The Wellness Wednesday campaign was initiated as a hashtag promoting wellness and mindfulness. It has since evolved into a global initiative promoting self-care.
Employers are searching for ways to enhance their employees’ mental health, and we can assist you in introducing Wellness Wednesdays at your workplace. We all can agree that last year was particularly challenging for everyone.
Nearly 20% of adults believe they are more stressed out currently than they were a year ago. This is a worldwide mental health emergency.
Creating Wellness Wednesday ideas can range from sending an email with health-related articles to hosting an all-day health seminar. It’s up to you. Regardless of how you view it, Wellness Wednesdays are a terrific concept.
It’s a fun method to advertise well-being in the workplace and provide your employees’ health ideas in microdoses every week.
This article will include the 25 best Wellness Wednesday ideas for your office.
What is Wellness Wednesday?
Have you ever seen the hashtag #WellnessWednesday, a social media trend devoted to living a healthy lifestyle? Every Wednesday, this trend offers advice, tips, and insights into living a healthier lifestyle.
It first started as #wellnesswednesday, a day when people showed their most beneficial habits throughout the day to inspire others to do the same.
Employers now use it to introduce wellness-oriented activities into the workplace. Small behavior or actions that promote health both physically and mentally are emphasized.
In addition to Wellness Wednesday, it is sometimes called Well-Being Wednesday. Utilize the term that is most appealing to your employees.
How does Wellness Wednesday improve the workplace?
It is feasible to help workers develop positive lifestyle habits through workplace wellness programs. Wellness Wednesdays are always fun. If your workplace provides an exciting, original, and engaging method to explore health, it is more likely to endure.
The weekly events and activities will show more employee engagement, enthusiasm, and health improvements.
Here are three reasons why Wellness Wednesday improves the workplace:
#1. Promotes Wellness
Every week, your employees can look forward to receiving a fresh health tip, activity, or astute lifestyle wisdom if your firm participates in Wellness Wednesday.
When your wellness committee promotes health challenges, shares wellness insights, and advocates for general well-being, it is a prominent topic of discussion among employees. The name is playful and easy to remember, but it is also simple to market for.
#2. Encourages Camaraderie
Wednesday Wellness is a beautiful chance for departments to mingle and new team members to feel at home. Participating in dance lessons or cooking classes is a fantastic way to boost workplace social connections.
Those wishing to improve their health are encouraged to feel a sense of community through virtual or in-person activity.
#3. Fosters Self-Care
It is no longer feasible to downplay the significance of work-life balance. The pandemic reminded employees and company authorities of the importance of self-care.
It is critical to take time out to recharge through various wellness activities during the day to live a fulfilling and productive life.
Wellness Wednesday ideas are short and sweet. Wellness Wednesday activities can last anywhere from five minutes to a few hours, but at the end of the day, it’s all about putting health in a positive light.
25 Wellness Wednesday Ideas That Can Make Your Workplace Better
Healthy workplace culture is now a top priority for many business owners. In addition to boosting productivity, demonstrating that your company cares about its employees can help you recruit top talent. Here are 25 Wellness Wednesday ideas to improve office camaraderie.
1. Mindfulness Lunch and Learn
Your employees can take one hour of their lunch break to improve their mindful abilities during this lunch break class. These sessions are secular and will not be awkward.
This course is a good starting point for any mindfulness program. The first five minutes will include a mini-meditation, and then a 40-minute presentation on mindfulness in the workplace will follow. A 15-minute meditation will close out the session.
It will teach your employees the subtle differences between mindfulness and meditation, leaving them feeling less stressed and mentally alert after the lesson is over.
2. Chair or Mat Yoga Classes
In 1982, chair yoga was devised when a yoga instructor realized that his clients could not achieve specific postures due to aging or arthritis. Chair yoga is the answer to workplace yoga in 2022.
It’s excellent for Wellness Wednesday workouts since employees can perform it from a chair. The yoga professionals conduct these classes and are ideal for beginners.
If your employees are physically capable and want to participate in a mat yoga session for Wellness Wednesday, it’s also an option. These courses are also taught by qualified yoga instructors and include modifications to make them accessible.
3. Encourage Coffee Breaks
Encourage employees to take a mindful coffee break mid-early afternoon or set aside time for employees to socialize while drinking coffee. Ensure your office has a stocked coffee station to maintain focus and energy levels.
However, it’s not always the healthiest. Instead of providing caffeine boosts, offer natural sweeteners, plant-based milk, and herbal tea to give you the boost you need.
This is an excellent time to recharge, as most employees will likely be in a slump towards the end of the day.
4. Hire a Beauty Therapist
Have a beautician or masseuse visit the office for the day and let your employees book appointments. Rewards for your employees will often inspire them to contribute more and work harder, so consider adding a special touch.
5. Have a Healthy Snack Station
It can be especially tough for office workers to resist nibbling on sugary or fatty treats throughout the day. You can replace unhealthy vending machines with healthy alternatives to improve your team’s health, vitality, and nutrition.
You can find some more beneficial vending machines that provide more nutritional brain food snacks. Look into those models to see if they’re available.
6. Take a Walking Meeting
Instead of holding a formal meeting in a conference room, arrange to meet outside or at a local coffee shop. This tactic will get your team out of the office and into a new environment, resulting in a much more profitable meeting.
IStep out of the boardroom and get active. Instead of attending a meeting in a conference room, have a walking meeting every Wellness Wednesday. Research indicates that walking meetings increase creativity by 60%, so get up and move. Your employees can now get paid to walk using these ways.
7. Participate in the Sleep Challenge
It’s not a shock, but one-third of adults aren’t getting enough sleep. Therefore, a significant portion of your workers will probably not be adequately rested when they arrive at work in the morning.
To encourage adequate sleep, set up a sleep contest with your employees. Have them use a sleep app to track their sleep for a week and give prizes to the individual who records the most eight-hour sleep nights.
8. Buy Fresh Healthy Food for the Communal Fridge
Cucumbers, red bell peppers, yogurt, and nuts are all excellent options for healthy office snacks. Maintaining healthy blood pressure, supporting energy levels, and providing the nutrients necessary to live a long life are all assisted by consuming fresh foods.
Although it is known to reduce the risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, prevent certain cancers, and more, eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables has long-term effects.
9. Encourage Sober-Curious Movement
There is a massive “sober curious” movement in which people are beginning to question the role alcohol plays in their lives. Some individuals abstain from alcohol for one week, month, year, or permanently to see how it influences their mental and physical health.
If you want your employees to drink more thoughtfully, an alcohol-free week or month in the office might be a good Wellness Wednesday idea.
10. Virtual Meditation Classes
Meditation classes can be provided both in-person and virtually, regardless of whether your team is in the office or working remotely. Virtual meditation classes would thus be suitable for everybody. Working from home presents unique challenges.
By providing incentives such as meditation classes to employees virtually, you might be able to help them gain a new perspective on these difficulties.
11. Virtual Nutrition and Mindful Eating Classes
You may schedule virtual nutrition and mindful eating class with a nutrition expert trained in the field. In this class, you will integrate mindful eating to energize and nourish your body. In addition, you will receive a recording of the course to use on future Wellness Wednesdays.
Mindful eating is an easy yet powerful method to include mindfulness in everyday life. Ask your employees to grab a cup of coffee or tea before the class, and they will finish with a mindful coffee break meditation.
12. Offer Work-Life Balance Training
Working and personal life become so entwined that you can’t even tell where one stops and the other begins. A good work-life balance is critical for lowering stress and maintaining mental health—host a work-life balance training session to encourage employees to spend more time with their families and hobbies.
13. Virtual Cooking Competition
Virtual cook-offs have been around for a long time, but they’re much more beneficial than ever due to the global epidemic. Because your company may have branches all over the country, why not organize a virtual cooking battle?
Send an invitation with ingredients and a set timeframe, and let the games begin. If you are looking for an excellent team-building exercise for your business, consider instituting Health Wednesdays.
14. Purchase Meditation Apps for Employees
Employees can benefit from all of the wellness apps out there. Your employees are more likely to utilize a service if you pay for some of it or provide it for free. As a perk, you can buy step counters, sleep trackers, or meditation apps.
As businesses have grown accustomed to remote workers in the last year, they have begun to offer meditation apps as a bonus. For example, Hewlett-Packard provided a meditation app to its workers, and it worked. Their employees used over 500,000 collective minutes on the app.
15. Reward Your Staff Gift Cards
Give your employees gift cards to local gyms, healthy eateries, or fitness centers to encourage healthy behaviors at work.
For instance, you might give a free month of gym membership to the employee of the month or give gift cards after a significant project is completed successfully.
16. Maximize Natural Light
Regular access to natural light can improve office workers’ wellness and mood. Remove bulky window treatments and consider removing barriers to make the space feel more open and happy to enhance health and mood.
17. Implement Flexi Time
Employees who need to juggle their busy daily lives can benefit from having independent start/finish times. You may even allow workers to operate from home one day a week to give them the comfort of working in their own homes. It is beneficial for people who have a long distance to travel to work.
18. Host a Step Challenge
Try to organize a step challenge among your co-workers to encourage your team to exercise daily. Award the employee who has taken the most steps in a week with a gift card for new gym clothes or a month of free classes at the local gym, or offer a free month of fitness classes to everyone.
19. Healthy Snack Boxes
You can use Wellness Wednesdays to distribute healthy snack boxes to your workers. It will help if you avoid the workplace vending machine culture. Brain function and motivation levels can be negatively impacted by eating high-nutrient foods. Clean eating and new eating may even be encouraged by doing so.
20. Self-Care Boxes
Rotating healthy snack boxes with self-care boxes on Wellness Wednesdays would be fantastic. Provide your team with bath products, hair care items, a stress ball, a journal, and a self-care checklist as self-care boxes. Self-care boxes are an excellent way to let employees know their health is essential.
21. Natural Wellness Box
You can provide your workers with a natural wellness box to encourage them to become more mindful of their senses. The options are limitless. For instance, you might offer a stress ball, a fidget toy, or a water bottle, among other things.
You can also add Wellness Wednesday facts on notecards, such as which herbs are suitable for specific organs or what foods are best to eat before bed.
22. Host a Journaling Challenge
You have already supplied the self-care kits with journals. Now, urge your employees to utilize them. Give awards to those who keep up with their journals every month if they write one journal entry daily for thirty days with no restrictions or limitations. It might be a random thought, a positive event from that day, or a lengthy journal entry.
23. Keep the Flu Away
The flu is so contagious during flu season that it can wipe out an entire office. Make sure that doesn’t happen to your group by holding a flu vaccination clinic in October before flu season begins.
Flu season is at its highest in December and February, so even if your company is late to the party, it is worthwhile to provide flu shots for your team. Even if your employees are not physically present, you may still send them a voucher to get vaccinated.
24. Stop and Plank
Employees can test their endurance by maintaining the plank position for as long as possible during a 60-minute workout. Planks strengthen the body without requiring any equipment.
You may also encourage your workers to participate in a daily push-up or burpee challenge at work. Keeping track and giving the victor a prize at the end of the month is another way to incentivize fitness at work.
25. Gift House Plants to Employees
Potted plants make excellent gifts for employees. They increase mental health, improve productivity, and are affordable. Adding plants to a room can make a more complete and welcoming environment for home or work-from-home workers.
Every Wednesday can be Wellness Day, and you can provide your employees with small plants or succulents.
Wrapping Up
Let your team know how essential wellness is by supporting Wellness Wednesday. There are many ways to accomplish this in the workplace every week. Keeping it straightforward is the key to success for those involved in health and wellness initiatives.
Hopefully, our guide provides you with the best Wellness Wednesday ideas to boost office morale.
