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Businesses Must Not Neglect Employees’ Health

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Concept: Successful business trend. Happy talented businesswomanDo you ever stop to think about how much time and money you have invested in your employees?

Whether you run a company with just a handful of workers or one with dozens and dozens of people under your employ, your team is critical to your success.

If you have employees that are healthy and raring to go day after day, you stand a good chance of being a successful, long-running business.

On the other hand, a staff where some employees are missing work regularly due to sickness and injuries, well that can be a recipe for disaster.

So, which is it for your company?

Help Your Workers Practice Better Health

Even though you can’t (and shouldn’t) babysit your employees once they leave the office each day, it is important that they lead relatively healthy lives outside your presence.

Sure, some will smoke on a regular basis. Others, meantime, never turn down junk food or the ability to not exercise. Some are even accident prone.

No matter what kind of employees you have, you want them to be relatively healthy for several reasons.

First, you hopefully are an employee who cares about the well-being of his or her team.

Secondly, healthy employees tend to do better on the job, not to mention show up for work more times than not.

Third, healthy workers typically have a better attitude about now just the responsibilities of their jobs, but life in general.

So, what are you doing to be as sure as you can that your team is relatively fit and happy?

Incentives Typically Work in the Workplace

Giving them incentives to be as healthy as possible is certainly a good start.

Among the areas to focus on:

  • Healthy habits – First and foremost, your workplace (just like schools, hospitals and other public gathering places) can be a breeding ground for germs. Do your best to encourage workers to show up for work as healthy as they can be. This means not coming into work when one is sneezing, coughing, running a fever etc. Having allergies is one thing; bringing the next bad cold into the office to infect others is totally different. Be insistent that workers not come to the office when they’re battling colds, the flu, and other such illnesses. It doesn’t take long for one person to spread the illness around the office;
  • Knowing how to help others – While you hope and pray that you never will have a major health incident in your workplace, all too many business owners have seen otherwise. Knowing CPR, how to treat injuries on the job etc. is important for both employer and employee. If the majority (or all) of your employees do not formally know CPR, find CPR in your area and get them trained. You never know when one of your workers or even a client/customer visiting your office could develop chest pains and other related problems. Being able to deliver CPR on the spot until medical professionals arrive could mean the difference between life and death;
  • Fitness does matter – Remember earlier when told that you can’t babysit your workers 24/7/365? While that is true, it does not mean you can’t or shouldn’t encourage them to be relatively fit. More businesses are doing their part these days by helping employees get and stay fit. You can consider offering fitness memberships to your team or even allowing them to workout at a fitness facility in your building (oftentimes, buildings where a number of companies call home will have a fitness area available to workers). Another option is having company workouts. Know, you all don’t have to go and see which employee can lift the most weights or do the most push-ups. Outings after work or on the weekends to go bowling, bike riding, hiking etc. can be great physical excursions, not to mention more bonding for the company.

No matter what option/s you choose to keep your team as healthy as possible, do it in a productive and professional manner.

While you can’t force employees to be as fit or as healthy as you may like, always tout the positive, letting them know why this can help them and others over time.

If you haven’t thought too much in the past about the importance of employee health, change that train of thought.

Have a healthier outlook on the men and women helping you stay in business.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Dave Thomas covers business topics on the web.

How Do I Keep My Employees Healthy?

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As a business owner, it is your responsibility to keep your employees motivated and productive throughout the day.

Part of this is helping them become healthier, physically and mentally. People who are living healthy lives tend to have more motivation to do a great job.

So by introducing healthier food options or wellness programs in the workplace, you’re not just helping your employees, but you’re helping your company’s success as well.

That said, what are you doing to help keep your employees fit and productive?

Provide Healthy Foods

Start by introducing healthier foods around the office.

If all you have in your office is coffee, donuts and vending machines filled with snacks and sweets, then that is all your employees typically have during the day.

A good majority of people are not going to bring their own lunches and instead go out to eat. So on the days when they don’t feel like going out or are hungry for a late morning snack, they head straight to the break room.

One way to improve their physical health is by offering healthy items instead of things like donuts and bagels. Have fresh fruit set out for employees, and stock the break room with snacks like yogurt, granola bars or even whole grain bagels with fat-free cream cheese. Put more healthy options in your vending machines as well.

Introduce a Wellness Program

Wellness programs have been very successful for companies who choose to utilize them.

A wellness program can include anything you like, such as on-site classes in yoga, Pilates or even CrossFit.

You can have someone offering stress-relief services for the wellness programs as well, such as massage therapy or acupuncture. This can become part of an employee’s signing bonus and benefits program. It helps your company by offering more benefits and being able to retain your employees, as well as getting more productive and motivated workers in return.

Offer Fitness Center Memberships

If you have a gym on-site, great! But even if you don’t have one, you can still encourage the use of fitness centers by offering memberships or discounts to local gyms.

Contact fitness centers in your area and see if they will offer discounts if you send your employees to their gym. Employees get a cheap gym membership and the gym get a good deal more business, so it works great for everyone.

Encourage On-Site Fitness

There are also ways to encourage physical activity in the workplace.

Start having stretches a couple times a day where you have everyone stand from their desks and perform stretches. This is going to help prevent injury from repetitive motion, such as doing stretches for the hands, wrists, arms, shoulders and back.

You can also give an extra 5 or 10-minute break to employees who want to take a walk around the building for some fresh air and exercise.

Your employee’s health should be important because it keeps them working every day and improves their productivity.

Another thing to note is that you should be offering them help for mental and emotional health through their benefits package.

Photo credit: healthline.com

About the Author: Tina Samuels writes on social media, healthcare recruitment, small business, and social media.

Fighting the Stress of Blogging by Staying Fit

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Blogging was never meant to be an activity that contributes to your stress (in fact it was supposed to be the opposite) but somehow, it is becoming more and more stressful, given the competition and how much more challenging blogging has actually become.

If you are about to start a blog, and you’re inspired by the stories of bloggers who started blogging as a pastime some years ago, and now they are making hundreds and thousands of dollars from their blogs (if they are to be believed), please beware that it is not going to be the case when you launch a blog in this time and age. Sorry to break it to you, but while it was easy to hit the jackpot with little or no effort some time ago, now the internet in general, and blogosphere in specific is turning more and more vicious, and jumping into the red ocean (read: Blue Ocean Strategy) and coming face to face with the big fish is going to be quite tiresome, if not destructive.

To cut a long story short, full time blogging, especially when you are doing it for the sole purpose of making money, can be quite stressful and unhealthy for following reasons.

  • A succession of Panda updates have disposed all of those easy content generation techniques (e.g. spinning or re-phrasing news or others’ articles) and now you need to spend quite some time, and do a lot of thinking to create fresh and unique content on regular basis. And all that time in front of PC with little or no physical activity can result in obesity, weight gain, poor diet, and bad health in general
  • Getting your blog to the top of Google’s results for your desired keywords (AKA SEO) is getting more and more difficult
  • To make the most of your blog, you will have to promote it on all available platforms including(but is not limited to) Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, optimizing for search engines, and other blogs via guest blogging, and again, it can take quite some time and efforts
  • Staying in front of your PC or laptop for long hours and pushing your mind all the time for more and more ideas can contribute to stress and even mild depression in some cases
  • Sitting all the time in front of your PC or laptop will result in bad posture and a seriously out of shape figure, you might even end up gaining weight, and all these ailments will definitely add to your stress
  • Going through your fellow bloggers’ experiences and success stories (even if some of them are nothing but hyperbole), you will feel quite disheartened, especially if your own blogging experience isn’t as fulfilling as others

Taking all of the above in consideration, we can safely declare that modern blogging is a job full of stress, and if you are not taking your mental and physical fitness seriously, it can cast quite negative effects on your overall health and well being.

So here’s the two-way approach to stay fit and deal with the stress built by blogging.

Goal One – Stay Physically Fit:

As earlier suggested, full time blogging will require you to spend more and more time in front of your PC, because you need to be online for everything, from finding new topics to researching for the material, and writing your posts to doing the marketing, and spending all this time while sitting in a bad, bad posture can’t be good for your body. You need to make up for this lack of physical activity by fitting in some exercise routines or sports to your daily schedule to make sure you are not putting up excessive weight. Secondly, if you are looking to take up blogging as a full time job, try to do more work on a standard PC instead of a laptop or notebook, because the smaller screens and keypads will put extra strain on your body parts like eyes, wrists, and shoulders. Lastly, for Bloggers, it can become even more important to maintain a healthy diet program, for example, a big part of your work will require mental labor, therefore it is recommended that you are consuming food which is good for healthy brain, for example salmon, avocado, or walnuts (of course after consulting with your physician).

Goal Two – Stay Mentally Fit:

A healthy body will eventually result in a hale and hearty mind, plus you need to provide your mind with some respite and lots of breaks, mainly because in blogging you are making it work harder than the routine jobs. Ideally, all full time bloggers must be having some sort of a hobby or pastime Away from the computer or TV screen. It will help if you can go out and meet your friends and have some good laugh to wash away the tiredness accumulated from hours and hours of blogging. Lastly, (and this one is going to be tough), try not to be too greedy, because unrealistic expectations or goals will result in more and more stress.

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This post was by Rahil who writes for WeightLossTriumph, who offers fitness related coupon codes like  nutrisystem coupons codes and TRX promotions at his website. You will find many more discounts and reviews of popular products, in addition to nutrisystem and TRX, if you visit his site.