Blog Archives - Page 9 of 9

May 21, 2019October 14, 2021

Top 3 Effective Employee Engagement Activities

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.

May 2, 2019October 22, 2024

6 Reasons Corporate Yoga is the Key to Corporate Wellness Programs

Why is corporate yoga a crucial addition to a companies’ workplace wellness program? Mainly for these six reasons: regular yoga practice is scientifically proven to reduce pain, stress, and anxiety while improving flexibility, strength, and overall fitness. The key to having your employees reap the enormous benefits of a corporate yoga practice is to help them understand that they don’t need special skills to enjoy yoga. Certified yoga teachers know how to start newcomers off slowly and adapt poses for all levels of practitioners. There are, in fact, a variety of corporate yoga classes that employees can feel comfortable doing in the workplace, including indoor mat sessions, outdoor yoga classes, and yoga classes that employees can do at their desks without having to take a long break or even change out of work clothes.

“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.

Want to learn more about corporate yoga?

Click the button below to visit our corporate yoga page.

April 12, 2019October 14, 2021

Workplace Wellness Massage Programs For Employees

4 Tips For Integrating A Corporate Massage Package Into Your Employee Wellness Program

Every morning, your employees look forward to that first cup of coffee to get them ready for the day. However, as much as coffee helps get you going, it doesn’t do much to lessen stress. If your company offered a convenient way to reduce stress during your workday—namely corporate massage services— wouldn’t you take advantage of it?

In order to attract and retain top talent, companies need to offer perks that differentiate them from their competitors. These days, it’s rare for employees to be loyal to one particular company over the course of their career. New opportunities beckon, and workplace cultures can become stale.

Corporate America often pushes us to work like machines, but the truth is that humans are not machines; we need more to prevent burnout. Today’s modern human resource executives recognize that one’s state of mind and overall health and wellness have a direct effect on workplace productivity. In fact, according to a recent nationwide study, 95% of human resource leaders admit that high workplace stress leads to increased employee turnover.

Massage has been shown to improve sleep, relieve headaches, reduce muscle tension, and promote focus and concentration. It is especially effective in addressing depression and anxiety, which have become the leading factors in lower productivity rates. Corporate wellness programs that offer a massage benefit to employees have been shown to increase worker morale and productivity and decrease employee turnover over the long term.

Below are four tips to help you find a corporate massage package that best suits the needs of your organization.

1. Consider Cost and Convenience

Cost and convenience are key. Massages can be costly, so select a package that allows you to offer a company discount to employees. With a reasonable price, staff members will surely sign up.

Between work and family commitments, employees lead busy lives, so look for corporate massage services that will come to you. Offer staff a selection of dates and times to accommodate their schedules, along with the needs of your organization. For example, during tax season accounting firms have their hands full. Offering a massage program during the months of January through April would be a nice perk to help get through this stressful time of year.

At Body Techniques, we offer customized scheduling software and a dedicated front office, so staff members can conveniently book our services for the dates and times that work best.

2. Provide for Personalization

Just as workplace cultures vary, massage techniques differ in the way they benefit the mind and body. Consider the needs of your company. Is your workplace dominated by women? If so, look for a corporate massage program that offers prenatal and postnatal massage. Is your staff sedentary most of the day, or do they perform hands-on labor? A deep tissue massage package may be what you’re looking for.

Look for corporate massage programs that can be tailored for your organization’s size and the number of office locations. Our dedicated staff will work directly with you to customize a program using our nationwide network of providers and flexible software.

3. Keep Quality in Mind

Many massage therapists claim to be the best at what they do, but they all have different levels of education and experience. For a busy corporate environment, the satisfaction of your employees is paramount. Look for companies with therapists well-versed in various techniques with a proven track record of satisfied clients.

Our massage therapists are among the best in the nation, which is a testament to the companies that choose to utilize our services—including Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft.

4. Evaluate Effectiveness

Any added company program must have a beneficial impact on employees, productivity, and the culture for it to continue beyond a trial run. Make your corporate massage package more than just a pilot program by measuring the results it has on employee productivity, morale, and retention, and communicate this data to executive management.

Our user-friendly software even calculates massage services ROI, using utilization reports and employee feedback to demonstrate the effectiveness of the program to C-level decision-makers.

Join the increasing number of wellness directors who are recognizing the powerful long-term benefits of massage on employee wellness, which translates to increased productivity and company loyalty. Adding a corporate massage package to your organization will make for happier employees who are smiling more and calling out sick less.

Just about every workplace offers coffee to its staff; how many of them can offer the opportunity for a relaxing massage as a company perk? Look to a corporate massage package to give your organization that competitive edge.

Want To Learn More About On-Site Massage?

Click the button below to visit our corporate massage page & learn more about our wellness programs.

April 1, 2019October 14, 2021

Top 3 Corporate Massage Benefits

Corporate massage therapy gives employees so much more than a relaxing 15-minute pause during their lunch break (even though that is nice). Bringing professional massage therapy into the workplace has many benefits, from physical perks to increased productivity. In fact, corporate massage participants report significant stress relief, better sleep, reduced muscle tension, and decreased migraines. Offering employees massages in the office shows your commitment to their wellbeing and ultimately improves the organization as a whole.

Here are some specific corporate massage benefits:

1. Stress Management

Stress isn’t entirely avoidable, but there are simple ways to keep it in check. Left unmanaged, stress can easily become employees’ dominant emotion, overpowering any positivity inside and outside of the workplace. Stress has a hugely negative effect on the workplace, too. In a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 29% of people said they felt quite a bit or extremely stressed at work. And with numbers rising, employers have a responsibility to help their teams manage that stress.

That’s where corporate massage comes in.

Many forward-thinking companies have set up programs for workers to receive quick massages during the workday. Chair massages help reduce stress by physically removing built-up tension. In just a few minutes, a chair massage promotes better circulation and muscle stimulation, undoing the results of sitting at a desk or standing for hours at a time. These effects can counteract fatigue, promote positivity, and leave employees feeling refreshed and inspired. Regular massages help manage stress in the long term, and employees are the first to tell you how welcome that help is.

2. Increased Productivity

Happy employees, happy business! Introducing a corporate massage program makes can increase positivity and have a huge impact on work performance. When you set up a wellness program, you’re building a structured outlet for stress and tension that gives employees a chance to take their productivity into their own hands.

Productivity can be limited by quite a few stress-related factors:

Feeling overwhelmed or anxious
Inability to stay focused
Stressful environment

Massage therapy, yoga, mindfulness meditation, and fitness classes can help with all of the above. Massage therapy in particular has been proven to reduce anxiety and promote relaxation even after the session ends. When employees feel less overwhelmed and more focused, you’ll see a boost in productivity from the bottom up. That type of physical activity can also unite team members, boost their mood, and help them focus on the positive aspects of their job and the people around them. After all, a happy business means a happy culture, too.

3. Easier Hiring & Retention

Corporate massage also has perks at the organizational level. When speaking to a potential new hire, imagine the spark in their eye when a recruiter brings up a corporate massage or fitness program! It’s a major amenity that modern companies are adding to their workplaces every day, changing the corporate culture game.

Offering a wellness program helps position a company as one that invests in employee wellbeing and morale. Our clients have noted greater employee retention too, as it helps reduce stress and boost efficiency and overall job satisfaction.

Get Started

Introducing corporate massage programs can be more than just a lofty dream. It can start with simple actions. Listen to your team members about what would make their lives easier. Look for the effects of stress on your team and their work. And consider the value you can bring to your corporate culture by taking one step forward in bringing them a way to manage stress.

Want to learn more about on-site massage?

Click the button below to visit our massage page.

February 12, 2019October 14, 2021

Office Massage Beats Office Stress

Are you looking for ways to de-stress employees and improve the overall mental and physical health of your company? Trying to increase productivity and creativity? The positive health effects of regular office massages can be a major draw for employees who are trying to stay healthy and combat stress. In fact, providing office chair massage along with other positive workplace stress reduction practices like yoga and fitness classes, mindfulness meditation, and even acupuncture sessions can help your company recruit and retain employees by increasing job satisfaction along with their health.

Human Resources Can Lead the Way

Workplace stress in the tech industry goes beyond the stress found in most offices, but that’s not to say people aren’t feeling stressed out in other industries. A recent poll conducted of HR leaders in all fields by Kronos Incorporated and Future Workplace revealed that 46% of them cite employee burnout as the reason for up to half of their annual workforce turnover. One of the main reasons stressed-out employees leave, rather than speak up, is the nature of stress discourages the sufferer from admitting the problem and seeking help.

So how can HR leaders help employees feel more energized, with renewed ability to meet crucial deadlines, solve problems, fire on all cylinders, and leave work with a smile? Forward-thinking companies are proving that supportive environments are the biggest motivator for engaging and keeping happy employees. In such workplaces, employees understand office massage and other stress management programs are part of company culture, they feel their managers promote wellbeing, and they witness C-suite leadership supporting and even engaging in the programs themselves.

Relaxation and ROI Go Hand-in-Hand

Many companies on 2018’s Fortune 500 list show that high revenues don’t have to come at the expense of staffers’ health and happiness: some of the highest-grossing companies in the U.S. are leaders in employee wellbeing, too. For example, Google (whose parent company Alphabet is 22 on the list) encourages employees to take advantage of office massage and on-site nap pods to reduce workplace stress. Salesforce (285 on the list) offers a monthly “wellness allowance” that reimburses employees for stress-reducing activities such as office massage and yoga to smoking-cessation programs.

National workplace stress management companies like Body Techniques, which provides massage for all of Google’s offices nationwide, has found corporate massage programs work best when companies subsidize a percentage of the massage program cost as an employee benefit, rather than merely providing access to such programs. For example, when a subsidy is in place and the cost of a 15-minute chair massage is $10 or less to an employee, Body Techniques’ data tracking shows a jump in utilization from 50 – 60% to 85 – 95%. Along with providing customized scheduling software, established vendors such as Body Techniques will also assess program impacts through utilization reports and employee feedback to calculate ROI and guide financial decision-making, making stress management stress-free for a company’s internal team.

Office Massage: A Unique and In-Demand Company Benefit

Massage may be the missing piece of the puzzle for HR leaders who want to improve employee satisfaction. Prolonged sitting is one of the leading causes of back pain, headaches, fatigue, and other health problems, which can lead to missed days or poor productivity. While standing desks are helpful, multiple studies conducted over the past two decades have shown that regular office chair massage decreases anxiety, reduces fatigue, and helps prevent stress-related or work-related injuries like back problems or joint pain.

Chair massage has many benefits for a workplace. For example, it’s portable and easy for employees to access fully clothed, and they can see benefits with short, fifteen-minute sessions. With chair massage, a tremendous amount of stress can be released from the biggest tension points on the body: shoulders, neck, and upper back. These points are where we store stress, and unrelieved stress can affect posture, impair thinking, and even trigger headaches and muscle injuries.

Some other proven benefits of office chair massage include:

Pain Relief
Reduced Anxiety
Relief of Tension Headaches
Lower Blood Pressure
Strengthened Immune System
Increased Overall Sense of Wellbeing
Improved Job Performance
Boosted Workplace Morale

In forward-thinking tech companies and other businesses, success centers on providing employees with a positive experience and the tools they need to accomplish their goals. Office chair massage is a highly effective and efficient use of time and resources that offers employees easily accessed mental, physical, and emotional relief. That means more productivity and less resources spent on training new staff to replace those who leave.

Want to learn more about on-site massage?

Click the button below to visit our massage page.