The Challenges of a post-pandemic workplace

The pandemic has forced the workplace to become a digital space as well as a physical site. We know that every business is having to look at the needs of its people in ways that yesterday’s world didn’t require. This presents both challenges and opportunities.

Having identified these challenges, we can now share the opportunities we’ve created to help you meet them.

Every workplace will have a unique set of challenges facing them. But having spoken directly to organisations and business leaders globally, we know that the following challenges are being prioritised by all:

NUTRITION How can we support our people to eat in a way that best supports their individual needs?

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY How can we encourage our teams to achieve their commitments to regular exercise and a better work/life balance - irrespective of whether people are working from home or back in the office?

MINDFULNESS How can we ensure a more mindful approach both to the workplace and to downtime, knowing it’s a useful tool for mental health, for offsetting the unprecedented ‘screen time’ our teams are having to spend, and even in fostering a sense of wider environmental responsibility?

RECOVERY How can we ensure our people rest well at a time when they’ve never had to work so hard?

The Data

These findings underpin our three objectives. They also evidence the common challenges we’ve identified.

1. Workplace health interventions are linked with at least a 1-2% increase in productivity

2. Workplaces for >1000 people lose > £126k a year in productivity due to obesity alone

3. Mental health is one of the major causes of work-related sickness

4. 46% of people who have access to a staff restaurant strive to eat healthily at work

5. 70 million workdays are lost each year due to mental health problems in the UK, costing employers approximately £2.4 billion per year

6. 66% of shoppers are now more open to changing their diets so they’re healthier and more sustainable

7. 63% of adults acknowledge that it is more important to be active now compared to before CV19

8. 200,000 working days are lost in the UK every year due to insufficient sleep with an annual cost of around £30 billion to the UK

Tackling these challenges when everyone is sitting within the same four company walls is difficult enough, so what’s the plan now that we’re looking after a disproportionate number of ‘anywhere workers’ vs office ones?

What are the guarantees that Ways to be Well is a programme capable of working in practice - and what wellness benefit does that represent to the businesses we partner?