February 2004 - Workplace health

In a week when the Wanless report is once again drawing attention to the rising costs of healthcare in the UK, it may be time for employers to take a good look at whether they are doing enough to promote healthy lifestyles in the workplace.

There is sound reason to do so. Private medical premiums for employees are rising at a rate of between 10 per cent and 20 per cent a year. Work-related illness is costing UK businesses £12bn a year, according to the Confederation of British Industry, and full-time employees are absent for 8.5 days a year on average.

The Health and Safety Executive says that about 33m days were lost because of illness in 2002, including 13.4m owing to stress. Millions more days are lost because of illness related to obesity. The National Audit Office has estimated that overweight people are costing the National Health Service at least £500m a year and the economy £2bn.

Added to this, a recent report revealed that more than half the UK's population is overweight and trends in obesity are increasing. It cannot take much more to convince us that the UK has become, if not the sick man of Europe, the sick worker.

For all that, UK health worries pale besides those of the US where healthcare costs to employers were expected to rise by 20 per cent in 2003 on top of large rises in the previous four years. According to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, stress-related illness is creating an annual dent in the US economy of $300bn (£180bn) a year.

Just reading about all this ill health is enough to make us feel poorly. No wonder Clive Pinder, managing director of Vielife, a health and well-being management company, is trying to persuade employers to adjust their approach to occupational health.

"What does occupational health mean anyway? Do health concerns stop when you leave the office? It's a ridiculous term in itself," he says, while peeling a tangerine he has plucked from a fruit bowl on the table in the company's open-plan London office.

Mr Pinder's company tries to practise what it preaches. The fruit is a nice touch. Added to that are little morsels of health information scattered around the office. Over the washbasin in the gents' toilet, for example, is a colour chart for you to compare your urine with the shades on the chart (the lighter the better).

His mission is to persuade companies to promote healthier lifestyles among their staff. This makes a lot of sense. I take the view that society- including business- creates its own problems.

In my early career, I had real lunch breaks, sitting around a table, not munching a sandwich while staring at a screen. Now, too often, our workloads are so open-ended, and the technology for multi-tasking so ubiquitous, that we try to juggle too many chores, mixing employment with domestic issues. Instead of focusing on one job at a time, we try to do two or three to the detriment of all of them.

The same people who used to be embarrassed when their mobile telephones rang during meetings can now be seen lending no more than half an ear to a discussion while flicking through messages on their electronic e-mail organisers. This kind of ignorant behaviour feeds on itself. While we celebrate ever broader bands for information technology, our attention spans are growing ever narrower. Our bodies and brains are overloading.

Something has gone wrong with our lives and employers must take their share of responsibility. It is in their best interests to do so: national insurance contributions from employers are paying two-thirds of the annual £60bn costs of the NHS. Moreover, employers are also suffering the consequences of lost productivity through ill health.

Derek Wanless, the former chief executive of NatWest, has been calling for a "fully engaged" response to health in his reports for the UK Treasury. This means that health should not be something we place solely in the hands of doctors and hospitals in what Mr Pinder prefers to call the "national ill service". He points out that four-fifths of the health service budget is concentrated on remedying the illnesses of 20 per cent of the population.

Health, therefore, is a responsibility for all of us. But we need some help because the messages we receive in the media are so confusing. Schools are beginning to understand their responsibilities, improving healthier eating choices and ensuring that children get plenty of exercise. The next step is for employers to follow suit, instead of treating workplace health as a matter of regulatory compliance.

In-house gyms, fitness programmes and salad bars should be seen as more than employee benefits; more, indeed, than recruitment tools. They have an impact on competitiveness.

There is growing evidence to suggest that a preventive approach to healthcare in the workplace can produce measurable improvements in productivity. We know this because companies that have adopted the World Health Organisation's health and work performance questionnaire are beginning to track their employees' health.

The questionnaire, devised by Harvard Medical School, asks employees to rate their physical and mental health. It then asks questions about specific medical conditions and symptoms, including notes on the numbers of visits to hospitals and surgeries in the past year. The responses allow employers to build up a picture of the health problems affecting their workforces, enabling them to direct interventions to the issues that matter most. Subsequent staff surveys allow year-on-year comparisons to measure improvements.

Employee health improvements can make a big difference to workforce productivity, according to the initial findings of research among a number of leading UK employers undertaken by Vielife. Early results, says Mr Pinder, show the most healthy quartile of a workforce is more productive by seven hours a week than the least healthy quartile. This is consistent with studies in the US.

Given the UK government's interest in plugging the productivity gap between the UK and the US, these are significant findings. There is further significance for large companies grappling with the kinds of workforce measures they will need to adopt for annual operating and financial reviews that will be governed by the proposed Standards Board. The need for human capital information was outlined in the Accounting for People report published by Denise Kingsmill last October.

The Kingsmill report did not specify health reporting but the gains to be made by promoting healthy workforces and the proven means of measuring health improvements that can be adopted by human resources departments should not be ignored by employers.

Measuring absences only diagnoses the problem. Measuring health points to the cure.

www.vielife.com