Workplace Is Key To Solve UK's Obesity Crisis, Says Study

Employers can help to solve the UK's obesity crisis by achieving improvements in the health and wellbeing of their workers and employees, Unilever and think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) have suggested, following a year-long workplace health pilot.

The latest statistics show that 61% of adults in England are overweight – 24% of whom are obese. In 2009 Unilever launched a workplace health pilot, Fit Business, to help more than 1,600 employees in factory and office settings improve their health and fitness.

The results of the pilot, which was independently evaluated by the IPPR, suggest that businesses can make a significant contribution to improving the health of their employees.

The study found that Fit Business helped staff to lose weight and cut body fat. The initiative achieved a 26% decrease in the weight of factory workers and a 9% decrease in office workers who were overweight or obese. At the same time, 13% fewer factory workers and 12% fewer office workers finished the scheme with an ‘at risk’ body fat level.

Over half (52%) of office workers and 42% of factory workers acknowledged that the pilot had impacted on the quality of their diet.

The proportion of office based workers who “successfully made changes to their diet and stuck to them” increased from 29% to 46% during the year.

As a result of the pilot’s success, Unilever will roll out Fit Business to all 7,500 employees at its 17 UK and Ireland sites in 2010.

The roll-out will be based on the programme launched in 2009, which included:

• Engaging employees in health checks – bringing health checks to production lines and providing a bespoke appointment booking service in the office removed perceived barriers to attending health checks and contributed to record rates of participation, with an increase of 17% on previous years. Health checks helped employees understand measures such as blood pressure and Body Mass Index (BMI) and provided them with tailored health advice.
• Providing attention-grabbing nutritional information in employee restaurants and aligning activity with Government public health campaigns – showing calorie, fat, sugar and salt content alongside price in site restaurants helped employees to make informed and balanced choices. Fit Business was also aligned with Government health campaigns to ensure employees were receiving consistent communications both in and outside of the workplace.
• An ‘empower, don’t preach’ approach – concentrating on providing the resources employees need to make informed decisions themselves.

Alan Walters, Vice President of HR, Unilever UK & Ireland, said:

“Most people spend a large proportion of their lives at work. Through taking some simple measures, major employers have a real opportunity to help employees live healthy lives – quickly, on a sufficiently large scale and with no impact on public spending. By rolling out Fit Business across all of our UK and Ireland sites and sharing our insights into complex behaviour change, we hope to play an important role in helping tackle the rising challenge of obesity facing the UK.”

Carey Oppenheim, co-director of the IPPR, said:

‘‘If we want to tackle the problem of our increasingly unhealthy lifestyles, we need to make a huge joint effort. Individuals have the main responsibility – but government and employers can help. This very useful project has given us greater understanding of how to trigger behaviour change and it shows that the workplace can be an important setting for catalysing and supporting healthier lifestyles. It would be good to see other employers taking a look at these findings and applying them to their businesses.”

Source: workplacelaw.net