How to help ensure your employees stay healthy

One thing that many business owners hate to hear is that their employees are not coming into work because they are sick. The reason for this is that if your employees are calling in sick that means you are going to end up being short staffed and that can cause you to lose money. And depending on what kind of business you are running you might even have to hire temporary workers to fill in while your employees are out sick so that you can continue on with business, or you might even need to pay other regular employees overtime in order to make up for that lost employee. But regardless of what you have to do what usually happens is that your business is losing money when your employees are calling in sick. So as a responsible business owner you want to do everything in your power to make sure that your employees stay healthy.

Difficulty rating:Easy to moderate

Step one:
The first thing that you are going to need to do in order to ensure that your employees are healthy is to educate yourself about what you can do to help them stay healthy, but you are also going to need to educate them. The reason why you need to educate them is that you can do everything you can to ensure that they stay healthy but it is still up to them to adopt these practices, meaning you can't force them to stay healthy.

Step two:
The next thing that you are going to want to do is to provide them with a break room that includes a miniature like kitchen. The reason for this is that it will encourage your employees to eat at work, meaning bringing lunches or dinners from home rather than going out and grabbing fast food. And everybody knows that our healthier food comes from home.

Step three:
Something else that you are going to need to do is to provide a clean work environment. This includes the employees' work place, the break room, bathrooms and anywhere else that the employees must go to go about their daily routines. The cleaner your workplace is the less chance you have of finding germs and bacteria growing which can actually cause your employees to get sick.

Step four:
Require employees to wash their hands after sneezing, coughing, eating, smoking, going to the bathroom, etc. By washing their hands after such activities you are cutting down on the amount of germs that are being spread around from hand contact. You can also provide hand sanitizer at certain locations so that the employees don't have to stop what they are doing to thoroughly wash their hands.

Step five:
Something else that you can do to help ensure that your employees stay healthy is to promote exercise at work. You can do this by encouraging them to go for walks during breaks or even by signing the company up for walk a thons or having a gym installed on the facilities for employees to use. You also want to promote good sleep habits and other things that can go along with a healthy lifestyle.

Step six:
You also need to show support to the stop smoking programs so that you can support any of your employees who wish to quit smoking. But besides supporting those programs you are also going to need to put certain guidelines into effect such as no smoking on work premises and other things that can help stop people from smoking.