7 must-have workplace wellness trends for 2024

Workplace wellness trends aren’t what they used to be a year ago.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, most businesses have shifted their focus to working from home over the last year. As a result, workplace trends like fitness centers and healthy meals at work have now lost their appeal.

However, that doesn’t mean companies have stopped focusing on employee wellbeing.

In this article, we’ll cover seven excellent workplace wellness trends businesses can implement to keep their employees happy and productive. We’ll also tell you how technology can help you provide preventative benefits to every employee on your team.

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The 7 Best Workplace Wellness Trends Your Business Needs:

Mental Health
Financial Wellness
Stress Management and Resilience
Telehealth
Personalized Wellness
Combating Covid-19
Preventative Benefits

Let’s jump in.

The 7 best workplace wellness trends your business needs

Wellness trends are practices companies use to ensure their employees have a healthy work-life balance. These can range from simple health perks like free fitness sessions to complete health awareness programs.

The pandemic has changed how we work and how businesses provide employees with resources for their wellbeing.

Even though most on-site offices have closed and people have opted to work from home indefinitely, companies can still ensure the continued wellness of their teams.

Here are seven corporate wellness goals covering key areas companies can focus on right now:

1. Mental health

Employers have ignored the health benefits that mental health policies can have on employee well being for too long.

However, with more Millenials and Gen Zs taking part in the workforce, and the vast majority of them advocating for the prioritization of mental health, businesses are paying more attention to mental wellbeing.

Now the focus on mental health has naturally increased with the onset of the pandemic. COVID-19’s impact on working conditions has caused additional stress for almost every employee.

Experts have even warned of a mental health crisis that can arise due to Covid-19.

And when we combine the pressures of working from home with always-on company culture, it’s not surprising to see chronic disease and mental health epidemics in the near future.

How can you help your team?

Companies have various types of mental health programs focused on awareness.

Here are some ways to provide mental health benefits for your employees:

Implement mental health and wellness programs that allow employees to break the stigma around mental health issues and talk openly about their challenges.
Provide each employee with access to 24/7 helplines and offer free sessions with qualified therapists.
Encourage mindfulness and meditation along with a workplace wellness program focused on physical fitness and self-care.
Provide managers with training to identify behavioral health and mental health issues.

2. Financial wellness

Financial wellness refers to the absence of money-related stress, which results in a high level of overall financial health.

Studies show that employees who suffer from financial stress experience more punctuality and absenteeism issues — they usually miss almost twice as many days as those who aren’t financially stressed.

In a situation where many people have been laid-off due to the pandemic, it’s easy for any employee on your team to feel financially stressed.

They could have a partner who’s lost a job, or your business might not be able to provide increments and bonuses this year. All of this can factor into the financial health of an employee.

Ensuring financial wellness among employees can save you a lot in the long run.

How?

On average, businesses lose out on $500 billion annually in the US alone due to absenteeism and low employee engagement issues caused by the poor financial health of employees.

Financially healthy employees help you avoid these losses in revenue.

How can you help your team?

Companies use several strategies to ensure financial wellness among each employee. These can range from simple perks to a complete corporate wellness program on financial health.

Here’s what you can do for your team:

Invite guest speakers to conduct a financial wellness program on budgeting, avoiding debt, and investing.
Partner up with companies that specialize in personal financial planning.
Provide financial wellness incentives like contributions to student loans, scholarships for tuition fees, and even financial assistance for healthcare costs like preventive checkups and fertility treatments.

3. Stress management and resilience

While stress management fits into the broad category of mental wellness, most companies prioritize it separately since many employees struggle with managing workplace stress.

A 2017 US-based study showed that around 60% of employees were stressed out all or most of the time at work.

Not only is dealing with stress exhausting, but it also makes an employee experience tons of physical and mental health issues.

On top of that, Covid-19 is making the situation worse — it has directly affected employees and contributed to the rise of stress levels.

To combat workplace stress, most companies focus on helping their employees with stress management and resilience.

Resilience is an employee’s ability to bounce back from challenging situations at work. Investing in developing the resilience of employees is crucial for businesses to have a motivated workforce.

How can you help your team?

Here are a few things you can do to help your team overcome stress:

Provide access to employee wellness programs focused on resilience training.
Create resources and training sessions to help each employee manage their stress better, including dealing with personal losses and grief.
Provide guided meditation classes or access to similar platforms with wellness activities.
Encourage open communication regarding stress and stress-related health issues.

4. Telehealth

Telehealth refers to virtual technology to deliver health care, health education, and related information. Some good examples of telehealth are remote medical appointments, advice, and monitoring.

Now, the growth of remote health care can partly be attributed to the spread of Covid-19. So naturally, most businesses are now investing more money into providing telehealth services for their workforce.

Telehealth offers a range of benefits for health care providers and patients.

For example, virtual appointments and medical webinars help people get the advice and care they need from the comfort of their homes.

How can you help your team?

The easiest way to embrace telehealth is by implementing a health plan that includes a telemedicine platform for your employees.

Here are a few telehealth employee benefits you can offer:

Provide your team with 24/7 access to resources that keeps them informed about their health.
Help employees make regular virtual medical appointments whenever it suits their schedules.
Provide wellness portals for your team to get answers to any health-related questions when physical medical centers are closed.

5. Personalized wellness

All employees are unique. And so are the needs for their wellbeing.

That’s why an employer needs to focus on offering personalized wellness solutions.

Even before the pandemic, personalized employee wellness options like on-demand fitness sessions, health and wellness coaching, and subscriptions to self-care services were increasingly popular.

And since most employees work from home now, every employer needs to support a personalized wellness initiative.

Understanding the need to promote wellness trends, many companies provide a host of wellbeing programs like self-care subscriptions and on-demand fitness sessions.

This way, employees can pick what best suits them and have the flexibility to use the services wherever and whenever they need them.

How can you help your team?

Personalizing wellness can consist of many different things.

For example, you can choose to give team members access to a single app or a platform covering physical and mental health altogether.

Here are a few options you can use:

Give employees access to apps like Calm, Headspace, or Elevate that focus on mental wellbeing and brain training.
Provide fitness trackers and memberships to apps that promote physical activity among your team.
Provide employees with access to wellness coaches who can recommend a personalized holistic approach to wellness.

6. Combating Covid-19

While some companies offer employees the option to work from home indefinitely, others plan to have employees return to work over the coming year.

Businesses requesting employees to return to work are responsible for ensuring workplace wellness for their teams.

However, even with most of the population vaccinated, there’s still a risk of spreading Covid-19.

If employees get infected from Covid-19 within office premises, it could cause more than just a minor setback for companies. That’s why almost every employer is implementing direct measures to prevent employees from contracting the disease at the office.

How can you help your team?

The best way to combat the spread of Covid-19 is by encouraging employees to continue working from home.

However, if your team needs to report to the office to carry out tasks, consider implementing a Covid-19 wellness passport system.

What is a Covid-19 wellness passport system?

Wellness passports are apps and platforms that can keep track of employee vaccination data and health screening results. They can keep you updated on employee health and keep your team safe from being infected.

Another method to help your employees feel safe is to redesign your workplace.

Here’s how a redesigned work environment should look like:

Implement office design that ensures social distancing.
Focus on an activity-based working environment, in which employees visit the workplace only to complete a set number of tasks instead of being there all day.
Use smart devices and systems that help employees follow social distancing and other health guidelines.

You can also consider designing a program that will improve the employee experience of getting back to work after almost two years of working remotely.

7. Preventative benefits

The problem with wellness benefits is that most of them come too late.

For example, every employee is encouraged to enlist in a physical or mental wellness program only when they experience stress, backaches, or reduced productivity.

If companies focused on prevention instead of reactionary measures, they would derive drastically higher wellness benefit results.

When prevention is done right, companies will have physically, mentally, and financially healthy employees, leading to happier and more productive teams.

A good starting point for preventative benefits is to analyze the cause or root of the problem.

For example, if an employee complains of severe headaches caused by work-related stress, managers should look into what causes so much pressure in the workplace.

How can you help your team?

There are tons of preventive benefits companies can offer to their employees.

Here’s how you can do the same with your team:

Train your managers to identify signs of stress among employees.
Conduct workshops about leading healthy lifestyles.
Organize regular health risk assessment and immunization programs.
Encourage employees to pick up healthy habits and lead active lifestyles.

Now, preventative measures don’t always have to be done manually. Instead, you can use technology to help provide preventive benefits throughout your organization.

How can technology help you take preventative measures?

While using manual preventative measures can benefit your team, leveraging the right software can increase the effectiveness of your preventive measures.

For instance, tools like Time Doctor can help you easily track your employees’ performance and how much effort they put in at work.

What is Time Doctor?

Time Doctor is a powerful productivity management tool used by large corporations as well as SMBs to keep employees motivated and productive.

You can use Time Doctor to quickly see whether employees are overworked and prevent further losses in employee productivity.

How?

Time Doctor has a Work-Life Balance Widget that lets employers and managers identify potential work-life balance issues early. They can then take the right steps to prevent employee burnout, leading to better employee satisfaction and retention.

Managers or employers can use the widget to find out:

Which employees are working too many hours a day.
Which employees are working outside of their scheduled shifts.
Which employees are working late hours.
Which employees are working on weekends.

Try the Work-Life Balance widget here.

But that’s not all.

Here are some other ways Time Doctor helps manage employee productivity:

Track how long your team spends on work.
Prevent employees from idling at work.
Access real-time reports to dive into your team’s performance.
Use the Chrome extension to monitor employee productivity across other tools.

Check out the complete list of Time Doctor features and benefits to understand how it helps both employers and employees boost their productivity.

Want to learn more about work-life balance for remote employees?

Read our post on encouraging work-life balance in remote work environments.

Final thoughts on holistic wellbeing

An increasing number of companies realize that employee wellness trends focused on physical health and fitness aren’t enough to keep people healthy.

Instead, you need to focus on holistic wellness, which includes physical fitness, mental mindfulness, emotional wellbeing, and financial wellness — all of which we’ve covered in this article.

Once you implement the wellness trends we’ve mentioned and complement them with tools like Time Doctor, you’ll have a happy and productive workforce in no time!

To get started, why not sign up for Time Doctor’s 14-day free trial today?