How Playing Sports Will Help You at Work

Sports play a major role in ensuring that employees at work stay focused, productive and healthy. Many managers often will seek employees who play sports due to the associated benefits such as an improvement in a variety of skills including teamwork, strategic thinking and change management to name a few.

Furthermore, evident in a variety of research, studies and individual experience it is found that playing sports has an extremely greater influence on the success level of an employee in their day-to-day operations. This is due to an increase in individual focus and ability to handle a variety of situations with stronger capabilities to the non-sporty co-worker counterparts.

In turn, provided below within this blog are the key benefits gained through playing sports and how it will help you at work.

Health and Wellbeing

The first and most commonly found benefit for employees to participate in playing sports is an increase in health and wellbeing. It is largely well known that sports have a diverse influence on the health of individuals such as reducing the risk of obesity, increasing cardiovascular fitness and further relaxing muscle tension to name a few.

Although it can be found that when at work due to playing sports and undergoing physical activity employees are seen to be less stressed and experience less burnout when compared to non-sporty employees. Likewise, employees experience more positive wellbeing at work as they may focus and not experience as much anxiety due to handling pressure that sports congruently train employees to handle.

Teamwork

Participating in sports effectively plays an important role when at work through benefiting employees to gain positive teamwork skills. Specifically, when playing team sports employees share a common goal, this is important for the workplace as whilst working employees need to work together with other team members to achieve the shared goals they wish to attain.

Moreover, sports allow for employees to work more productively with others, through gaining skills to understand other employee strengths and weaknesses and deciding how to best work effectively with this knowledge to achieve workplace activity success.

Strategic Thinking

Playing sports can effectively help increase an individual’s strategic thinking which is an extremely important skill to have for any employee. Specifically, when playing sports and competing against others you are constantly trying to identify the best possible way to take action in order to win or do your best in a given situation.

This means you will identify your personal strengths and weaknesses, whilst further identifying the strengths and weaknesses of those around you, to devise and strategize a plan to help you in the current situation to meet the goals you want to attain. This is critical as at work we do the same thing, that is, we aim to meet common goals and plan strategically a pathway to meeting those goals. In turn, those who play sport are more experienced to think strategically than their non-sporty counterparts.

Change Management

Playing sports effectively teaches employees at work how to effectively deal with adapting and managing unexpected change. Throughout sporting activities, it can be found that sudden and unexpected change may occur, in turn, as an athlete you will find that you are able to adapt to the situation effectively.

For example, on a run, or even running during an outdoor sports game, you may find that the weather suddenly starts to rain, to control your balance, momentum and tempo throughout the game you may slow down a notch to gain more control throughout your sporting activity. Correspondingly, when at work you may be struck with unexpected tasks and as such having the experience of dealing with sudden change through playing sports is extremely beneficial to employee work success.

Perseverance

When playing sports employees at work learn to persevere throughout all kinds of struggles and difficulties to meet their goals. Specifically, when playing sports, you may be knocked down, think something is impossible or find an obstacle in your way, although you have the drive to pick yourself up and find a way to move forward with a determination to attain your goals or even win the match you are playing.

Likewise, when at work having that perseverance to never give up is extremely important. Through participation in sports, employees can be found to persevere through struggles and tough tasks to meet their desired goals more effectively.

Competitiveness

Sports are extremely helpful for employees to partake in for work as it teaches employees how to be positively competitive. Specifically, when playing sports individuals are driven through a competitive nature to win or achieve the goals that they want. In turn, individuals will do everything in their power to attempt to ensure that they achieve success.

Although in some cases this success may not be attained and through playing sports individuals learn how to accept loss and defeats. This is extremely critical as when at work employees need to learn to accept mistakes, losses and rejections which is a critical skill that may be gained through sports. Although due to the competitive nature of these sporty employees they are not negatively impacted but driven to try harder next time to ensure they achieve the goals they want to achieve.