Why your organisation needs to prioritise employee wellness now more than ever

The COVID-19 pandemic will have a long-lasting impact on working lives, with many employees having to navigate new ways of working or downshift their careers, as well as adapt to changing circumstances in their personal lives.

As businesses strive to meet the challenges posed by a global pandemic and a serious economic crisis, employee wellness has never been more important to address. If you want to improve retention, lower rates of absenteeism, increase performance and create a collaborative and rewarding working environment, you must prioritise the health and wellbeing of your workforce.

Here are some of the key benefits of cultivating a wellbeing culture:

• Create a happy workplace in which people thrive
• Boost motivation, productivity, and engagement
• Attract and retain the best talent
• Reduce absenteeism
• Reduce work-related stress and enhance wellbeing
• Increase job satisfaction
• Build and sustain high employee morale
• Create sustainable success for your organisation

A quality employee wellness programme could include:

• Health benefits such as access to wellbeing apps, counselling, gym membership, health insurance and personal wellbeing days
• Leisure benefits such as travel insurance, access to event season tickets and paid flights
• Financial benefits such as an annual work from home stipend, corporate retail discounts, financial bonuses, and referral schemes
• Flexible working
• Social activities such as team building events, book clubs and sports

If you are interested in learning more about the innovative benefits organisations are currently offering, order a copy of our 2023 salary and benefits review here.

Click here to view the UAE organisations that are driving wellbeing in the workplace.

How to build an effective employee wellness programme

To drive your mental health and wellbeing strategy forward, there are several steps you need to take:

• Seek approval from the executive/management team and ensure they are willing to participate and actively promote the initiative within the organisation
• Be clear about the company-wide objectives of implementing the programme and communicate these to company leaders and employees
• Set definable goals
• Adapt an employee-centric view of workplace wellness by surveying staff to gain actionable insights and determine which initiatives will be most popular
• Regularly review your wellness policy and adapt it to reflect the evolving needs of your workforce

In building an effective employee wellness programme, you are demonstrating your company’s commitment to taking care of its people, and if you take care of your people, your business will thrive. We hope that this post will help you to jump-start your employee wellness initiative and ensure your employees stay healthy, happy, and productive.

If you’re interested in talking to our team about how we could help you develop a winning employee wellness strategy, or how we could help you meet your staffing needs this year, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us here.

Author Zahra Clark Tiger Recruitment Team