May 2008 – Taking the pulse of your company

As a child, before reaching the rebellious teen years, I used to swim competitively. I was never the best in my team, partly, I suspect, because I never gave everything in a race.

I recall the coach measuring my pulse after a practice race. “You weren’t trying,” he said. “I can tell by your heartbeat.”

I cannot imagine, therefore, the effort that will be needed of those who seek a gold medal in the Beijing Olympics this summer. James Cracknell, the double-gold medal-winning British Olympic rower, gave us an inkling last week at an event at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, run by Harvey Thorneycroft, the relationship management company.

Cracknell was recalling an eve-of-race pep talk by the British rowing team coach, Jurgen Grobler, ahead of the coxless four finals during the Athens Olympics in 2004.

Before joining the British team Grobler had been the rowing coach of the East German team during the communist era. He told the British four that the best performance he had witnessed among rowers was by the eight-man East German crew, three of whom could not stand to receive their medals after a race in the late 1980s.

“If you can stand up for a silver medal tomorrow you don’t deserve to have one,” said Grobler.

The British quartet were leading by half-way but the Canadian team, their nearest challengers, had edged in front by the three-quarter mark. Pulling on reserves they didn’t know they had, the British rowers fought back to cross the line just eight hundreds of a second ahead.

It’s not surprising to hear, therefore, that Cracknell is motivated by a deep desire to win. He took the same approach to an Atlantic Rowing race in 2005-2006 when paired with the TV presenter Ben Fogle, only to find that each of them had different goals.

“Mine was to win but Ben’s was to finish the course. When we realised our goals were different we had to learn how to motivate each other,” says Cracknell.

The same is true of the workplace. Everyone has different aims and motivations. Some want to do their best. Some spend the day clock-watching and can hardly wait to get out of the door.

But it’s difficult to translate sporting achievement in to the average workplace. The competition, the training and the nature of the work are a world away from the sports arena. The issues are different but there are some overlaps in performance monitoring.

You don’t, for example, work on a report until you can’t stand up. That said I once met a lawyer with a bed in his office to give him time for the completion of work. His workload was doing nothing for his health. Mental exhaustion can be just as disabling as physical exhaustion.

The decline in blue-collar work means that the kind of physical workloads that led Frederick Taylor, the work-study engineer, to time the activities of steelworkers, are no longer as significant as they once were.

Maintaining standards of performance, however, must remain a concern, particularly for those engaged in decision-making. A poor decision today will cost a company down the line. It pays to ensure that people are fit and prepared for work.

Yet in recent years companies have been slow to respond to employee health in the way that they once did. In the 1920s and 1930s big companies understood the need to have a healthy workforce and encouraged people to stay fit by spending on playing fields and establishing sports and social clubs.

The current interest in fitness among a population that is waking up to a worrying rise in obesity is a fraction of that displayed by our parents and grandparents before the Second World War when there was a proliferation of swimming and athletics clubs across the UK.

Between 1929 and 1931 the number of swimming clubs in England rose from 276 to 1,400, encouraged by grants issued by the Ministry of Labour. The swimming craze is highlighted in Roger Deakin’s book, Waterlog, who reminds us that swimming was so popular the Imperial Tobacco Company issued a set of swimming cigarette cards (long before anyone understood the health risks posed by cigarettes).

Today many companies have sold off their playing fields for development. Schools have done the same. Children whose parents walked to school are ferried to their classrooms by car, choosing to spend their evenings at computer terminals instead of playing in parks.

The chances are that, for employers today, a good percentage of their 20 and 30 somethings are no fitter than their older employees. But a growing number of people approaching their middle age seem to be waking up to the need to respond.

Today we can not only measure our heartbeats. We can take our blood pressure, learn our body mass index, cholesterol ratios and triglyceride levels. We can, in the words of Dorian Dugmore, a cardiovascular specialist, “Know our numbers.”

Speaking at the Brocket Hall event, appropriately titled “Getting the edge,” Dugmore, director of Wellness International, a healthcare provider, outlined a list of individual health-associated measures that can enable people to identify their levels of fitness.

One of the most important of these, he says, is blood pressure. When a blood pressure monitor can cost as little as £40, every company can provide people with the means to take their blood pressure at regular intervals, but how many do?

Wellness International sends teams in to companies to carry out these and other measures such as cholesterol ratios, blood sugar levels and body mass index. At the same time the teams help people modify their lifestyles is response to any issues.

Dugmore is right to stress the need for a re-emphasis on preventative medicine when western health systems are almost wholly geared to expensive treatments of ailments, typically concentrated in our last few months of life.

While I know that it is becoming increasingly common for companies to offer health screening for more senior employees, there is a growing need for whole company approaches involving all the workforce. These need not be costly and, even if they are, if the benefits outweigh the costs, such spending must be seen as an investment.

See also: The case for building healthy workplaces and: Measuring health