The importance of creating a healthy workplace is a subject that has been brought sharply into focus over the past year. As health and hygiene have been prioritized at an unprecedented level, companies are making more effort than ever before to ensure their work environments are as clean as possible.
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Protecting the health of employees is a responsibility employers should always take seriously for the sake of their staff and the success of their business. Employee absence has a significant impact on businesses. Unsurprisingly, rates of employee sickness surged during 2020. It is reported that an average of 1.5 million employees missed work due to illness, injury, or a medical problem each month in 2020. These figures show an increase of 45 percent compared with the previous 20 years.
Even during normal times, without the additional strain caused by COVID-19, the effects of absenteeism create significant issues for employers. Absenteeism causes reduced productivity, can impact customer service, cause deadlines to be missed, and put a strain on the employees left to cover an increased workload.
In short, staff sickness can cause a wide range of unfavorable situations for businesses to handle. So, it makes sense for organizations to do all that they can to reduce the likelihood of staff sickness and avoid the unfavorable consequences that it creates. Of course, staff absence cannot be eliminated altogether, but businesses can play an active role in ensuring that they are not the cause of absenteeism in their workplace.
Here are some tips to help you create a healthy workplace for your team and reduce the chances of employees needing to take time off work:
Nurture a Healthy Culture
While no employer wants their team to be off sick, taking a harsh approach to employee sickness can foster a hostile work environment. Ironically, being too tough on your team about their sick days can exacerbate the problem, and you may see absenteeism increase. Your staff turnover may become a cause for concern, too. Everyone likes to be treated fairly, especially so at work.
Keeping this in mind and fostering a healthy workplace culture will go a long way toward ensuring your team feels happy at work and that their health and wellbeing matter. Creating a healthy workplace culture should help your staff sickness rates to fall naturally and productivity levels to rise, as employees feel supported and happy to be at work. So, taking steps to make your work environment positive could provide significant benefits.
Manage Workloads
Everyone feels stressed from time to time when they are at work. However, if your employees are under continual stress, this could negatively impact their performance at work and increase the likelihood of them taking time off work.
While driving forward productivity levels and encouraging your team to get more work completed in less time may seem good for your bottom line, it is not so healthy for your staff. One study shows that 80 percent of employees feel stressed at work, and 60% of absences are related to stress. So, giving your employees heavy workloads is something you should definitely reconsider if you want to promote wellbeing at work and reduce staff sickness.
Aside from feeling stressed out, giving your team too much work can also cause a range of other problems that could cause absenteeism. A heavy workload may mean that employees arrive at work early, stay late and skip their breaks. Putting in all these extra hours without a break could cause or worsen a range of medical conditions, from high blood pressure to back pain and repetitive strain disorders.
Add Hygiene Stations
Increasing the cleaning frequency in your building is essential to help reduce the chances of sickness spreading throughout your team. But, as well as taking steps to improve hygiene levels on the floors and surfaces, it is also helpful to add hygiene stations in locations across the workspace and the entrances.
Introducing hand sanitizer points in the building and making sure these are topped up regularly is an excellent way to minimize the transition of COVID and other viruses that transmit easily from person to person.
Reduce Touch Points
Parts of your building that are frequently touched can become a breeding ground for germs. During the pandemic, the need to reduce the number of people touching the same surfaces was highlighted as a way to slow the spread of the virus. Continuing with this advice and reducing the need for employees to touch surfaces is an excellent way to prevent the spread of illness in your building.
There are many changes that you can make to introduce more contactless features to your building. Setting doors to automatic opening, so that door handles do not need to be used is a great starting point. It is also beneficial to consider additional contactless changes. Faucets Canada offers auto flush toilets that will help minimize the surfaces that employees need to touch in the bathroom and could be a useful extra hygiene measure.
Spending a little time thinking about your building and the various surfaces that people touch frequently should help you to see where the main touch points are and how contact with these can be minimized.
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Maintain the Building
The maintenance of your building has a significant part to play in creating a healthy workplace. Keeping up with regular maintenance of the building is a great way to ensure it is a safe and healthy work environment for your employees. Having the air conditioning systems and heating systems frequently serviced will help to ensure that the air quality in the building is high. This should minimize the chances of pollen, dust, and other contaminants being spread through the building by your heating and cooling systems.
Regular maintenance of the building should also help to reduce the chances of the building developing dampness and mold. Excessive moisture in the building and mold could also impact employee health, especially for employees with mold spore allergies and with respiratory conditions.
Facilitate Remote Working
Many employees got their first taste of remote working during the pandemic when the shelter in place orders came into effect. A lot of people enjoyed working from home and found it a far more convenient way to work. Many also discovered that their productivity levels were higher at home than they were in the office. Allowing your employees the flexibility to work from home or at least providing the option for a hybrid working split between being at home and in the office is an excellent way to reduce staff sickness.
Being able to work from home when they have a cold or other non-serious illness minimizes the need for your employees to take time off sick and also helps to reduce the spread of sickness throughout the rest of the team. So this is definitely an option to consider to reduce illness and keep your workplace healthy.
Final Thoughts
Creating a healthy workplace and reducing staff sickness is something that requires a joined-up approach. It is crucial to improve workplace culture to increase employee wellbeing at work and keep stress levels low as stress is a major cause of workplace absence. The efforts to safeguard the mental health of your team also need to be coupled with a proactive approach to workplace hygiene.
Taking steps to minimize the impact of work on both your team’s mental and physical health is an excellent way to show your employees that you value them and should help to keep absenteeism low.
