How to keep your employees healthy

If there is one thing that most business owners hate is to hear that employees are calling in sick. The main reason for this is that if employees are calling in sick your business is going to end up being short staffed, which can cause your business to lose money. Depending on what type of business you are running you might even have to hire temporary workers to fill in for your employees that are out sick just so you can continue on with business. Or you might have to pay your regular employees overtime to make up for the lost employee. Regardless of what you have to do your business usually ends up losing money when your employees are calling in sick. So what you need to do as a responsible business owner is to do everything that you can to make sure that your employees stay healthy.

Here are some steps that you can take to keep your employees healthy.

Step one:
In order to keep your employees healthy you are going to need to educate yourself about what you can do to keep your employees 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:
You will need to provide your employees with a break room that includes a miniature like kitchen. Having a kitchen at your place of employment will encourage your employees to eat at work, which means bringing lunch's or dinners from home rather than going out and grabbing fast food. Most of us know that healthier food comes from home.

Step three:
Make sure that you provide a clean work environment for your employees. 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:
Always make it a policy for 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:
By promoting exercise at work you can also help your employees to stay healthy because the more physically fit you are the healthier you are. To help encourage exercise at work you can encourage your employees to go for walks during breaks or even by signing the company up for walking a ton 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:
The hardest thing that you will need to do to help keep your employees healthy is to get your employees to quit smoking. To get employees to quit smoking you will need to show support for the stop smoking programs so that you can support any of the employees who wish to quit. In addition to supporting these programs you will also need to put certain guidelines into effect such as no smoking on work premises and other things that can help prevent people from smoking.