How can you encourage healthy employees?

Workplace health and safety regulations require constant management by businesses, but have you thought about how far these practices extend?

Maintaining a healthy and safe workforce goes beyond simply removing dangers in the work environment, with what your employees do at home being just as important as what they do at work.

What can you do to encourage health and safety at home?

One of the main ways to keep employees fit and healthy at home and at work lies in the daily process that joins the two together – the commute. Recent research from The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health discovered that changing the way people get to work can have a noticeable effect on their weight, and subsequently their health.

The findings of the study mainly target people who are still driving to work, as it promotes the benefits of switching to alternate transport forms such as walking or cycling.

Unsurprisingly, members of the study who elected to leave their car at home and walk or cycle to work were more likely to lose weight. On the other hand, people who gave up on the plan and continued to drive gained weight.

Ditching the car helps with weight loss even if walking or cycling to work is impractical, as those who changed to public transport also experienced weight loss.

To encourage this in your workplace, it may be worth setting up plans or goals with staff who live near each other by creating a walking bus or company cycling group. Projects such as this can be kept track of with HR management software, enabling you to record participation and results.

Of course, there are other benefits to getting staff out of cars and into other modes of transport.

“Combined with other potential health, economic, and environmental benefits associated with walking, cycling and public transport, these findings add to the case for interventions to promote the uptake of these more sustainable forms of transport,” the report explains.