Healthy eating is one of the pillars of health and wellbeing, and the workplace can often be the place where employees eat most of their food, making it an ideal setting for promoting healthy eating.
There are multiple reasons to promote healthy eating in your workplace and ensure your workplace environment is conducive to healthy eating choices. Poor nutrition is linked to chronic disease and illness, and lack of essential nutrients will hinder the body’s ability to flourish and heal which impacts on cognitive, emotional, and physical wellbeing.
An organisation’s greatest asset is their workforce. A workforce with decreased risks of disease and illness and enhanced cognitive, emotional, and physical abilities has the potential to lead to multiple benefits:
- Greater productivity, innovation, and creativity
- Greater motivation and problem-solving capacity
- Greater loyalty to the organisation
- Greater workplace cohesion and stronger team spirit
- Reduced absenteeism
- Reduced insurance costs
- Healthy, happy, and thriving workplace environment
Additionally, a commitment to the health of your employees will improve your public image and recruitment and retention opportunities.
Here are some quick resources to get you started:
Employee Wellness Policy Template
This Employee Wellbeing policy template from Workable.com is ready to be tailored to your company’s needs.
While these resources are helpful to get you started, it’s very important to carefully plan your workplace wellbeing activities. Research shows that all activities that target the individual employee, should be coupled with activities at the level of the organisation. In other words, you should always take measures to create a supportive organisational environment alongside lifestyle-focussed supports for your employees. We’ve included detailed advice on how best to plan your activities at both these levels.
Organisation-level Activities
The “bedrock” of the CIPD Well-being Pyramid is culture, leadership and people management. These are the best ways to ensure you’re creating a solid foundation to your workplace well-being efforts
Individual-level Activities
Your wellbeing initiatives at the individual level will likely focus on raising awareness and/or building skills to manage this wellbeing area.
Other Healthy Eating Resources
In this section you can find additional resources to help you with your healthy eating programmes
Connect with the HSE and community support organisations for infographics and other resources in our Community Links section.