Here are a few ideas for keeping work a healthy place:

There have been a number of articles on how your health could be impacted by isolation. We’ve decided to talk about ways to combat some common side effects from this year of social isolation. Everyone is different, so you should choose what areas of your health have been impacted the most and take a few steps to become healthier in those specific areas.

With gyms closed for most of the year, you probably didn’t see many gains this year and maybe saw the opposite. If you feel you’ve become weaker, there are still some things you can do at home to start rebuilding that muscle. There are thousands of bodyweight workouts you can find on YouTube if you have no equipment. If you want, you can get creative in using things around the house to use as weights. What’s important is that you do something most days to keep your muscles working.

Does walking up a flight of stairs seem a little harder than normal? Staying indoors and not being able to hit the treadmill probably has had its effect on your heart and lung health. But even without a gym, cardio is easy to work on. Go on a brisk walk and try adding some intervals of jogging. Or go on a run if you feel up for it. Again, consistency is key, so try to get your heart rate up every day. Not feeling motivated? Join a PUML challenge so you can get rewarded the more steps you take!

An increase in fat can come from multiple causes so of course be sure to consult your doctor if you feel you have fat gain that is not due to your current eating and exercise habits. But if you can tell you’ve gained some fat due to a slower routine, there are a few things you can do to get back on track. First, make sure you are eating healthy foods in reasonable proportions every day. Plan your meals for the week before grocery shopping. Avoid snacking just because you’re bored with working at home. And if you can’t resist snacking during the day, make sure you have healthy options on hand – fruits, veggies, hummus, etc. In addition to eating healthy, follow some of the above tips for getting a workout in, even if just at home.

Has your back and neck been aching? Your home office set up may not be as ergonomically sound as your desk and chair in the office. As a result, your posture could be suffering. A simple thing you can do is set reminders on your work computer at random intervals during the day reminding you to sit up straight and roll your shoulders back. It is also important to give your eyes a break from the screen. You don’t want to be looking too closely and hunching over or to be squinting and straining your eyes. So when your reminder goes off to sit up straight, also look away from your screen at something around 6 meters away for 20 seconds to give your eyes a break. Do this a few times a day.

With everything happening in the world and drastic lifestyle changes happening, sleeping habits have suffered for many. To help get better sleep, create and stick to a simple bedtime routine. This could mean reading before bed, practicing some light stretching or simply being screen-free for an hour before you want to sleep. Try to start your routine at the same time every night so that your body gets used to winding down regularly. 

As your physical health deteriorates, so does your mental health and vise versa. If you feel like your mental health hasn’t been that good throughout this year, doing things to increase your overall health like having a good diet and regular physical activity are good first steps. If this doesn’t help, you should also contact a professional for added support. There are a lot more options for remote therapists now because of COVID and it could be worth it to check them out. 

This blog post is a part of a series on caring for your remote employees’ wellbeing. We think this is especially important with the rise in remote working due to COVID-19.

To read part 1 of this series focusing on social connection, click here.

To read part 2 of this series focusing on physical health, click here.

How an employee feels has a direct effect on the decisions they make and the conversations they are having at work. Feelings of stress, isolation or burn out that remote employees can experience are not going to have a positive impact on your business. It’s important to provide ways to alleviate those mental burdens for your employees so they can lead healthier, happier lives. I think it goes without saying, if employees feel psychologically at ease, they will be able to focus better and enjoy the work they are doing.

All of the different elements of wellbeing are interconnected. This means that as someone improves one area of well being, other areas also improve. So if team members start feeling more connected socially to one another, their mental health will likely improve. Similarly, taking a break to go on a walk is not only a physical activity but also a mental break. So continuing to improve employees’ social and physical health is important in helping with mental health.

Here are some ways to reduce stress and encourage good mental health in the workplace when working remotely.

The trouble with working and living in the same space is that it can be hard to turn off your working mind and relax. It is easy to feel like you should keep working since the lines are blurred between work and home. To avoid this, have remote employees set and post their working hours somewhere the whole team can see. Respect these hours and try not to call or set meetings that are outside employee working hours. Also, encourage your employees to respect their own time and remind them to close their laptops and unplug if you see they are continuously working later than they should be. 

To take this practice a step further, it can be beneficial to make a company-wide or team-wide rule of no meetings on a certain day of the week. If employees know their day is not going to be interrupted with meetings, they can plan on getting more focused work time in. They can structure their day however they want to be more productive or efficient. This simple rule can alleviate stress and meeting fatigue while allowing employees more flexibility.

In addition, allowing your employees to work flexibly can help their mental health. Let them take a few hours off during the day for an appointment. Or if they’re taking care of kids at home, allow them to set their working schedules to later in the evening. This can make employees less stressed, by allowing their work to fit around other facets of their lives. This also allows them to truly focus on work when they are working, knowing that other areas of their lives have been taken care of. The key to implementing this is to set up a way to communicate their schedules and working hours, so everyone on the team is up to date and on the same page.

Some activities are proven to help alleviate stress and anxiety such as certain breathing techniques, yoga and meditation. Similar to setting up challenges or providing resources for physical health and wellness, you can do the same for mental health. You can set up a meditation challenge or yoga challenge with your team. Compete for how many meditation sessions you can complete in a week. The goal is to use some healthy competition as a stepping stone to creating real habits that will lead to better mental health. 

If you do not want to set up a challenge, you can still share resources with your team. This can be as simple as including links to meditation apps or breathing technique videos that help lower stress in an email to your team. The easiest way to think of promoting stress-lowering activities is to think of what activities help lower your stress levels personally – maybe it’s walking, meditating, or cooking. Then promote these activities to the rest of your team in a fun and engaging way.

If you’re looking for an easy way to promote stress-relieving content for your employees, check out PUML’s corporate wellness program which allows you to stream videos and set up different challenges for your employees.

Just remember that employee wellbeing impacts every facet of your business and it is something you should take seriously as an employer. As you improve one element of wellbeing, you will improve the others, so continue to take small steps to help your employees gain better social, physical and mental health.

We’ve provided you with lots of ideas throughout this series on how to promote wellbeing at your company, especially for employees working from home. Don’t feel like you need to implement every tip right away. Instead, take one or two that you think will have the greatest impact on your team’s health and try them out.

We may be biased, but we think PUML is the best platform on the market for promoting company wellness. To learn more about our corporate wellness platform and request a demo for your company, visit our corporate wellness page.

This blog post is a part of a series on caring for your remote employees’ wellbeing. We think this is especially important with the rise in remote working due to COVID-19.

To read part 1 of this series focusing on social connection, click here.

Discussing the benefits of good physical health seems pretty unnecessary. Having good health is pivotal to having good overall wellbeing and, just like all the elements of employee wellbeing, has a direct impact on employee happiness, efficiency and productivity at work. So although it may not seem like your place as an employer to encourage a healthier lifestyle for your employees, it does make an impact on your business. Also, many of the most forward thinking company’s today such as Asana, Facebook, and Google (just to name a few) make their employee health a priority. So you probably don’t want to be lagging behind in this area. Even if you don’t have the budget to sponsor gym memberships or provide nap rooms for your workers, there are many other ways you can help them become healthier individuals.

Encourage walking meetings. If you only need to meet with one person to discuss something, ditch the meeting room and opt-in for a walking meeting. Get your blood pumping, change the scenery and increase your step count for your company challenge! This works for employees working from home as well. Suggest they take walking meetings while still dialed in on their phones if possible. Or even encourage a few short walks a day to break up the workday. 

Another easy activity to encourage is simple stretching. Everyone gets stiff from sitting and looking at their computers all day. Send a 10 minute calendar reminder daily to your team members, reminding your team to stretch. It’s simple and they can do it on their own. Walking and stretching are easy physical activities to incorporate into the workday. Here are a few more you can encourage:

• Water breaks – hydration is pivotal to being physically fit
• Doing 10 pushups – switch out your walk with a new activity every once in a while
• Posture check – a simple reminder to sit up straight and aligned
• Not working through lunch – especially when working from home it’s easy to skip lunch or opt into a quicker, less healthy lunch in order to work more.

The key here is starting small. Encouraging simple healthy habits is a great strategy for promoting a long term healthy lifestyle for your team. You can go the simple route of sending out reminders for these habits, or you can come up with a system for team members to track their success and offer rewards or bragging rights.

Maybe you can’t afford to sponsor gym memberships or have a gym connected to your office building. But you can still offer virtual workouts that team members can opt into, which is perfect for your team members working from home. You can send out a “workout of the week” video from Youtube to your employees and incentivize them to take part. Or you can have a fitness instructor lead a workout routine virtually for your employees (of course they can have their cameras off when they’re following along if they are more comfortable with that). We make it easy for teams to set up weekly workouts on the PUML app, which is another option. Teams can choose which content they would like and a time that works for them. These workouts can be pre-recorded videos or live streamed workouts. However you’d like to do it, promoting one longer physical activity a week along with daily habits is a great way to incorporate a healthy lifestyle into your employees’ workday.

Just remember that employee wellbeing impacts every facet of your business and it is something you should take seriously as an employer. As you improve one element of wellbeing, you will improve the others, so continue to take small steps towards helping your employees gain better social, physical and mental health.

Promoting better physical health doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. Setting up a team culture that praises people who take breaks throughout the day and setting up group activities, even via video, that employees can take part in are inexpensive ways to increase employee wellbeing. 

We may be biased, but we think PUML is the best platform on the market for promoting company wellness. To learn more about our corporate wellness platform and request a demo for your company, visit our corporate wellness page.

So what do we mean when we talk about employee wellbeing? There is tons of information out there about wellbeing and wellness and their exact meanings and components. One definition of wellbeing that I particularly like is “enabling people to develop their potential, work productively and creatively, form positive relationships with others and meaningfully contribute to the community” (Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project 2008). If all of your employees were able to live out these components of wellbeing, it would definitely positively affect their work as well. And it is quite obvious that when employee wellbeing is low, so is work productivity, efficiency and satisfaction.

Now, with the rise in remote working because of COVID-19, it can be more difficult for an employer to have an impact on employee wellness. In addition, working from home can have varying effects on your workers’ wellness. That’s why in this series we will focus on the elements you, as an employer, can make the most impact on for your remote workers. We will define wellbeing as a feeling of happiness rooted in social connection, good physical health and good mental health. For this first installment of the series, we will focus on social connection and ways you can increase this in your teams, even virtually.

Social connection is something that can be hard to foster when employees are not physically working in the same place. However, even with remote workers it is pivotal to foster a sense of community. When people feel connected to their co-workers, not only do they feel happier, but there is also a higher level of accountability. Additionally, when coworkers are more comfortable with each other, they don’t hesitate to ask questions or get a second pair of eyes on the work they are doing. All of this hopefully equates to better and more efficient work done for the overall company or team. Here are some ideas to increase social connection on your team or business.

Add a quick non-work related check-in to an already existing weekly standup or meeting you have with your team. It’s important to have a more personal check-in that goes beyond just, “how is everyone doing this morning?” Before you think that this might be too personal for work, realize that this check-in can simply be a question you ask at the beginning of a meeting to spark conversation. The point is to get real interaction between your employees or team members. Your question could be thought-provoking, like: 

• What’s something you’ve learned recently? 
• What are you most excited about at the moment?
• If you could wake up with a new habit formed, what would it be?

Or your questions could be silly, like:

• If you had a magic tree in your backyard that grew anything you wanted, what would you have it grow?
• Would you rather not be able to stop dancing or not stop singing?

It really doesn’t matter what you ask, you can get creative with it. What matters is that you start a regular routine of having fun genuine conversations with coworkers. 

When having your check-in meeting with remote team members, make sure everyone knows to have their video on. When team members can see each other’s faces, they are a lot more engaged and willing to participate in the conversation. Also, make sure to start, not end, your meeting with the fun question. People tend to feel rushed to get off a call towards the end of a meeting. But if you start the meeting with a question, this opens people up and sets an upbeat tone for the rest of your meeting.

Challenges are great ways to get coworkers to bond over things that are not work-related. We all know about corporate step challenges. These can be a great initiative for making employees think about activity daily and participate in healthy behaviors. Additionally, the added bit of healthy competition can bring teams or departments closer together if they are competing against other departments. Increase employee engagement by having rewards and a leaderboard keeping track of top employees or teams.

You can get creative with what type of challenge you choose. Here are some examples:

• Heart Rate Challenge
• Virtual Workout Class Challenge
• Hours of Sleep Challenge

What’s great about company challenges is that participants take part in these challenges on their own time and even a remote workforce can take part. Company-wide fitness challenges obviously are great for increasing physical health, but their added bonus is increasing social connection on a team.

Here at PUML we have the best platform for hosting your company challenge, with rewards and a leaderboard built in to help keep employee engagement up – learn more here.

Have a designated “space” where co-workers can discuss things happening in the world, their life or anything that’s not related to work. This could be a channel in slack or another similar communication tool. Another way to encourage this is by having virtual “coffee breaks”. Giving remote workers a place to form connections with their co-workers, decreases their levels of loneliness and isolation.

Just remember that employee wellbeing impacts every facet of your business and it is something you should take seriously as an employer. As you improve one element of wellbeing, you will improve the others, so continue to take small steps towards helping your employees gain better social, physical and mental health.

We’ve provided you with a few ideas on how to promote social connection at your company, especially for employees working from home. Try implementing one of these ideas and let us know how it goes in the comments. We may be biased, but we think PUML is the best platform on the market for promoting company wellness. To learn more about our corporate wellness platform or to request a demo for your company, visit our corporate wellness page.