May 2019 - Body Techniques

Keeping your employees engaged at work can be a challenge. Beyond birthday parties, holiday parties, and other special occasions, how far do you go to keep your employees involved daily?

Workforce engagement has many benefits. Not only does it reduce burnout and boost employee retention, but it also fosters a sense of community. The more present your team feels, the more they’ll have a stake in your organization’s—and each other’s—success.

We think about workplace culture a lot at Body Techniques, and we want to offer a few of our favorite employee engagement activities to help your workplace culture. If you’re willing to be bold and try something new, these activities can break the ice around active engagement. They’ll stimulate your team’s morale and well-being along the way!

Workplace Yoga: Get Your Om On

Corporate yoga is a great way to incorporate physical movement and involve a large group of employees. Yoga offers employees the opportunity to shake off desktop rust and practice mindfulness, so they can recharge and return to their roles with greater efficiency and satisfaction. After class, your employees will walk away from their mats feeling more resilient, relaxed, and rejuvenated than ever before.

Incorporating multiple yoga disciplines can encourage a wide range of employees to participate. It can also keep the most active members of your team on their toes by giving them effective, dynamic workouts—while avoiding the sort of workday repetition that can drain their spirits.

For our corporate clients, Body Techniques offers programs that include styles from gentle Yoga Flow to warm Vinyasa, set to music. We emphasize breathing, physical poses, and guided meditation to help your team center themselves and melt away the stress. Our clients often provide a designated quiet space for yoga, to give employees a set space to develop that perfect balance of body and mind.

Start Moving with Fitness Classes

Fitness classes are another great way to get the blood pumping and body moving. As with yoga, they’re held in a communal setting, so your employees can engage with each other at the same time as they engage in physical activity.

When Body Techniques designs custom fitness programs for clients, we focus on meeting the needs of their specific employees. That can mean a wide range of fitness classes, offering support in generating awareness, or adjusting class hours for increased participation. Our goal is to get your employees engaged in the program.

Another possible perk? Lower insurance premiums. Start a verifiable fitness program through any insurance carrier for the potential to be rewarded for your attention to employee health.

Massage Away Your Troubles

Sometimes, you need to disengage in order to re-engage. Nothing feels better after slouching in front of the computer all day than a restorative chair, table, or reflexology massage. Massage therapy offers many benefits as well. From stress management to decreased muscle tension to fewer migraines, massage can work wonders for staff engagement. Massage therapy has also been shown to be effective at treating depression. This is significant, as depression is the single biggest factor in plummeting productivity rates.

Corporate massage is the centerpiece of our services at Body Techniques. We’ve specialized in massage therapy for more than two decades, and our skills and experience keep us on the leading edge

Our Personalized Approach to Stress Management

The best employee engagement activities aren’t cookie-cutter creations. Be sure to choose a service provider that can help you address the unique needs of your workforce and encourage participation. (Otherwise, your program won’t do much for your employees.) Our customized stress management programs give our clients a voice in developing successful programs, and our scheduling software makes implementation easy for internal stakeholders.

Body Techniques is about helping forward-looking and culture-oriented companies. We set our sights on those that recognize a willingness to give back to their employees as an investment in people and results.

Want to learn more about on-site massage?

Click the button below to visit our massage page.

“If you can breathe, you can do yoga.”

Part of creating a well-attended corporate yoga program is to stress how accessible yoga classes can be. It’s important to understand what employees know about yoga in order to break down any barriers they might have about giving it a try. For every person that embraces the idea of doing yoga poses and breathing exercises, there is another who thinks yoga is only for young, super-fit people who can stand on their head or twist like a pretzel while rattling off complicated Sanskrit terms for all the poses.

Focus on building a corporate yoga program that is fun, accessible, and provides a way for employees to walk away feeling great. Let them know that you don’t have to be a great athlete, a certain age, or a certain body type to take part. A good way to help employees become more comfortable with yoga in the workplace is to emphasize that athleticism, strength, flexibility, and meditation experience aren’t required —these benefits are the result of regular practice. Be sure to stress the advantages they’ll receive, such as achieving better posture while sitting at a desk, gaining better focus, or using breathing techniques to manage stress.

Yoga Is For Everyone

With so many styles of yoga out there, it’s also important to educate employees about the types of yoga classes that could work best in a company environment and then survey your employees to find out what yoga classes they would prefer. Body Techniques’ corporate yoga programs, for example, offer movement and meditation to help employees de-stress and experience calm awareness both on and off the mat. Employees leave refreshed, relaxed, and resilient. Beginner classes provide fundamentals of poses and breathing, correct alignment, and ways to adapt the pose to each person’s needs. Yoga Therapeutics address issues like injury recovery and chronic pain, and Vini Yoga is a therapeutic-style technique that is carefully sequenced to help employees learn how to transform the neuromuscular patterns in their body into a more relaxed state. The beauty of this approach is that participants can make the class as challenging or restorative as they like, since there are many ways to adapt each pose. More experienced employees might prefer a more vigorous class with flowing poses that build heat, strength, and stamina, or a Hatha yoga class that releases tension through long-held yoga poses and focused breathwork.

Perhaps the strongest reason for incorporating yoga into your corporate wellness program is the ease with which yoga classes can be implemented with a minimum of resources. All you need are floor mats and a group of willing participants with a strong desire for a healthier, more fulfilled life.

Yoga teaches us to move in ways that realign posture, help release tension, and promote more functional movement patterns. While modern technology offers countless benefits, the fact remains that many employees spend hours sitting in front of computers, and the repetitive movement patterns that digital devices demand can cause neck and shoulder strain, back problems, and a shallow breathing pattern that drains employees’ energy levels. Workplace yoga classes are booming because they are a low-cost, preventive healthcare measure, and when done right, yoga can be the key to a winning corporate wellness program.

Month: May 2019

Top 3 Effective Employee Engagement Activities