It’s the duty of an employer to make sure that their staff is happy with their working environment. Now more than ever with the current COVID19 crisis, ensuring that a workplace is a safe place has never been more important. Whether your employees are still working as essential workers throughout the crisis or you are slowly reopening locations and getting employees back to work, it’s important to actively demonstrate that you care for their health and wellbeing, particularly during these uncertain times.
Provide Personal Protective Equipment:
Even if PPE is not strictly required for your employees to do their jobs, providing it to them will help them feel safer and demonstrate that you are taking every step possible to improve their personal safety at work. Branded face masks can be an ideal option with blank and custom designs available; make sure that masks are either washable and reusable or that there are enough of them to allow employees to safely change them regularly. Provide employees who touch food or other goods with disposable gloves and again, make sure that there are enough for them to be safely changed between each use. Employees should have access to hand sanitizer throughout their shift and ample hand-washing stations.
Take Mental Health Seriously:
Awareness of mental health issues is on the rise, but research shows that work is still causing people’s mental health to suffer and there is still quite a lack of support and understanding from managers and employers in regard to this issue. Right now, in particular, employees may be dealing with more anxiety and stress than usual due to the pandemic and it’s important that employers are able to understand this and provide as much support as possible. If continuing to allow your employees to work from home is feasible, this should be considered rather than having them come back to the workplace under unnecessary stress.
Listen to Employees:
One of the best ways that employers can show that they care about employee health and wellbeing is simply to be good listeners. When it comes to what your employees need in order to feel safe and supported at work, the best people to tell you what needs to be done are the employees themselves. Whether you’re putting new systems in place to improve employee health and wellbeing during the COVID19 process or putting together a returning to work strategy for a business that is reopening, getting opinions and ideas from the employees themselves and putting these into practice is essential.
Consider Physical Health:
Employee physical health is often directly related to their mental health and wellbeing, and as an employer, there are several things that you can do in order to support employees with improving their physical health at work. This is particularly true of office environments where sitting at a desk all day is not doing your employees’ health any favors. Eight in ten workers say that they are worried about the effect that sitting at a desk all day is having on their physical health, so it’s a good idea to come up with solutions to support this such as sit-stand desks.
Provide a Nice Working Environment:
Last but not least, people spend the majority of their waking hours at work so it’s no surprise that providing a pleasant environment for them will have a significant impact on their wellbeing. Simple improvements such as deep cleaning the office more regularly, letting more natural light shine through, and encouraging a friendly, supportive company culture and morale can often make the biggest difference.
Employees spend a huge amount of their time at work, so it’s no surprise that work can have a massive impact on physical and mental health. Right now with the COVID19 crisis currently underway, it’s more important than ever for employers to show that they care.