How you can promote healthy eating in the workplace

Employees who eat healthily are generally healthier than employees who eat badly. That means they take fewer days off and are more productive when they are at work. It’s therefore very much in employers’ best interests to encourage healthy eating in the workplace.

Here, Workplace Refreshments share their top four tips for how you can promote healthy eating in the workplace.

Make sure employees take their breaks

In principle, making sure employees take their breaks should cost employers absolutely nothing. In practice, it’s far from unusual for employees just to work their breaks and for employers to ignore it. To a certain extent, this is understandable. Employers generally hate to micromanage as much as most employees hate to be micromanaged.

Unfortunately, this approach is setting both the employee and the employer up for failure. Essentially, it’s the time-management equivalent of a false economy. By contrast, having employees take breaks lets them recharge mentally and physically. It, therefore, increases their productivity when they’re back at their desks.

Employees (and hence employers) will often get particular value from their breaks if they use them to drink and/or eat healthily. This takes more time than just grabbing a drink or a snack. For example, a chocolate bar can be gobbled down in a few bites. A banana, on the other hand, needs to be properly chewed.

Provide the best kitchen facilities you can

In the UK, most people eat lunch between 12 noon and 2 PM. If a workplace has minimal kitchen facilities, then there is a good chance that people will end up eating convenience foods. There are some healthy convenience options, but overall convenience food is not known for its nutritional value.

At a minimum, try to ensure that there are enough fridges and microwaves for staff to store and heat their own food without falling over each other. Another option would be to provide vending machines with healthy lunch options plus facilities to heat cold food.

If you have the space, it can be a nice touch to grow your own herbs. Many herbs are foliage plants and hence safe for allergy-sufferers. A lot are very easy to grow (or you could invest in grow-pods). This lets staff literally pick their own garnishes.

Review what food you provide

Many employers provide their staff with some free food and often free beverages too via office food delivery services. Switching to providing only healthy options may cause howls of protest from some staff members. You can, however, start introducing healthy options amongst your regular offerings.

Over the course of time, you can increase the ratio of healthy options to unhealthy ones. How quickly you proceed with this will depend on how your staff react. If they need some encouragement, ask managers to lead by example and to reach out to employees who want to eat healthily.

In addition to looking at your food options, look at your hydration options. Make sure that employees have caffeine-free and sugar-free options for both hot and cold beverages. This will encourage them to hydrate whatever the weather even if they dislike plain water.

Guide staff towards healthy choices

The golden rule of sales is to make it easy for people to do what you want them to do. The easier you make it, the more likely it is that they will do it. On the flip side, the harder you make it for someone to do something you don’t want them to do, the less likely it is that they will do it.

The technical term for arranging products to influence customer behaviour is “choice architecture”. It’s used to great effect by retailers, particularly large ones. For example, it’s no coincidence that supermarkets of all sizes always have fruit and vegetables by the entrance. Employers can make use of it too.