Patrick Coyne discusses how workplace policies can determine people's health and why it makes a compelling business case to keep employees healthy.
Occasionally after a hard day at work American poet Robert Frost pops into my head.
“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day”.
I’m sure I’m not alone. Around 30 million of us in the UK, eight hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year are busy working away.
For office workers that means, for many, sitting down at a computer screen. And we sit and we sit. In fact, the British Psychological Society has revealed that the average office worker spends an astonishing 5.41 hours per day sitting down.
Now you might think, so what? But there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that sitting for long periods increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and death. Worst of all, the harm caused by excessive sitting is still done even if people also exercise.
With that in mind, in could be argued that employers have a huge role – perhaps the biggest role – to play in making us healthier. And actually this doesn’t have to be a moral decision by employers to make people healthier, it’s sound business practice.
The cost of absence to employers due to ill health stands at between £673-760 per employee per year. Incredibly that would mean an average London firm of 250 employees loses around £4,800 per week (or around £250,000 a year) due to sickness.
Translating that into the wider economy it was estimated in 2007 that the cost of poor health in the working age population stood at between £103-129 billion (plus another £62-76 billion to the Government).
The business case is clear so what can employers do?
Denmark recently made it mandatory that employers supply sit-stand desks for all staff who spend longer than six hours each day at a desk.
Sit-stand desks allow people to adjust the height of the desk so that they can work sitting or standing up.
Not only would this seemingly solve the problem of prolonged sitting, but one recent study showed that using a standing desk caused the heart to beat an average of ten beats faster per minute than when sitting – which is around fifty calories an hour extra burnt.
Could walking meetings provide a solution? Here at the Alliance over the past year we’ve switched many of our internal meetings from sitting in one of the offices to a walk around nearby St James’s Park.
Don’t get me wrong, on a wet Tuesday in November we may be less inclined, but over the summer it provided a great way of breaking up the day and getting 30 minutes of activity as a bonus too.
Simple, but very important, things like ensuring employees take regular breaks and work reasonable hours can also have a huge impact on people’s mental and physical health.
If people know they are allowed to get up, stretch their legs and make a cup of tea, even if it’s just for a few minutes, that will break the day’s pattern of inactivity.
Solutions are out there but the impetus for change has to come from the top and be passed down through line-managers. This needs to be reflected in corporate policies which must recognise the importance of employees’ health and well-being.
The National Institution for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has just launched a consultation on workplace policy and management practices to improve the health and wellbeing of employees.
The guideline makes recommendations on improving the health and wellbeing of employees, with a particular focus on organisational culture and context, and the role of line managers. The guidelines make a number of recommendations and now is the time for you to help shape them.
Bear in mind that most of us will now have to work until we are nearly 70 and considering that more than three-quarters of the population do not have disability-free life expectancy up to the age of 68 – we have got to make a change.
Given the proportion of someone’s life that is spent at work, workplace wellbeing programmes have the potential to be that change.
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