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In today’s tough business environment, bosses always want to squeeze the maximum effort from their employees. There is an increasing trend to offer health and wellbeing perks such as corporate health insurance , cycle to work schemes or discounted gym memberships. These perks not only offer a way to increase productivity and reduce employee absenteeism but contribute to increase job satisfaction and employee engagement. Some examples of successful healthy schemes in the workplace are: - Edenred Cycle to work scheme : This scheme is proving to be one of the fastest employee benefits in the UK, allowing companies to buy bikes and lease them to employees over a fixed period of time. The Edenred Cycle to work scheme is run in partnership with Halfords and allows employees to choose from a wide range of makes and models of bikes and accessories up to a value of £1000. The benefits are numerous including improving staff well being and morale, reducing car park costs and traffic congestions, even making savings on your national insurance contributions. - Lunch Walks: This idea has originated from the US, where there is even national walk at lunch day. The latest walk at lunch day was the 27th of April. Research have shown than fitting a brisk walk in the middle of the daily work routine has several benefits such as reducing stress levels, decreasing the risk of heart attack and type-2 diabetes and losing weight. Some companies even distribute pedometers so employees can count their number of steps as way of tracking their content. -Healthy eating schemes: In this scheme the company tends to provide information about how to achieve a balanced diet. Healthy eating essentially means eating foods from all the different food groups in the right amounts. Guiding your employees through the necessary steps to achieve a balanced diet is something that it does not cost much time or money and it can reap huge rewards. It is of course important to preach with example and offer healthy options in the company canteen like fruit and salads. -Health Checks in the work place: This initiative has been pioneered by the financial firm Hymans Robertson and offers health tests to all their employees to check basic health parameters such as cholesterol level or blood pressure. This initiative has the benefit of detecting potential ailments before they become too serious which subsequently reduces employee sickness. Moreover the company personnel feel appreciated as their employers are showing a genuine concern for their health and well-being. -Subsidise Gym Memberships: This is a widely adopted scheme; one example of a company successfully adopting this scheme is energy giant Schlumberger which has reimbursed employees up to £250 of a gym annual membership. The best news is that healthy work initiatives are not only feasible of big corporations, healthy eating or cycle to work schemes are very cheap to implement. Furthermore some insurance companies will offer small business health insurance packages. It is really important not to overlook these initiatives as recent studies have shown that health related benefits play a major part in staff retention. Mark Montanana, has conducted a research about how company health insurance and healthy initiatives can increase staff productivity and job satisfaction.
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