httpv://youtu.be/MUn3-rqsdcw
Coffee and smoke breaks – both of these are acceptable time periods during the day that employees take from an employer with no cost benefits in return. Frankly, the opposite is true. Hypertension, high blood pressure, cancer and death are all side-effects that drain our healthcare system and add increased costs to an employer’s balance sheet. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel just a little bit better after a stretch or walk around the block during the day and KEEN footwear thinks that getting away from your work area for just 10 minutes a day to do a little physical activity is worth making into a new ‘company’ policy.
KEEN has teamed up with Dr. Toni Yancey, author of Instant Recess: Building a Fit Nation 10 Minutes at a Time, to develop an online toolkit to help employers develop a program to take just a little time out of the day to reinvigorate and promote a healthier lifestyle for their employees through physical activity. The Recess at Work website is filled with presentation packages for introducing the concept of implementing a recess program to a management team, forms to track employee performance, lunchroom posters, score boards, workout videos and even a tool to calculate the return on the company’s investment into instituting such a program. All of the tools are designed to help a company kick-off their own ‘recess’ program and sustain one once it has been started.
As KEEN points out in their Manager Reality Check PDF from the Recess ToolKit:
Prolonged sitting increases the risk of premature death by 40%, even in lean people who exercise regularly. But by taking Recess breaks in your workplace, you can help protect employees’ physical and mental health. They’ll be more engaged, happier at work and more productive.
Implementing such a program may prove to be difficult, especially in these economic times as companies are trying to squeeze as much productivity out of their staff as possible. It is easy to say that the program only requires 10 minutes out of the day, but in reality it would probably mean 20 minutes out of the day. If you have worked in an office environment you know the staff will probably stroll of to the recess area for the first five minutes and have to use the rest room or grab a water before settling back into work after recess. The big question is does this cost in employee time outweigh the cost of a major illness or disease on a company’s health care costs.
Take heart disease alone – according to the Center of Disease Control (Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Addressing the Nation’s Leading Killers: At A Glance 2011):
Death rates alone cannot describe the burden of heart disease and stroke. In 2010, the total costs of cardiovascular diseases in the United States were estimated to be $444 billion. Treatment of these diseases accounts for about $1 of every $6 spent on health care in this country. As the U.S. population ages, the economic impact of cardiovascular diseases on our nation’s health care system will become even greater.
That is just one statement about one disease. Spend any amount of time searching the internet about healthcare costs and you will find more information than you could ever read on the topic – almost all pointing to the increase of health care costs on employees, employers and our country. A program such as the KEEN Recess at Work is not going to be the golden ticket for employers to eliminate health care costs, but it certainly is a worthwhile tool for employers investigating options to reduce these costs. As Ben Franklin quoted in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”