Getting your staff to develop and maintain healthy eating habits is a great first step to any wellness program, and it won’t break the budget.
Healthy eating is as simple as making better choices. Making those choices is much easier when you’re surrounded by healthy options, which is why you need to make the right decisions when providing snacks for employees.
So, how do you encourage staff to go healthy to better their working day, without becoming unpopular in the lunchroom? Start here and be amazed at the increase in energy and productivity within your workplace:
1. Offer healthy food choices onsite
Small changes to your workplace environment can make a big difference to people’s’ eating habits. Keep vending machines stocked with healthier choices or supply a subsidised communal fruit bowl. We recommend providing fruit instead of biscuits, offering almond or coconut milk as alternatives for tea and coffee, and stocking up on almonds and other healthy nuts as a snack option.
2. Remove the temptations
Stop offering unhealthy or less-than-healthy snacks. At the very least offer a majority of healthy items and just a few traditional junk food items. Removing temptation will make it easier for staff to make the better choice.
3. Order healthy for breakfast or lunch meetings
Shouting your employees a meal is a common way of creating a sense of community or celebrating the end of a project but too often the food on offer is not the best. So try rewarding your team for putting in the extra hours by ordering something highly nutritious. These days we’re spoilt for healthy food options, so there’s no excuse for defaulting to pizza.
4. Encourage staff to drink more water
We’re constantly reminded of the importance of keeping hydrated. Place jugs of water around the office and incentivise staff to drink throughout the day. Or better still? Company water bottles!
5. Education on healthy eating
Whether it be a healthy recipe in your weekly newsletter, or a healthy eating seminar organised over a lunchtime – education works. It will empower staff to take their new healthy habits home and create a more balanced lifestyle. It’s also FUN! Encourage staff to share their favourite recipes and make suggestions of what they’d like to learn from educational seminars.
(To find out how the best companies approach wellbeing, read our article.)
Healthy eating within the workplace can improve mood and boost energy, making it a no-brainer to provide for your office.
[…] healthy is prohibitively expensive. However, you can dispel all of these misconceptions by having a nutritionist host an on-site healthy eating workshop. After just one session, you could set your entire team up to greatly improve their quality of life […]
Thank You for sharing such a nice and informative blog and your knowledge with us. Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle. Combined with physical activity, your diet can help you to reach and maintain a healthy weight, reduce your risk of chronic diseases (like heart disease and cancer), and promote your overall health.
Great innovative. Very good effort with collecting and collating the information.
Employees working in the office should choose foods with healthy fats, limit foods high in saturated fat, and avoid foods with trans fat. Heavy meals with not sufficient amount of vitamins, minerals and nutrition may cause hidden hunger in employees which might impact their work. Therefore, it is very essential to keep a balanced diet.