(Newswire.net — December 6, 2017) Salt Lake City, UT — As an employer, it’s only natural to worry about the number of sick days your employees take. While you can’t prevent some diseases, you can adapt your working environment to reduce absenteeism. With the following suggestions, your employees will remain productive, and you’ll boost their welfare.
Make Your Sickness Policy Clear
When employees operate under the illusion that they can’t call in sick, they’ll turn up during their infectious period and spread germs around the office. Create a sickness policy that’s clear upon hiring to stop the spread of germs. This is especially important when it comes to diarrhoeal diseases, where most workplaces recommend taking at least two days off.
Introduce a Staff Room
Ensuring your employees have a separate space for eating prevents them from experiencing burnout. If they encounter burnout, their cortisol levels rise, which will suppress their immune system. Similarly, when employees eat lunch at their desks, their productivity decreases.
Offer Healthy Canteen Choices
Not every employee has the time to bring food to work, and if your workplace has a canteen, they may give in to unhealthy choices. Striking the right healthy to unhealthy ratio encourages them to eat a balanced diet. As a result, they eat a diet rich in antioxidants, which boosts their immune system further.
Start Dishing Out Praise
Employees don’t always take sick leave because they’re sick. When morale is low, they’re less likely to turn up for work, resulting in a higher illness record. While you shouldn’t avoid giving developmental feedback when they don’t meet their potential, giving praise when they need it boosts morale, making them less likely to take an unnecessary sick day.
Boost Your Workers’ Hydration
The human body has everything it needs to filter out toxins and germs, yet many people work against it, resulting in more illnesses. For example, when you don’t drink enough water, your kidneys struggle to filter, and you experience electrolyte imbalances. Add a quality office water dispenser and encourage them to boost their hydration, so their habits work in synchrony with their bodies.
Provide Sanitising Wipes and Gels
Every phone call, brush against a desk, and fingers tapping away at computers leads to the spread of germs. Provide sanitising wipes for employees to clean keyboards and phones before the next person uses them. Similarly, add gels to your toilet facilities. Bacteria such as e-coli spread through the faecal-hand-oral route, causing conditions such as infectious diarrhoea. Antibacterial gels and wipes reduce the chances of this happening.
Purify the Air
According to Allergy UK, millions of people suffer from allergies, many of which kick in due to particles in the air. One example is asthma, which causes some sufferers to experience difficulties with breathing from something as simple as a dust mite. Buy the best air purifier you can afford and you will minimise the number of triggering particles, which could lead to fewer attacks.
Don’t Ignore Mental Health
With one in four people suffering from a mental health condition, the potential for an increase in sickness is extreme when you don’t create an environment your employees feel comfortable in. Flooding the room with natural light, adding plants and providing employee assistance programmes for when their personal lives cause stress reduces the number of depression-related absences.
Encourage Workers to Vaccinate
While flu vaccinations won’t protect your employees from every strain that hits each winter, they will tackle the more common ones. Depending on your staffs’ underlying conditions and the strain of flu they catch, they may spend up to a week off work. As flu symptoms usually present after the infectious period ends, your employee may come into work feeling healthy, increasing their risk of spreading the infection to others. With vaccination, this is less likely to happen.
Reduce Stress in the Workplace
From limited opportunities to take a break to uncomfortable working conditions, there are millions of ways your employees can encounter stress. In addition to exacerbating conditions such as depression, anxiety weakens the immune system. As a result, your employees are more likely to catch whichever viruses are making their way through the local community.
While some of these policies are easy to introduce, others may take a little while. Approach each of them one-by-one, and you’ll soon create an environment that leads to fewer sick days and a more productive business.