In today’s corporate world, unhealthy work environments are very common. Such environments take a heavy toll on employees’ heath, leading to many problems like hypertension, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, stress, and more of the kind. While employees’ well-being directly influences their job performance, attendance, and work behaviour, stressed-out employees lead to lower productivity rates, increased absenteeism, a negative employer brand, and reduced innovation.
Turning a blind eye to this situation might not prove to be the best idea in the long run. Why? Because you’re most likely to lose skilful employees one after another if you fail to combat the workplace elements that are negatively affecting your employees’ health. Here we’ve gathered a few of those elements to help you look after them and ensure a healthy workplace environment. Let’s check them out!
Occupational hygiene
Lack of occupational hygiene exposes the employees to multiple illnesses and injuries and puts their health at risk. To ensure a safe workplace environment, occupational hygiene is imperative. The reason is that it controls, evaluates, recognises, and anticipates the workplace environment. To ensure occupational hygiene across your workplace, you can consider hiring skilful people for your business; preferred are those who’ve earned degrees relevant to occupational hygiene. For example, individuals with qualifications like an online industrial hygiene degree can prove to be the optimum choice, with the necessary skills required during the course. They can now practise them at your workplace.
Downsizing
The decline in an organisation’s economic growth causes the organisation to downsize. During this process, frequent lay-offs happening at the workplace make existing employees question their economic security, leading the employee to additional stress.
Workplace stress feeds into a host of other problems and results in employees’ poor health. While there is very little evidence that downsizing the organisation would ultimately help the organisation to grow, a relatively large number of researches show that payoffs do more harm than good to the company. You can counter this problem by finding alternatives to downsizing and practising cost-saving strategies.
Fairness
Lack of fair treatment leads to dissatisfied employees with reduced levels of trust and commitment and increased levels of turnover. Ensuring fair treatment across the workplace is crucial because fairness plays a key role in enabling employees to trust an organisation and operate productively to work toward the goal. Employers must offer employees equal opportunities, profit sharing, fair compensation, and fair promotions by developing practices and programmes that encourage fairness.
Flexibility
Employees are also average human beings. They have a family to take care of while performing their jobs dutifully. However, there are times when they have to put their family overwork, which stresses them out. Employees are stressed out to such an extent that even taking their ageing parent to a doctor gives rise to their guilt because they feel that either they are disappointing their organisation or their family. You can try approving their leaves to make them feel at ease, enabling them to give their best when performing. Besides, your workplace should promote flexible working that enables an employee to work outside of office hours and meet the day’s goal.
Competitive environment
A competitive environment across the workplace is not as good as it sounds. While a healthy workplace environment ensures a healthy bond among the employees, a competitive environment weakens social ties and cuts down social support. Social support is essential for a person’s psychological well-being, and lack of social support can make people feel isolated and lonely. Therefore, instead of encouraging competition in your workplace, encourage activities that promote teamwork and collaboration. This would ensure the good psychological health of your employee and transform your work environment into a healthier and happier one.
Work overload
Work overload is not positively related to organisational or employees’ well-being. Employees overburdened with work have to spend more time working at their offices, resulting in less productivity and more exposure to seriexposurenesses, including disability, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. This implies that you need to care for your employees and encourage them to call it a day when the clock strikes 5.
Autonomy
The impacts of work are generally more negative on employees working in high-pressure positions with little to no control over their work – either if it’s the control over their workdays or their project management. A study shows that there are 43% fewer chances of burnout if employees are given the autonomy to work. This is why your organisation must encourage self-control. For better results, you can regulate the work of employees working on their own until they’re fully equipped with the skills required to control the way they work.
Takeaway
If you’re truly aspiring to build a workplace that can contribute to your employees’ well-being, the above-mentioned are some elements that you might need to get rid of. Start eliminating these elements from your workplace now by simply strategising a plan and jumping onto it.
Ellen Diamond did her degree in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in mental health and well-being.
