Workplace Wellness
Considering most of us spend anywhere between 30 and 50 hours each week at the office, workplace wellness is extremely important.
Here are a few ways that you can ensure workplace wellness in your office:
- Always have a glass of water on hand. And drink it! Aim to have at least three glasses of water during your workday. You can also fill a water bottle with water in the morning, with a goal of drinking the entire bottle by the end of the day.
- Invest in a standing desk. Or a cardboard box propped on your desk to place your laptop on, like I do! This is a very handy, no-cost, easy way to improve your posture and stay on your feet. I’ll go through phases of using my cardboard box as a standing desk, and will vary from using it for an hour each day to half a day to a full day at a time.
- Take breaks when you need them. If you keep powering through work even though your brain is fuzzy, your productivity levels will decrease and your work won’t be as high quality as you’d like it to be. Take a five-minute stretch break, walk around the office, or make a cup of tea. Sometimes this will be enough to refresh and re-energize you.
- Go for a lunchtime walk. You know I’m ALL over this one.
- Be honest*. If you’re having a bad day and snapping at your co-workers, everyone will feel miserable. You can prevent the entire office from becoming cranky by being honest with them and telling them that you aren’t feeling like yourself – this will help them to understand that if you’re acting irritable, it’s nothing personal.
- Eat well. Have healthy snacks on hand where possible, and make sure you have plenty of fruits and vegetables at lunch.
- Make your office a welcoming space. I’m in a window-less, basement office right now, and when I moved into it, it was extremely bare and not a place I would want to work in at all. But once you hang some pictures on the walls and add a few personal touches, it’s a lovely space to work in! Wanting to go to work is one of the best things you can do for your workplace wellness.
What do you do in your office to ensure workplace wellness? Share in the comments section below!
*In a professional way (keeping boundaries), of course.
At my office we have a cardboard box that props up one of our laptops on a counter for standing work/typing. It works great HOWEVER it was pointed out to me that the box can overhead from the laptop and be a fire hazard. Sure enough, we checked the box under the laptop and it was HOT! Be careful with this tip. We still use the box, but make sure the laptop is turned off and not just in sleep mode when not in use.
Anony-mum
Good point! Also good to note that it probably shouldn’t be kept on the box 24 / 7… I expect over time the box could weaken, and it would never do for a computer to come crashing down!
for me it was the always having a drawer FILLED with healthy snacks.
and guarding it from the snack stealers 🙂
Ooh yes. Can’t trust those snack stealers! 😉
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My grey industrial office with a view of other grey cement buildings was getting me down particularly on grey rainy days so I printed some pictures of sunny landscapes and a sun and put them up in my office. The joke is that our color copier does more of a green than yellow so people call it my martian landscape and play various tricks on me putting pictures of martians and the Mars Rover on my landscapes of Tuscany and Hawaii. They add to my enjoyment so I think I am going to stay green.
Haha, love it! Besides, grey and green go well together 😉