3 Simple Ways To Boost Workplace Performance

Your people are your organisation’s most valuable asset. They are the lifeblood of your business, the crucial cogs that keep all the wheels turning. Without them, you wouldn’t have a business.

That’s why it is important to always ensure you are doing everything in your power to encourage and facilitate maximum productivity in your workplace.

1. Regular Exercise

The health benefits of regular exercise are widely documented. But did you know that exercise can also play an important part in boosting the productivity of your workforce?

Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, which sharpens awareness and makes people more alert. As a result, they are more conscientious in their work and benefit from boosted energy levels, meaning they can often carry out tasks more efficiently than their peers who are not exercising regularly.

Furthermore, long periods of prolonged sitting have been linked with conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. So, when you suggest that your employees interrupt their sitting every hour for at least for 2-4 minutes, you actually stand to reduce absenteeism and promote a much better culture of improved health and wellbeing.

2. A Better Working Environment

In the same way that animals and plants thrive depending on their environment, so too do humans. As such, in addition to promoting the benefits of exercise to your employees, it’s also important to ensure their working environment is making a positive impact on productivity, efficiency and wellbeing too.

First and foremost, focus on the physical aspects of your workplace and the occupational health and safety of your employees. Every one of your staff should be working in a safe environment. One that’s conducive to enabling them to be productive.

Workstation assessments are a crucial part of ensuring your office-based employees are working in a suitable environment. However, so too is ensuring you have a healthy culture, one that promotes the principles of support, recognition and mutual respect.

3. Sufficient Sleep

Some companies – deliberately or accidentally – encourage working practices that favour longer hours and less sleep. But the reality is that little sleep has a detrimental effect on an employee’s ability to do their job.

In fact, research by the Centre for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley has shown that “shorter amounts of sleep predict both a lower work rate and slower completion speed of basic tasks”. In other words, employees who are tired are unproductive. They also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to problems.

Lack of sleep also thwarts creativity, with individuals who get less sleep often opting to undertake more mundane tasks when given a choice, thus generating less creative ideas in the process.

While sleep guidelines are not an exact science, a typical person needs around eight hours of good-quality sleep a night.

So, to wrap up: exercise & move more, create a good working environment and ensure your staff get plenty of sleep. All of these factors makes sense and should shape your Employee Well Being plans.