November 2005 – Employee health and fitness at BT

When BT, the telecommunications company, decided in September to launch a company-wide health and fitness drive it was staggered by the response as nearly 16,000 employees signed up to the 16-week programme designed to help them get fitter, trimmer and healthier.

Behind the programme was a discovery by Dr Paul Litchfield, BT’s chief medical officer, that in the previous financial year 26 of the company’s employees had died prematurely of heart related illness.

“The average age of our employees is about 47 and we have a big bulge of people in their mid-forties and early fifties. I see the death notifications and was shocked to find out that it had been one every two weeks on average,” he said.

The upshot is that BT has now launched a health and fitness programme, issuing pedometers, diet and exercise regimes plus an element of friendly competition among teams of employees.

Six weeks in to the regime, Dr Litchfield says it is progressing well and says he is expecting some quantifiable health benefits given that more than 15 per cent of the workforce is following the web-based programme.

The programme will not only benefit individuals but should, hopefully, have a positive impact on absenteeism and productivity rates. It has taken companies some time to wake up to the business benefits of encouraging better health and fitness in their employees. Too often in the 1990s companies were blithely selling off their sports fields while their employees, attempting to deal with ever increasing workloads, allowed themselves to cut short their lunches or stay late in the office beyond agreed working hours.

This kind of flexibility was encouraged by many employers who ignored increasing evidence of health problems associated with sedentary lifestyles and fractured working patterns in offices that provide few opportunities for exercise. Too often the coffee dispenser is sited by the side of a vending machine selling potato crisps, chocolate bars and fizzy drinks that only exacerbate sugar-related cravings.

Instead of tackling the root cause of health problems, employers have been content to record the resulting absence rates. Where human resources managers do intervene, more often than not, it is to conduct the kind of return-to-work discussion that smacks of distrust and opprobrium.

A recent survey among HR professionals carried out by Personnel Today magazine illustrated the extent to which companies prefer to distance themselves from health issues. Some 93 per cent of the 2,000 managers surveyed said they would employ a person of “normal weight” ahead of one who was obese.

The research led to a flurry of newspaper headlines about managers preferring fat workers to thin ones. “Job hunting fatties are being unfairly snubbed by bosses,” said one story under the headline: “Lardies have fat chance of a job.”

Fattism, said the magazine, was the last bastion of employee discrimination. I doubt that. The same sort of result would emerge if recruiters were asked whether, all other things being equal, they would choose a good looking candidate over an ugly one. If there is no truth in that, how else can we explain the profusion of young and glamorous female news presenters, particularly on the US TV networks?

Still, the Personnel Today research was worthwhile since it highlighted the shallowness of diversity policies that concentrate mostly on gender and race. Some now include disability but few yet consider age and none would pay attention to body shape or facial attractiveness in the form of positive discrimination.

Too many companies, like fashion advertisers, want beautiful minds and beautiful bodies that reflect the sense of perfection that governs their production ideals. Yet, at the same time, they have encouraged the development of working practices that eschew exercise and sensible diets.

Now some employers are becoming convinced of the benefits to be gained by investing in employee health programmes. The Metropolitan Police has seen absence levels fall from more than 10 days a year in 2003 to just over seven days after instigating a health and fitness programme that it believes has saved it £30m.

No wonder that other employers are beginning to sit up and take notice. Vielife, a health consultancy I featured in this column nearly two years ago, has been carrying out long-running research drawing health-related productivity comparisons. Its most recent findings suggest that spending on employee health programmes can produce almost a four-fold return on the investment.

The link between health improvements and productivity suggest that a universal health and fitness measure across workforces could be a useful indicator of relative performance capabilities. The downside to such a measure, however, is that it might lead to even greater discrimination against overweight job candidates.

Some may feel such discrimination is justified. After all, the National Audit Office has estimated that overweight people cost the National Health Service at least £500m a year and the economy £2bn due to sickness absences resulting from obesity. Obesity, unlike a virus or infection, it could be argued, is self-inflicted. But a broader view might draw an association with the sort of eating habits that have been promoted by the processed food and snack industry, supporting oven-ready TV-dinner lifestyles.

Business, in other words, is part of the problem. Added sugars and salts in heavily advertised processed foods, encouraging addictive eating habits, have led to an increasing incidence of diabetes, while the proliferation of screen-based and call-centre jobs that anchor people to their desks are creating fewer opportunities for exercise. Instead of selling healthy lifestyles, too many companies have conspired in creating a chronic aversion to the workplace, either through genuine sickness or general malaise.

A significant feature of this undermining of healthy living is the way employers have gradually increased workloads. A recent report on employee absence by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development identified workload as the number one cause of workplace stress followed by change or restructuring programmes and the pressure to meet targets.

About 40 per cent of just over 1,000 employers who responded to the survey were reporting increases in stress-related absences.

In the more paternalistic businesses of the mid-20th century company-run sports and social clubs were an important part of working life. But life moved at a gentler pace in those days without the so-called labour-saving devices and communications technology that should have made work easier. Instead they seem to have created more clutter in our lives, not less.

The relentless concentration on efficiency and productivity at work, coupled with dual careers and pressing domestic burdens are increasing the potential for burn-out and leaving fewer opportunities for people to refresh themselves.

Employees must play their part in adopting healthier lifestyles. At the same time employers need to put their own houses in order. They must start by moving beyond the traditional focus of occupational health and accept, like BT has done, that general health is an employer concern too.