World Health Day - How To Stay Healthy While Working Remotely

Our Planet, Our Health, is the theme of this year’s World Health Day, on April 7th 2022. It aims to focus our efforts on creating economies based on well-being and sustainability.

World Health Day 2022 is a clarion call for social and environmental betterment. As one of the flagship welfare and health-focused international days of recognition from the World Health Organisation, its stated mission this year is to create a post-pandemic world where healthy lifestyles can be maintained around our fast-changing digital lives.

“We aim to focus global attention on urgent actions needed to keep humans and the planet healthy and foster a movement to create societies focused on well-being. The pandemic has revealed weaknesses in all areas of society and underlined the urgency of creating sustainable “well-being societies”, committed to achieving equitable health now and for future generations without breaching ecological limits”. (World Health Day 2022)

Personal well-being should always be seen as something employers focus on, especially in a post-COVID working world where communities have been tested to breaking point.

Working life post-COVID

Working life has, as we all know, changed quite profoundly over the last 2 years.

Employers should look to take responsibility for their staff in ways that compliment our new working realities – both digitally and physically, in ways that are personalised and relevant, rather than catch-all and impersonal.

A lot of work has been put into new standards of management and leadership, from curating more “servant leadership” hierarchies, to better performance management, to more empathetic management styles. This has gone a long way to creating new cultures of working welfare that suit the needs of the present, and are changing the nature of what work means to younger generations and the workers of the future.

Coronavirus touched everyone in some way, and poor welfare standards within employment were part of the reason so many millions of people quit their jobs in 2020 and 2021: The Great Resignation wasn’t just a reaction to the shuttering of businesses – it was a fundamental challenge to the way things were: focused on profit, rather than labour.

Utilising the theme of World Health Day should be a priority for employers in the coming years – how can we all create more sustainable, well-being-focused workplaces, and what can business leaders do to create better cultures of learning, support and improvement that everyone can get value from?

The importance of workplace well-being

Considering the rise of workplace ill-health, especially in regards to mental health, employers should prioritise how they can be the cure to workplace ills, not the cause:

• 19.86% of adults are experiencing a mental illness, equivalent to nearly 50 million Americans,
• 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year in England,
• The share of French people suffering from depression increased from 15.5 percent on October 21, 2020, to 22.6 percent on November 25, 2020,
• Singapore and India were the top two countries (in Asia) with workers facing increased burnout, at 37 percent and 29 percent respectively.

It’s safe to say the added burdens on people across the world due to COVID-19 ignored borders and demographics, and World Health Day aims to rectify this.

Here at Renaix, we wanted to do our bit to support World Health Day by putting together a Remote Workers Welfare Checklist – a simple priorities list of things for seniors and team leaders to put into their weekly or monthly schedule to guarantee their staff are getting the right sort of help, attention and support they need.

Lead with empathy

• “As we go through tough times, struggle with burnout or find it challenging to find happiness at work, empathy can be a powerful antidote and contribute to positive experiences for individuals and teams” – Tracy Brower, Author and Forbes Contributor.

Build routines

• “Working from home is a relatively new concept that takes a lot of trial and error before finding a routine that works. Productivity isn’t an innate skill (for most people anyway). It’s not even a skill really – it’s a series of habits that take consistent patience to build” – 5 Habits for Crafting the Perfect Remote Work Day.

Encourage “out of office” time

• “‘Always on’ working can harm mental health and productivity, so managers need to be clear about the number of hours an employee is expected to work, and employees need to be strict with themselves about sticking to it” – Workplace, from Meta.

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Similar posts:

What Will You Do to Celebrate Employee Appreciation Day 2022?, Leadership, Finance and Empathy in the Post-pandemic, Thoughts on the Return to Work in a Pandemic World

Photo on WorldHealthDay2022