Keeping your workforce healthy makes sound business sense. By supporting and encouraging your staff to live a healthy lifestyle, you’ll increase productivity and reduce sickness absence, in turn making your business more profitable.

The environment we work in influences our health choices and can be a force for improving health, both for individuals and the communities in which they live. It can boost an individual’s confidence and self-esteem while offering structure and companionship.

HOW YOUR BUSINESS WILL BENEFIT

But helping your workforce to stay healthy, you can also bring huge benefits to your company. These include:

• reduced sickness absence, bringing with it financial savings
• improved efficiency and performance delivered by a positive and enthusiastic workforce
• better team work and less workplace conflict
• heightened competitive edge by becoming an employer of choice

Healthy Ambitions Suffolk gives you a practical way to do it. 

There’s lots of simple, practical and low cost advice in the creating a healthy workplace section of the website, plus information on where else you can go to for more help.

Once you’ve started making changes, you can apply for a Healthy Ambitions Suffolk business award, which recognises and rewards your efforts to actively improve the health of your employees.

THE COST OF POOR HEALTH TO YOUR BUSINESS

Although being in work generally leads to better health, not all workplaces are healthy. Striking statistics show that:

• between 2% and 10% of your annual salary bill is likely to be going on sickness absence
• musculoskeletal problems and stress related conditions are now the most common reasons for absence from work
• an estimated 34 million working days are lost in England and Wales due to smoking-related illness
• alcohol misuse among employees in England costs up to £6.4 billion a year in lost productivity through increased sick days, unemployment and premature death
• the costs of making reasonable adjustments to keep an employee who develops a health condition or disability will certainly be less than recruiting and training a new staff member.

The longer someone is signed off, the less likely they are to return to work. For example, only half of back pain sufferers off work for six months will return to work. For people with mental health problems, the biggest obstacle to returning to work is often fear of discrimination by their employers.

You can change all this. You can have a measurable impact on reducing heart conditions, smoking and sickness absence. You can have a healthy, energised and motivated team, and enjoy all of the benefits that positive, happy staff will bring to your business.

So start today – and let Healthy Ambitions Suffolk help!