Planning Corporate Events for a Healthy Workforce

Corporate events don't have to be about the annual reports, which is good news when many businesses may be finding those reports are less than inspiring. Many businesses are using their budget for these events to encourage their workforce to be healthier. As an event planner you can come up with some truly innovative corporate days, which offer great opportunities for team building and self improvement.

Where many businesses are still feeling the squeeze after the financial crisis, employees are also suffering, with reports of low morale commonplace. Facing pay freezes and a tough jobs market, some employees are unsurprisingly feeling under the weather. This can take its toll not only on productivity, but staff sickness is also likely to go up under times of stress and strain, so a health boost is just what the doctor ordered.

Health and wellbeing

Often, gyms, spas and leisure centres will offer discounts to local businesses. Why not approach local fitness centres to see what deals they can offer to your business? You could ask these companies to speak at your event to promote their services as well as to advise your workforce on a healthy lifestyle.

Local healthcare providers are often happy to run health fairs, offering free cholesterol, weight and blood pressure monitoring for local workers. This could help with the early identification of any medical issues, and also demonstrates to staff that their employer cares about their wellbeing. This could be included as part of a corporate wellbeing day.

Cooking up a treat

In tough financial times, employees may be cutting back, and could be eating less healthily. Why not combine a healthy, yet frugal cookery class with a spot of team building to help your staff work better and eat better.

Team building activities where participants have to learn new skills as well as work in a new environment help to take everyone out of their comfort zone and allow new friendships to form. Working with colleagues on non-work problems allows everyone a degree of freedom to express their ideas. As it is not a work environment there is no fear in 'getting it wrong' as no one is working in their area of expertise. This team challenge should end in a feast where teams get to sample their culinary creations.

Healthy habits for a healthy workforce

Demonstrating healthy, quick and affordable meals as part of a corporate event day is a great way to encourage a good diet. If your team building event includes cooking demonstrations then you can show some quick and easy healthy meals, as well as demonstrating how these compare with quick fix equivalents in terms of both cost and nutritional value.

Feedback and Review

Don't forget that asking for feedback and review is a good way of getting participants to think about what has taken place. Often, review is left until a few weeks after the event, however getting participants to think about how the various objectives of the day were covered actually on the day, will help clarify to them what the purpose of the day was, and appreciate it in the context of self and team improvement.