Tag Archives: Health

Stand up for your workplace health

Whose job is it to improve the health credentials of our workplaces? The state, in a bid to ease the strain on our overstretched NHS? Employers, who reap the commercial benefits of healthier, more productive staff? Or should we the workers, for reasons of self-interest, stand up for our own workplace health?

Perhaps because no one can actually decide how to tackle the health time-bomb of sedentary working habits – or has the energy to do so? – we are sleep-sitting our way into a crisis of (literally) crippling proportions.

Inactivity: the cause of 20% of premature deaths

The extent of the problem was laid bare at this week’s Active Working Summit 2017. Expert speaker after speaker ran through the evidence:

  • nearly a fifth of premature deaths in the UK are due to physical inactivity;
  • more than 50% of staff working for the NHS (the nation’s biggest employer) are overweight;
  • the cost to the UK of poor workplace health is equal to the GDP of Portugal;
  • fewer than half of us are disability-free by age 50;
  • by spending seven hours plus a day seated we are suffering from muscle and joint issues that leave us frail and incapacitated.

The evidential case against workplace sedentary behaviour is clear. What researchers are focusing on too is how reducing those sedentary habits positively improves wellness and productivity. Early signs are good, and enlightened employers (and office design) encourage workers to stand up from their desks and get active around the office.

Move often, use mobile tech

The way to create active working is move often and carry mobile tech, ergonomics guru Prof Alan Hedge of Cornell University told the Active Working Summit. Younger workers get it, when their workplaces make it possible (take a walk through tech-co intensive Old Street and you’ll see this in action).

As Mayo Clinic Professor James Levine put it: “Active working is the coolest way to work. Barack Obama, the boss of Nike does it, Google, Facebook. These are cool places to work and they don’t want staff to be in their seats in one place all day long.”

‘We are being failed by the HSE’

So why aren’t corporate health and safety, occupational health departments in the vanguard of the active working movement? Gavin Bradley, the evangelical founding director of Active Working CIC, believes we are being failed by the HSE with its lack of recommendations for the use of adjustable desks. Workplace OH specialists generally only get involved once an employee has complained of a condition such as back or shoulder ache rather than taking the preventative approach.

We’ve got it the wrong way round, agreed Dr Nicola Eccles of Halifax-headquartered CP Active: “We shouldn’t be asking why aren’t you at your desk, but why are you always at your desk?”

So is it time for statutory guidance on active working? In Denmark, employers are legally obliged to provide sit-stand desks. It’s the law. The desks are there. Few workers use them. Gitte Toft, Danish inventor of the Steppie balance board blamed it on the lack of training, explanation and encouragement. Push rather than nudge just doesn’t seem to work.

Embed health in your business

Public Health England advisor Dame Carol Black agreed that legislation was not the answer, preferring options such as a voluntary register for employers. “Legislative policy follows the population,” she said. “Health and wellbeing at work cannot be an add-on: it needs to be embedded in a company.”

My take on this message – and one that I pass on to staff at companies I work with on healthy workplace practices: you work here, you deserve better, the ball is in your court. If you want a healthier working environment (and who wouldn’t?), you’ve got to demand it. Ask for the sit-stand desk riser, take regular breaks, become your department’s healthy workplace champion, put up posters, challenge your manager, stop eating lunch at your desk.

As Peter Brogan of the BIFM suggested at the Active Working Summit, the question that needs to get answered is: “Does your board even have a workplace strategy?”

Kickstart your healthy workplace campaign by signing up your team/department/company for On Your Feet Britain Day April 28, 2017: thousands are already signed up for a day of activity in the workplace in a bid to encourage the nation to #sitless #movemore, organised by Active Working CIC.

Business taking steps towards a more active workforce

Staff at the Sit-Stand.com standing desk company are contractually obliged to take a 15-minute walk during office hours every working day.

It costs the company precisely nothing, but it is a healthy workplaces commitment to the principles of a business run by the founder of Active Working: to reduce the amount of time we spend sitting down at work.

And as CEO Gavin Bradley points out, once you’ve started your 15-minute walk-out, it will probably turn into more. Activity logged: job done.

Sitting leads to health problems

Evidence is constantly growing that staff who spend most of their working day seated are both less productive and more inclined to suffer health problems. Office workers sit on average 10 hours each day, and 70% of this sitting time is at work. The solution is simple: stand up and move around more. It’s not complicated, it’s not expensive, just good business sense.

No surprise, then, that during a 90-minute meeting with Sit-Stand.com‘s director Gavin Bradley, we were on our feet the whole time. A standing meeting with the offer of a freshly-blitzed smoothie: I love a company that practises what it preaches, and this one certainly does.

It’s all part of a growing recognition of the fact that employers who take measures to enhance the health of staff benefit from people who are more motivated and productive, less likely to suffer stress and absenteeism and act as positive advocates for the business.

So why don’t more bosses take simple steps such as encouraging staff to move around more, step away from their work stations at regular intervals and pay more attention to their personal health outcomes?

Is business culture changing?

It’s a business culture issue, but one that is certainly starting to change, as is evidenced by the increasing number of companies I work with who are recognising that supporting their workforce in making healthy choices does not have to be costly or time-consuming.

Workplace health-boosting measures can include steps as simple as moving bins away from desks so that staff are forced to stand and walk a short distance to dispose of rubbish, or encouraging greater use of stairs by posting inspirational Step Jockey style stickers beside the lifts.

The standing desk solution

Installing adjustable standing desks is becoming popular among employees, and is another relatively low-cost investment, with the entry level Sit-Stand.com Yo-Yo workstation costing well below £200.

In Denmark, 90% of employees have an adjustable standing desk. Health and wellbeing at work evangelist Gavin Bradley would love to see similar in the UK, and with his value range of adjustable sit-stand desks, PLUS his Active Working and Get Britain Standing campaigns, he is taking massive steps in helping move the world’s workforce towards a more active future. I’m in.

Find out more about how I can help YOUR business enhance its healthy workplace credentials

Why cutting your sugar intake is about more than obesity

UK health experts want to see less sugar in the foods we eat, fruit juice and fizzy drinks banned from the dinner table, and possibly even a sugar tax.

In an instant, the current recommended sugar intake has been halved, so that an adult woman should now aim to consume no more than 25g of added sugar (5-6 teaspoons) per day; 35g (7-8 teaspoons) for a man.

About time too. If as a nation we don’t take action on improving our diets, there is no chance of beating the obesity crisis whereby in the UK, 67% of men and 57% of women are either overweight or obese, according to a recent Global Burden of Disease study. More than a quarter of children are also overweight or obese.

But cutting your sugar intake is about more than obesity. Being overweight increases your likelihood of suffering from a whole raft of unpleasant conditions, with type-2 diabetes sitting right there at the top of the danger list. That’s right, you won’t just be fat. You will also be seriously unwell.

One in three adults in the UK are at risk of developing type-2 diabetes, and sufferers are getting younger. What used to be a later life condition is turning onto a middle age problem – and younger. But despite these warning signs, new research from ShARP (the Simply Health Advisory Research Panel) reveals that more than 60% of us are unconcerned about it, and 40% admit to general ignorance about Type-2 diabetes.

Maybe it’s time to start getting worried: if you’re overweight, inactive and have a family history of diabetes, the bad news is: You Are Likely To Get Diabetes. Fact.

Which means …
1. You’re FIVE TIMES more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, because diabetes damages your vascular system.
2. Painful foot ulcers caused by nerve damage as a result of diabetes are likely to reduce your mobility.
3. You’re 20 TIMES more likely to require a foot or lower leg amputation.
4. You’ll suffer more infections, because diabetes means high sugar levels in your body – and bacteria and fungi thrive on sugar!
5. You’ll be low on energy and suffer from extreme tiredness.
6. You may suffer renal disease because of the damage caused by high blood sugar to the small blood vessels within your kidneys. Kidney disease kills one in 10 people with type-2 diabetes.
7. You’re at increased risk of glaucoma and cataracts, which occur 10-15 years earlier in people with diabetes.
8. You are also more at risk from blindness as a result of retinopathy, because fluctuating blood sugars – especially high blood sugar, as in diabetes – damage the blood vessels at the back of your eye.
9. People with diabetes are 10-20 times more likely to lose their sight than a person with normal blood sugar levels.
10. Getting diabetes in middle age increases your likelihood of a form of brain damage associated with dementia.
11. In fact, blood sugar problems can actually shrink your brain: diabetics have an average of 2.9% less brain volume than non-sufferers, scans at the world-famous Mayo Clinic have shown.
12. Your long- and short-term memory will deteriorate as a result of diabetes: a condition known as vascular dementia.
13. You are at high risk of suffering from depression.

Well, wouldn’t you be depressed on realising that you’ve contracted a preventable disease that entails serious life changes (ongoing medication to control your diabetes and related conditions, taking more exercise, avoiding foods that contain glucose – that’s sugar, folks) – for the rest of your life?

Go easy on the sugar and do your whole body a favour.