen. The most ideal results of course happen when you can encourage employees to take care of eating healthy all on their own. Our products from Mepal are great for inspiring creative and healthy food choices. Take a look at all our kitchen products!
Hydration is key!
Around 60% of the human body consists of water, so make sure you give your body gets plenty of water during the entire day. When you’re body is fully hydrated your energy level and brain function increase. To maintain this energy and productivity, it is recommended for adults to drink around 1.5-2 liters of water per day, which can be hard if you don’t have a way of “tracking it”. That’s why we recommend purchasing nice water bottles that people know contain a certain amount of water so the idea changes from around 2 liters of water to drink 2-3 bottles of water. One is easier to track in your head, which makes it a fun little objective. Check out your options here.