Employees do need a break room, although it does not have to be as plush as this one.
By Aden Field
As a boss, it’s one of your duties to look after your employees. Not only look after them in the legal sense, but make sure that they are healthy and happy too. If your employees are unhappy, whether it’s because of work or their home life, it can affect their job. Doing what you can to ensure their health is a good investment. Here’s how you can help your employees be healthy and happy:
Give Them Breaks
Your employees need to have plenty of breaks so they can come back to their work stations recharged. Obviously you need to stick to your legal obligations here, but you might want to give them a little extra leeway if they need it. Giving them the breaks they need throughout the day, and don’t forget about the breaks for holidays through the year.
Encourage Them to Get Away from Their Desk
When your employees take breaks during the day, encourage them to get away from their desks. Sitting at their desks while eating lunch won’t make them feel like they’ve had a break at all. Make sure they realize how important it is to take breaks from their work throughout the day.
Make Sure They Have the Right Facilities
Give your employees the right facilities so they can feel comfortable at work. This could be a fridge, tea and coffee makers, microwave, and other things to help them prepare food and drinks. You could even create a chill out area for them to have a break and eat their lunch so if they don’t leave the building, at least they have somewhere to go away from their work space.
Make it Easy to Talk to You
As a boss, you need to make sure you don’t cross the line over to ‘friend’ territory. This can lead to staff taking advantage of you. However, you should make it easy to talk to you. Staff could be having problems at work, but if they feel like they can’t tell you, you won’t be able to help them. This could affect your business. Make sure they know your door is always open.
Introduce Services to Help
There are plenty of services you could introduce to help your employees stay happy and healthy at work. Employee assistance programs specialize in making sure your employees are happy and healthy. They can work with you too, so that you can both come up with a solution to help the employee that is satisfactory to everyone.
Make the Office Environment a Nice Place to Be
If your office environment isn’t pleasant, then it isn’t going to be a very nice place to be for your staff. Make sure you avoid hiring toxic staff members, and deal with them ASAP if it turns out there’s one on your team. Don’t enforce silly rules like ‘no talking’ either. This is unrealistic and will make your employees feel like children. You want them to feel like you trust them to get their work done!
Don’t underestimate the happiness of your employees!
