Your employees will soon be considering their New Year’s resolutions. And there’s a good chance that, shortly after they make those resolutions, they’ll break them. The failure rate for resolutions—75% or higher, according to a Wall Street Journal report—is startling.
Don’t miss this chance to maximize the New Year as an avenue toward a healthy workforce. Consider the following tips to create easy healthful opportunities for your employees:
- Create ways for your employees to exercise. Bring group exercise onsite. Make a worksite fitness center out of unused meeting-room space. Establish a walking program or partner with a local commercial fitness center for reduced-rate memberships.
- Get creative with signage at work. Fran Melmed of Free Range Communications offers an intriguing blog on ways to maximize signage at work to help employees make better choices. My favorite idea is to post notes on vending machines indicating how many minutes on a treadmill will be required to burn off the choice candy bar that costs more than $1.
- Encourage healthy food choices. Speaking of food, a study just came out indicating that when people use cash to pay for food, they tend to make healthier choices. Apparently those in the study were less likely to make impulse buys on unhealthy foods when they were paying cash for their groceries. Perhaps worksite cafeterias should initiate a cash-only payment policy.
How will your worksite leverage New Year’s resolutions to create a healthier workforce?