Employees spend a considerable portion of their day at the office. This puts you in a unique position to influence their food choices. Providing fresh fruits at work is one way of encouraging them to eat healthy.
Why should you care about what your employees eat? According to studies, what people eat during work days affects their job performance. To be more precise, if employees do not consume enough nutritious food, they become less focused and decisive. Additionally, their chances of experiencing low morale and/or getting into workplace accidents are higher.
Aside from its impact on job performance, the consumption of unhealthy food can make your employees more susceptible to illnesses. When employees get sick and do not report to the office, work days are lost. Again, this can hurt workforce productivity in your business. Moreover, having an unhealthy workforce translates to increased medical expenses for your company.
There’s no denying that poor job performance and sickly employees are not good for any business. These can pull down the productivity of your workforce and hamper business operations. Financially, having employees who do not perform up to par or frequently miss work can cause your company to lose opportunities and money. Suffice it to say, it is in your best interest to have employees who eat well and eat right.
In an effort to make their employees eat healthy, some companies are making it their priority to have cafeterias that serve nutritious meals. Some big firms are providing free meals for their employees, while others are even hiring top calibre chefs to take charge of their office kitchens. There are also companies that are installing healthy vending machines.
Admittedly, the aforementioned initiatives, particularly subsidising the meals of your employees, can be costly. The good thing is that these aren’t the only options you have. If you currently don’t have the budget to embark on grand projects, you can always start with something simple.
One affordable way of making your employees consume healthy food is to have fresh fruits in your office. Implementing this initiative is also less tedious as some vendors now provide fruit delivery services in Ireland. With this, you save time as you don’t have to go through the trouble of going to the market just to get the fresh fruits you need. Also, with some fruit providers offering an array of fruit boxes, finding one which suits your budget and needs shouldn’t be difficult. Some even allow you to customise the contents of these boxes thereby enabling you to avoid wastage as you get to pick fruits which you know your employees will like.
Of course, your work doesn’t stop after buying the fruits. You must implement strategies to ensure that employees consume them. You can start off by clearing your pantry of unhealthy snacks and replacing them with fresh fruits. Another thing you can do is to display fruits in conspicuous and accessible areas like your reception area and near the work stations of your employees. Doing this is a subtle and effective way of making them choose fruits over unhealthy snacks as the former is just within their reach.
Another strategy you could employ is to directly give each employee a weekly fruit supply. You can pick a ‘fruit for the week’, pack it in a snack bag and distribute it to your people. Alternatively, instead of choosing the fruits yourself, you can provide a ‘fruits list’ for your employees and ask them to select which fruit/s they’d want to receive. With this approach, you can be certain that they’d eat the fruit you supply.
You could also come up with monthly cooking classes wherein your employees could learn healthy recipes using fruits. Another option is to ask selected people in the office to share their healthy fruit recipes. Apart from being a tool for you to promote healthy eating in your office, the aforementioned strategies are also good ways of improving workforce camaraderie.
Want to have healthier employees? Have fresh fruits at work! We have different options for our fruit boxes. Call us at 01 4624811 and we’ll deliver fresh fruits to your office!
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Image courtesy of Max Pixel.