Employee self-care is everyone’s personal responsibility. Ensuring it involves taking on activities that help maintain health and well-being, enabling them to prevent and manage illnesses caused by an unhealthy lifestyle.

Between an employee’s tasks at work and at home, however, maintaining a balance and fully taking care of yourself can be challenging.

This is why call centers in the Philippines are up to that task, highly prioritizing workers’ health and well-being. They’ve deeply incorporated employee welfare into their company culture. Open Access BPO, for instance, has consistently been implementing different employee development and wellness programs over the years.

Cultivating a Culture of Self-Care in the BPO Workplace

The workforce is the heart of any company. For workplaces that require high performance and productivity such as firms in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, it’s crucial to build and sustain a culture of employee self-care. This is because employees here are prone to high levels of stress, especially those in customer support and content moderation.

While the benefits of self-care focus on the individual, it can also impact other people and the environment they’re in. For companies, a culture of self-care means a happier workplace and better performing employees.

• Boosts Employee Engagement and Productivity

  
  When employees feel valued and supported, they tend to be more engaged and motivated to perform their best work. By prioritizing their wellbeing, you can boost their productivity and performance levels.

• Reduces Absenteeism and Turnover Rates

  
  By investing in your employees’ wellbeing, you can create a positive work environment that reduces stress and burnout. This can lead to lower absenteeism rates and decrease the likelihood of employees leaving your company.

• Improves Workplace Culture and Morale

  
  By prioritizing your employees’ wellbeing, you create a culture that fosters a sense of community, collaboration, and mutual respect. This leads to higher morale, job satisfaction, and a better overall workplace culture.

• Enhances Company Reputation as an Employer of Choice

  
  By showing your employees that you care about their wellbeing, you can attract and retain top talent in your industry. This can lead to a better reputation as an employer of choice, which can lead to more job applications and referrals.

• Fosters Loyalty and Commitment

  
  When employees feel supported, they tend to be more loyal and committed to your company. This can lead to longer tenures, better work quality, and a more stable workforce.

• Improves Work-Life Integration

  
  By prioritizing your employees’ wellbeing, you can help them achieve a better work-life balance. This can lead to better mental and physical health, which can ultimately lead to better job performance.

• Promotes Creativity and Innovation

  
  By reducing stress and burnout, you can create an environment that fosters creativity and innovation. This can lead to new ideas, improved products or services, and increased competitiveness in your industry.

• Reduces Healthcare Costs and Improves Profitability

  
  By promoting healthy habits and reducing stress, you can lower healthcare costs and increase profitability. This can lead to a more sustainable business model and better bottom-line results.

Prioritizing your employees’ wellbeing benefits both the employees and the company. By investing in your employees’ health and happiness, you can create a win-win situation that leads to better business outcomes and a happier, healthier workforce.

All this results to low workforce attrition rates and consistently high-quality customer experience.

Ways to Support Employee Self-Care

To establish a culture of self-care in the workplace, it’s vital to assess which efforts address the physical, mental, and emotional needs of employees. Here are ways that have been found helpful in ensuring employee self-care:

• Raise Health Awareness

  

  Providing key health and wellness information through basic awareness initiatives such as weekly health alerts can help educate employees about important health issues. Having access to such information also amps up their health literacy skills to enable them to better care for themselves.

• Encourage the Use of Health Benefits and Participation in Wellness Programs

  

  Employees must also be encouraged to use their health insurance benefits and participate in wellness programs made available to them.

  BPO companies like Open Access BPO take on a proactive stance in ensuring employee self-care. Aside from providing their employees with health insurance, they also put up health and wellness events where their employees can avail of health services and lifestyle products.

  Open Access BPO’s health and wellness programs include physical examinations, blood donation drives, vaccinations, and HIV/AIDS prevention seminar and screening programs. All these were established to reduce the risks of such diseases and improve their overall well-being.

• Help Employees Quit Unhealthy Lifestyle Habits

  

  People who exercise unhealthy habits such as smoking and excessive alcohol drinking commonly find it painfully difficult to quit. It isn’t enough to encourage employees to kick the habit, especially when they’ve come to rely on those bad habits to cope with work-related stress.

  To aid employees who are trying to move towards a healthier lifestyle, companies’ employee self-care strategies may offer free counseling or consultations with health experts who can better help them. They can also work with their employee engagement teams to run stress reduction activities and events.

• Promote the Benefits of Having Adequate Rest

  

  Sleep deprivation can cause damaging effects to a person s mental, emotional, and physical health. Symptoms include palpitations and heartburn, higher levels of stress and anxiety, and lack of optimism. Perhaps, the reason an employee hasn’t been performing well is due to lack of sleep.

  To promote having enough rest, plenty of BPO companies have sleeping quarters within the office or a rest area with comfortable recliners where employees can take quick naps during their breaks.

• Practice Mindfulness

  

  Being mindful—the human ability to be fully present and aware of existing situations and activities—is crucial in a BPO’s employee self-care plan. After all, tasks rely on the employees’ full attention and their ability to make quick, smart decisions based on information they’ve been given at that exact moment.

  Unfortunately, it’s easy to get distracted when people have a lot of things on their mind. Many companies are aware of this risk, hence incorporating mindfulness exercises in their efforts to ensure the well-being of every employee. Providing yoga classes is one of these, as it helps improve the balance between the mind and body. This allows gaining better control of one s thoughts and emotions to create mindful decisions.

• Celebrate Employees’ Work

  

  Companies that take time to recognize and appreciate their employees’ work reap the rewards of having productive and happy employees. Whether it’s about being able to positively manage a customer conflict or being part of the team’s cream of the crop, it pays to acknowledge their achievements to let them know they did well.

To ensure employee self-care, companies must identify which aspects must be addressed and are relevant to the needs of their employees. Fulfilling these needs helps create opportunities for higher employee engagement and retention.

Fulfilled and motivated workers churn out high-quality output that elevate customer experience and cultivate your brand’s reputation. Learn about Open Access BPO’s employee engagement and development campaigns to help our employees live more healthy, productive, and fulfilling lives.

Contact our program experts today, so we can start crafting a program for your brand, manned by our diligent and dedicated teams.