There’s more to healthy living than buying the odd slice of organic carrot cake, and our lackadaisical attitude to health is making bosses think more laterally about how to keep productivity up and absence levels down. Last year, United Kingdom businesses lost £12,2-billion through absence — that’s 168-million working days — so it’s hardly surprising that a survey by the UK-based Business in the Community (BITC) has found that employers are now ranking staff’s health and wellbeing as a top priority.
But how should businesses address the problem? If gym memberships and free fruit aren’t helping, should they go down the Japanese route of tai chi for all at 8am in the company car park, weather permitting? Could health and wellbeing programmes, with their ”prevention’s better than cure” methods, be the answer?
When managers at the London Underground found that one of the reasons for employee absence was illness, they put together an all-encompassing health plan. Since implementing the programme, they have seen a huge decrease in sick days, the scheme has been endorsed by the BITC’s ”Big Tick” for good practice and it has been shortlisted for the UnumProvident Healthy Workplaces award.
A major chunk of London Underground’s plan focuses on stress, which is the chief cause of absence. They developed what they unimaginatively titled a stress plan, using observational techniques to identify troublesome hot spots and put specific interventions in place to alleviate them. These included providing managers with a toolkit complete with guides on how to identify and deal with staff stress, informative relaxation CDs and advice cards. They also rolled out a stress reduction programme aimed at building employee resilience and protecting against future absence.
It seems to work: the programme alone — which sees staff attend a weekly two-hour group session over a period of six weeks — saved London Underground 1 362 days (the equivalent of £239 000 in extra staff costs) despite the fact that only 56 participants took part. What’s more, staff feel better equipped to deal with pressure.
”Rather than dwelling on why we were stressed, we looked at what we could do about it,” says Neasha Watts, a customer service assistant who took part. ”We realised we have choices to make: we can either react (get upset by public abuse) or respond (telling yourself that it’s not the end of the world).”
London Underground, for example, has a wider health plan that includes staff guides to good posture, free membership to a health website, and ”waist management” groups run by trained local station staff. — Â