Why Employee Wellbeing Should Be Your Organization’s Priority While Working Remotely?

With COVID-19 pandemic widely spreading across the world, organizations are moving their operations to digital platforms and mandating their employees to work remotely. However, managing this remote workforce has its own challenges.

Businesses around the world are looking for creating a healthy remote working culture for their employees as its very significant now to watch out for your employees’ health and wellbeing. The employees are already trying to adjust to this new paradigm of working from home with the presence of COVID-19 risk.

Therefore, you should make sure that you don’t leave your employees wandering alone, which may also affect their morale and productivity. Due to social distancing, they may have already started feeling lonely and isolated. To pull them out of this mindset and ensure that they are happy and healthy, you need to develop strategies to do so.

Here are some ways to ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of your employees while they work from home:

Encourage Conversations

Stay connected with your colleagues. Remember that social distancing means maintaining physical distance and not emotional distancing. Don’t let this impact the bond with your coworkers.

Catch up with them frequently and it does not always have to be about work. Hop on a video call with your team. Interact as frequently as you can. Foster a culture of collaboration which will enable the employees to communicate more with each other and work together.

Whether its creating a separate channel for communication or setting regular meetings on Skype, make the most of the resources you currently have to ensure that your employees do not feel lonely while working from home.

Motivate Them To Make Self-care A Priority

In these unprecedented times, you need to be very careful about your physical and mental health and the same implies to your employees too. While adjusting to this new remote working environment, make sure that your employees pay attention to their health and fitness. 

As now your employees don’t have to travel daily to the office, which indeed has restricted their physical movement, it is important that they dedicate some time to exercise to keep their mind & body fresh. 

Here some more healthy practices that will help your employees to stay fit:

• If you don’t have to use a screen, walk around while on the call.
• Don’t stick to the chair. Get up and stretch every 2 hours.
• Always have a water bottle handy and drink plenty of it.
• Meditate daily for some time.
• Limit the news input. Don’t watch too much of it.
• Pay attention to your diet.
• Don’t hesitate to reach out to your colleagues if you need someone to talk to.
• Schedule an online session with a health professional if needed.

Ensure that your employees are not burdened with a heavy workload and have ample amount of time to take care of their health. With the help of an HRMS software or a performance management tool, you can make sure that your employees are can easily clock-in and track their working hours,

Help Them Create A Balanced Routine

Trust your employees and encourage them to develop their own schedule, plan things in advance and stay on top of the commitments. Make sure that they login on time, accomplish their tasks and wind up as per shift without having to extend. You can use various HRMS software or attendance management systems to track and monitor your employee working hours.

Having software do all that, it will be easy for you as well as your employees to step away from the laptop and maintain a work-life balance.

Boost Them To Invest In Their Hobbies

With a proper schedule, they will have a lot of me-time. Push them to explore the creative side in them and discover their long-forgotten hobbies. Advise them to invest some time in whatever makes them feel relaxed like reading a book, painting, dancing, cooking, etc.
Spending time doing what they like will make them feel happy & refreshed. This will enable them to take a break from the Covid-19 updates.                                                                             
Arrange For Health Care Programs
The Covid-19 pandemic is not just affecting the physical health but also impacting the mental state of the people across the world. Hence, it may not come as a surprise that your employees too may feel low sometimes. And you may obviously want to help them come out of it.

Thinking how to do it? So you can offer them access to health facility centers who will talk and guide them as required. Arrange for a health advocate in your organization, whom your employees can reach out to in case of any medical issue. Whether it’s a telephonic, online, or video counseling, it will definitely help your employees to recover from their problem.

Lastly, it's not easy for any of us to adapt to this sudden change, but collective efforts and support will surely help in surviving this tough time. Therefore, always be up for help and ensure the safety of you and your loved ones!