Eating a balanced diet is important to maintaining your health and keeping your body functioning how it should. However, when in a working environment – sometimes this may be difficult to do. From social gatherings to desk snacking, eating the right things and maintaining the food group balance may slip. As an employer, there are a variety of ways you can impact an employee’s nutrition at work. Let’s explore how you can boost well-being by promoting healthy eating in the workplace.
Disadvantages of Poor Nutrition in the Workplace
Healthy eating can prevent significant illness from impacting your life. It reduces the risk of high cholesterol, high blood pressure and blood sugar levels which over time can result in heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Even if this is not the case, your body can be put under stress and can reduce the quality of life, for example, joint weakness and mobility that excess weight has caused.
Employee well-being is key to a healthy team. Poor nutrition can affect your team in the following ways:
- Stress Management: physical, mental and emotional well-being can suffer, leading employees to be more stressed as they feel they cannot tackle their tasks, challenges and problem-solving effectively.
- Reduced concentration: Nutrition can be linked to a lack of concentration, making it more difficult for employees to stay focused. Reduced cognitive function can make work tasks feel harder to undertake and complete.
- Mental Health: Nutrition can also affect an employee’s mental health, such as an increased risk of anxiety and depression.
- Immune System: Healthy eating can boost the immune system. Employees may be more susceptible to illnesses and be ill more often.
Benefits of Healthy Nutrition at Work
Healthy eating has many benefits for the body and mind. Having the right amount of each food group will help us gain the vital vitamins and minerals we need to work and live.
Improved Work Attendance
Poor diet and nutrition reduce the immune system’s effectiveness, making employees more likely to catch seasonal illnesses more often and more severely. Not only this, a poor diet can decrease both physical and mental wellness, alongside increasing the risk of more severe health issues.
There are also more health-related issues that are not talked about as often. Champion Health state: In the UK alone, 7.3 million working days were lost due to work-related musculoskeletal disorders in 2022. Poor nutrition can contribute to this and make it more chronic, by increased inflammation and not enough vitamin intake to maintain bone and joint health.
Contribute to Weight Management
Since 2015, the percentage of obese adults in the UK has continued to rise, with 26.2% of adults now being obese. Excess weight comes with additional health-related challenges and risks that can transfer over within the workplace. It can increase absence, long-term health risks and a decrease in productivity.
More Efficient Workplace
“Poor mental health is also cited as a factor that impacts productivity for almost 1 in 5 employees.” – Champion Health
Nutrition is also one of the important factors in maintaining and improving mental health. Creating a positive environment and boosting employee’s mental well-being will increase morale across the team. Experiencing anxiety and depression for example can make the work they’re doing seem unimportant or too much to handle, decreasing productivity. Reach your employee’s full potential by focusing on mental well-being.
Greater Employee Retention
When employees feel valued, the retention of employees that stay within the business increases. Nutrition can be one way to express that employee well-being is at the forefront of the business objectives and providing a positive workplace.
How Can Workplaces Affect Nutrition?
Sometimes, the workplace environment or job can affect how an individual values nutrition and how much they pay attention to it on a day-to-day basis. Here are some of the reasons employees may find it hard to eat well at work:
- Influence isn’t balanced: Celebratory snacks, after-work drinks and ordering unhealthy food are some of the things workplaces encourage. Balance is key here, and not offering the counter of healthy snack options can be a one-sided influence on negative eating habits.
- Creating a stressful environment: Nutrition can put stress on your body, but also the environment can. Workplaces need to manage workloads, listen to their employees, set appropriate deadlines and encourage employees to take breaks.
- No downtime: As we have mentioned, employees taking sufficient breaks in the day without feeling the need to overwork to meet expectations can aid nutrition. Employees will rely less on unhealthy snacks and convenience food.
Find out more about how to incorporate healthy eating habits.
What Can Employers Do to Promote Nutrition at Work?
Employers can help promote healthy eating in the workplace and increase the nutrition of their employees.
Find Out About Your Employee’s Current Wellbeing
Workplaces can often disregard the value of getting information straight from their employees. Sending out a questionnaire to be able to benchmark some insightful data will be key to seeing how you can make internal changes to improve well-being. You can see if they feel valued, stressed, or eating well and ask for their opinions/ suggestions.
Top tip: keep this anonymous, so employees are more likely to share accurate data.
Positive Influence
Be at the forefront of employee wellbeing and nutrition. You can do this by providing healthy fruits in the office as an alternative to refined sugar or high-fat content snacks. Remember to keep this topped up with fresh content and offer a variety to cater to different tastes.
Educate
Be at the forefront of wellness in the workplace by educating employees on how the right nutrition can benefit them overall. Share around resources consistently, or make use of awareness days to really highlight physical and mental well-being. You can even top up your employee’s benefits packages with subsidised gym memberships or fruit and veg vouchers.
Workplace Nutrition With Marvellous Greens & Beans
Nutrition and well-being in the workplace is key to a happy and productive team. Here at Marvellous Greens & Beans, we offer office fruit delivery specially for businesses. We cater from small businesses to multiple office locations and we can even send work from employees a fruit box straight to their door! Benefit from UK-wide delivery and customisable contents to cater to your employees. Contact us online or call us on 0203 633 9822 where our friendly team can advise what is best for you.
