Why employee wellness initiatives make good business sense

When Sarah Allswood was persuaded to join the RBI Living Well Challenge, a 30 day challenge that encouraged employees in her company to move more, she reluctantly agreed. She wasn’t too sure what ’employee wellness’ really was, and not being a lover of exercise, Sarah didn’t want to let the team down, but hoped that everybody would lose interest after a few days.

30 days later, Sarah completed her first 5k run, and that wasn’t all.

She became very aware of how little she actually moved each day, and how much more she was actually capable of doing.
She bonded better with her work colleagues, discussing her evenings and weekends in ways she hadn’t previously.
She slept better and felt more energised which impacted her productivity at work. It felt like the start of a whole new chapter in Sarah’s life.

Why employee wellness initiatives make good business sense

Faced with an ever changing and pressurised work environment, many companies are embracing techniques to help employees, like Sarah, adopt healthy habits. Most people know that doing exercise and keeping fit is an important component of a healthy lifestyle, but the fact remains that many people don’t move as much as they should, and exercise gets deprioritized as we’re too busy doing other things.

Workplace wellness initiatives are there to help you gain more energy, reduce risk and increase performance, and it’s great to see more companies putting resources into wellbeing programmes.

But where do you start if you’re motivated to pay attention to your ‘wellness’ – but there’s not a programme you can follow.

You can start by tracking and measuring – and reading up on your options.

What gets measured gets managed’ is a common mantra in business life. It’s the same for health and fitness. We knew that tracking activity was important and we wanted to make it as easy as possible for participants to track their steps. To support this goal, RBI signed up to leverage the fitness platform, Himotiv, that made it easy for people to both track their individual and team activities, and also see their team’s progress in comparison to other teams.

Here at Team Raw Energy, we are looking into ways to track and measure wellness, to inspire and motivate people to get onto a programme such as the one run at RBI, and to start even though they could be on their own.

If you want to track and measure, take a look at our other blog posts at the end of this post, which will inspire you.

You can also sign up for our health habits ezine where you can find inspiring help and advice to keep you going!