Health and wellbeing: Boosting productivity and resilience in your business

Join the Movement is a new website created by Sport England to help the country stay active during the coronavirus outbreak and beyond. It contains a wide range of simple, high-quality indoor workouts for all ages and abilities and ideas for things you can safely do outdoors. These range from links to useful apps like the couch to 5km programme to short workouts you can fit into your coffee break with no equipment required.

We have collaborated with ukactive and Sport England to create a hub featuring information and handy guides that provide ideas and inspiration on how to fit activity into your working day. These include advice on moving meetings, a simple guide to fitting activity into the work day plus a resource designed to help you form positive new activity habits. You can find these resources further down this page.

Lots of people asked this during our webinar. With many citing workload and the pressure to be the first and last people in the office as key barriers to being active.

There is no magic, overnight solution to making lasting changes to workplace culture, and it will require you to look at your current workplace culture and evaluate which parts of it work well and which parts need to be altered.

However, there are some simple principles that can help to get you started:

Give permission – openly encourage your employees to be more active and get them started by sharing some of the simple ideas resources we have created.

Be a role model -  lead from the front, and show your employees, team and even your clients that this is something you embrace and practise yourself

Involve your employees – ask your people what they want and need through an anonymous survey or informal chat. Understand what their barriers are and look at how you can enable and support them. They may come up with the solutions themselves and simply need your permission and practical help to make this happen.

Share useful resources – we have created a series of guides with simple ideas on how to build more activity into the working day for you to share with your employees.

Change your mindset - As physical activity expert, Professor Greg Whyte, references in the webinar, there is a fear within some businesses that giving employees time to be active (or do other things to support their wellbeing) means they are working for less time and are therefore less productive. However, the reverse has been found to be true and stepping away from this fear and genuinely embracing and accepting activity and health as part of your business day to day is a key first step.

Positive culture change is something that can be achieved over time and the benefits are huge. Aligning your workplace culture, practices and environment to enable  healthy choices and higher activity levels  will create a happier, healthier, more productive workforce and give your business the best chance of being success.

If you are looking to support your team with new initiatives it can be very useful to understand if they are having positive impact, especially if you are considering investing financial resource.

One prominent metric to capture is absenteeism as this will be available through your general reporting systems, however, this can be impacted by what is termed ‘presenteeism’. This is the practice of coming to work despite illness, injury, anxiety or other physical or mental health challenges that will often result in reduced productivity. Therefore, you may see absenteeism figures going down but productivity not going up if presenteeism is prevalent in your business.

The best way to measure elements such as presenteeism and productivity is talking to your staff, consistently asking the same relevant questions over time. Using an anonymous survey tool can help provide a general overview of key metrics and allow for honesty; the survey can be followed up with focus groups to generate a deeper insight into employees thoughts and opinions. To make focus groups sound less intimidating, they can work well as ‘tea and chat’ sessions which can be done successfully via video conferencing or in-person.

It can be useful to use the above process to explore multiple elements of wellbeing for your business, including, but not limited to, physical activity. It can also be used to gain wider views and feedback on what else might be impacting your business productivity and employee happiness. 

In addition to surveys and focus groups, individual employee KPIs have been used to measure performance and output rather than ‘hours worked’, which will usually be defined by the usual business system you use for KPIs. In certain industries (e.g. a service industry) it may also be relevant to directly measure impact on the financial bottom line, through raised productivity in the same hours worked.

As all businesses are different the most effective way to select measures is to have them picked bespoke for you. Although free surveying tools exist this might not be possible for all organisations due to lack of knowledge, time or resource. However, you may find your employee benefits provider offers an ‘off the shelf’ survey tool and Workplace Movement from Active Partnerships offers a low-cost solution to a staff activity survey. 

For help with a more bespoke approach, organisations such as ukactive can offer direct support if you want to explore in this greater depth. In general, utilising support from a third party will ensure you get unbiased and honest results if you want to robustly measure any activity and performance metrics.

As part of the physical activity hub we will be publishing case studies over the next few weeks to highlight real ways that businesses of all sizes and types have promoted activity.

If you have done something interesting around boosting physical activity in your business that you would like to share we'd love to hear it! Get it touch with us via the form below and we'll get back to you. 

Regular physical activity is associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety across all age groups and exercise is essential for slowing age-related cognitive decline and for promoting well-being.

Being active is central to our mental health, depression is increasing in all age groups and people who are inactive have three times the rate of moderate to severe depression of active people. More information about the evidence base behind this can be found in this guide from Public Health England.

In addition, the five ways to wellbeing are globally accepted as a key standard to overall wellbeing and being active is included in this approach as one of the areas to ensure is included.

• Be active
• Connect
• Take Notice
• Learn
• Give

This is explained in more detail by charity Mind in their mental health at work resources.

Promoting, supporting and enabling people to be active during the working day supports good mental health. All of our tips in the webinar and the resources referenced in this FAQ will help you achieve this.

Why not take the first step by holding a moving meeting? Not only is this directly beneficial for building more movement into the day, it's a great way to break down formality, encouraging open and honest conversation.  You can find a full guide on how to plan a meeting in the resources section below.

We've all been there! It's been a long day, you can't find your shoes, it’s raining...

The best piece of advice we can give to motivate you in this situation is to start small and not to worry if you don’t find a routine you can stick to immediately, just start again when you feel ready. Don’t overthink it, this is simply about moving more in a way you personally enjoy and it doesn’t matter how or when you do that.

There are many areas that contribute to wellbeing many of which we discussed in the webinar.  Good sleep, nutrition and a well-designed working set-up all contribute to wellbeing. Physical activity is just one element of a happy, healthy and productive workforce but also an element that can have a positive impact on wider wellbeing areas and can be simple to influence as a business owner or leader.

Check out our tool designed for helping you or your business get started with building something into habit.