In recent years, we’ve seen a tremendous shift in the health landscape. In the early 1980s, very few people were overweight or obese. You can look back at working age people from the era and most of them were stick thin – as they were after the war.
However, by the 1990s, the average waistline had begun to creep up. And by 2000, it was very obvious that there was a problem. The nation was putting on a tremendous amount of weight as a group.
Today, around 70 percent of people are either obese or overweight – and if you include the “overfat” in that number, it rises to 90 percent.
The Problem With Unhealthy Employees
For businesses, this is a problem. Being overweight comes with a host of health problems that cause productivity issues. Workers spend more time absent, and the cost of weight-associated chronic health conditions pushes up the cost of health insurance.
For this reason, firms are taking more of an interest in their employees’ health. They know that with a healthy workforce, they can improve their competitiveness and deliver more value to shareholders. But, equally, without it, they can’t get as much done. Poor employee health has real, measurable effects.
The Modern Corporate Wellness Movement
The move towards corporate wellbeing is all-encompassing today. Practically every major employer is doing something to encourage employees to be healthier.
We’re seeing, for instance, the rise of corporate nutrition programs, designed to explain to employees what they should be eating. And we’re also witnessing a dramatic rise in the number of workplaces using lunch hours for yoga classes and meditation.
There is even a drive to collect employee health data, anonymize it, and make it public to shareholders. Owners, for instance, want management to collect information on employee weight, anxiety levels, blood pressure and so on so that they can generate an overall wellness score for the firm. They will then feed this information into predictive models that forecast how profitable the company will be in the future.
It’s A Win-Win
Some commentators have expressed concerns with moves like this. Employees could be penalized for not adopting healthy practices and job selection criteria could begin including the health status of an individual, not just their practical or technical skills.
However, at the moment, there are actually relatively few short-term financial incentives for people to remain healthy. In many cases, they can’t significantly reduce their insurance premiums, even if they do live well.
Project health, however, could change all that. If employee access to benefits rises or falls in line with their health, then they will consider their wellbeing as a critical part of their lifestyle. What’s more, they’ll feel better for it too. Their working lives will become less of a chore and more of a creative pursuit or vocation. They won’t be so exhausted come Friday evening, as many workers are today.
Whether incentives will work in the realm of health, however, remains to be seen. Already, most people know that they will feel much better if they live a healthy lifestyle – encouragement in itself – and yet many cannot.
There is more going on here than meets the eye. The problem of food, for instance, is actually more environmental than people realize. Anyone who genuinely eats healthily or exercises regularly has to make a conscious effort to go against the grain – and that’s not always easy, either socially or personally.
Furthermore, there is a lot of misinformation out there as to what is actually healthy – and what isn’t. Not everyone has the time to do the research and come to conclusions themselves, making the task more difficult. All of this makes making any changes difficult among people who are “free living.”
Corporate wellness, though, provides a different model. Because most companies are top down, it gives executives at the top opportunities to shape their organizational culture. And such attempts are often very effective. Once a culture becomes established, social pressure to conform to the regular lifestyle environment of society diminishes. Within the bubble of the company, people feel free to live well.
The Stress Issue
Companies, however, aren’t innocent in all of this. In fact, there is substantial evidence that their actions directly imperil the health of workers.
Science is showing that chronic stress – the type of stress that lasts longer than a day or so – is on the rise. Firms demand a huge amount from their workers in exchange for what ultimately amounts to relatively little pay.
Corporate wellness is an attempt by firms to reduce this cost of their operation. Many managers and executives know that they are putting their employees under undue pressure, and it’s leading to problems. Burnout and diseases associated with stress are real and serious issues, leading to rising healthcare costs.
The current trick here is to encourage employees to engage in regular meditation. Meditation is a feature of most major religious traditions, and something that people once did to deepen their spiritual awareness and understanding. However, modern firms see it more as a tool to help their workers make it through increasingly difficult and stressful work environments.
Blaming It All On Firms
But is it all the fault of firms, though? We’ve had employee-business relationships in the modern form for the last 200 years. Why is it suddenly a problem right now?
Part of it has to do with the culture. Changes in the wider culture are increasingly propensity to feel stressed and anxious. Workers want to get ahead – and they take it incredibly seriously. They believe that the only way to have a good life is to push themselves to the limit for years on end.
There are also the personal health choices of workers themselves: something that is mainly outside of the control of firms. Employees ultimately decide what they put into their mouths and how much exercise they take, not their managers.
Companies are obsessed with health because they can see the writing on the wall. They know that if they can attract more healthy workers, they can outcompete their rivals.
