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A health-conscious work environment is becoming the norm for many companies, and for good reason. Organizations that successfully implement comprehensive wellness programs see positive business outcomes and create thriving work environments for their employees.
In fact, a study done by Harvard Business Review found that health care costs increased by just 1 to 2 percent for organizations with workplace wellness systems in place, as opposed to 7 percent, which is the national average.
If you already have a wellness program in place, then fitness trackers will fit right into the culture you’re working to build. Otherwise, this can be a first step in that direction and then some, because bringing this popular piece of technology into your office isn’t just good for creating health awareness among employees. It can also be used to improve sales, promoting friendly competition among employees.
Get your sales team moving and selling more with these tips and ideas for using fitness trackers to improve productivity.
85 percent of workers felt more motivated to do their best work when incentives were involved. – Business News Daily
A simple way to bring fitness trackers into your company is to use them as a reward for hitting sales goals. As one of the most popular items for both health and non-health conscious employees, it may be just the right incentive for motivating your team to take their sales to the next level.
The best part: Once an employee has earned it, they’ll likely start to use it for health purposes, allowing you to promote both wellness and productivity. A win-win.
Getting less than 5, but more than 10 hours of sleep results in employees staying home sick 4 to 9 days more than those who sleep 7 to 8 hours a night. – Sleep
The best part about wearables is that they can track far more than just steps. Many can track the number of hours a person sleeps, in addition to how well they slept, how many times they woke up in a night and more. Use this to your advantage by setting sleeping goals for employees. If 7 to 8 hours is the sweet spot, start there.
While this doesn’t directly correlate with sales productivity, the data does show the value in getting just the right amount of sleep in terms of work and productivity. Set this up as a one-time initiative and monitor whether the winners are actually doing more work on a daily or weekly basis or not.
If so, consider whether this would be a valuable way to increase productivity in your sales team—Plus: who can say their company has “sleeping goals” for employees? As an on-going initiative, it could be a great way to attract new talent.
“On average, each task was taking around 7 business days to complete. After we started doing our daily walks for about a week, we noticed that average dropping to 6 days, then to 5 days after about 20 to 30 business days of having daily walks 2x a day.” – Murray Newlands, founder of Due.
It makes sense that walking would improve productivity, especially when walks happen outside. Walking has been found time and time again to improve mood, focus, and attention while decreasing stress; these benefits increase when the walk happens in an outdoor space.
With fitness trackers, you can see which employees are walking more during meetings and then track their increase in productivity.
Start a walking meeting movement in your organization, where employees are encouraged to walk on their meetings rather than sit in a conference room. Start by asking employees to walk for just one meeting a day, and see if that organically increases as time goes on. This can give you a baseline for a longer initiative.
You may be thinking: this sounds all well and good but I have two questions—Are we supposed to buy trackers for the entire company and how do we get our employees to take part?
Luckily, there are answers for both of those questions.
If you want to buy trackers for your whole company, there are hundreds of wearables and smart watches available that you can purchase for an affordable price. For example, the Xiaomi Mi Band 2 is just $45, as opposed to a newer version of the FitBit, which runs around $200, according to a recent wearables pricing analysis.
Otherwise, all iPhone and almost all Android devices come with health tracking apps installed. If you’re not ready to make the investment, ask employees who want to participate to use those apps instead. While these tools aren’t as robust as a wearable, they can help you get initial ideas off the ground quickly.
Getting your employees interested is another issue that many companies have dealt with. While you’d be hard-pressed to make walking meetings and sleep goals mandatory for all employees, you can incentivize people to get involved with prizes, such as half days, ordering lunch on the company, and more. Consider what gets your employees excited and use that to your advantage.
Every company can improve productivity in sales, no matter how effective and streamlined your current team and process is. Consider how fitness trackers can be added into the equation to give employees the boost they need to sell more while getting healthier.
Jessica Thiefels has been writing for more than ten years and is currently a full-time blogger. She is also an ACE Certified Personal Trainer, NASM Certified Fitness Nutrition specialist, and the owner of her own personal training business, Honest Body Fitness. She’s using her experience from writing, editing and marketing to help people get healthy and learn to love what their bodies can do. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for health articles, new workouts and more.
