Providing better choices and health education
Australian Financial Review SPECIAL REPORT – OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH & SAFETY
Research shows that healthier staff are happier staff − as well as being more productive, reports Miriam Hechtman.
As the link between healthy eating and productivity becomes more evident, companies are investing in various ways to improve the dietary health of their employees. However, removing the hot chips from the canteen and expecting employees to eat only lettuce will not secure a happy workforce. Understanding your work culture’s needs and providing employees with dietary choices and health education may be the solution.
Good Health Solutions dietitian and exercise physiologist Nick Fuller says that “obviously, by the company managing their employee’s health, they can reduce the percentage of absenteeism in the workplace and increase productivity levels”. He says many canteens only provide one or two healthy options. “A lot of the food is often fast food − obviously high in saturated fat, so it’s very hard for someone who is eating at the canteen on a regular basis to choose to follow a healthy eating plan,” says Fuller.
As part of its health and wellbeing programs for corporate clients, Good Health Solutions runs canteen audits, a service that involves a comprehensive review of the existing food service in line with government and industry standards, and offers recommendations for improvement. Most importantly, says Fuller, the underlying aim is to increase the number of healthy foods available to staff.
Health has long been a consideration for food services company Spotless, says general manager of food development, Catherine Mitchell. She says there is a growing expectation that there will be healthy food in the canteen, and “we’re well ahead of that”. In 2005 the company launched the “wellbeing is vital” program, which focused on healthy eating in the workplace. A joint venture with the Heart Foundation’s Tick program was also piloted in 100 of Spotless’ workplace dining facilities in Australia, and now the company is considering buying the licence for this initiative.
Mitchell says healthier options, such as purchasing lean meats or sodium−reduced ingredients, can come at a higher cost to the employer. Employers need to understand each workplace culture and treat it effectively, as each facility has its own location, culture and behaviour, says Mitchell. What may be suitable for a corporate workplace may not suit an industrial blue−collar location where physical labour is required, so high energy food is required. “It’s about offering choice rather than offering one thing or another.
“You can’t just decide to take away everything that’s unhealthy from a cafeteria and replace it with healthy things because people will get annoyed with that, understandably,” says AGL’s manager of wellbeing and diversity, Megan Kingham. Vending machines at the company contain healthy alternatives, and have been located strategically so that employees have to walk to them. AGL also offers Weight Watchers meetings during lunch break in some of their offices, and has introduced lift−free Fridays in September to encourage workers to use the stairs. Says Kingham: “A healthier workforce is a healthier organisation, and there’s all sorts of research regarding people who are healthier having less absenteeism. “It’s just one aspect of wellbeing that contributes to our bottom line.”
To better understand the health of their employees, AGL employed health and performance management company vielife to run a health and productivity survey. “The questionnaire gives us a score on their health and it also gives us an aggregated report on the company’s health so we can see what the key health issues are of that particular organisation and target the campaign appropriately,” says vielife’s Asia−Pacific manager Sue Butcher. She says the reason companies approach vielife “is they feel they need to have some form of corporate responsibility for the health of their employees. “Companies feel that they need to be doing something. They want to be an employer of choice.”
Having a staff canteen can make it easier for companies to guide eating habits, says Butcher. Vielife programs offer guidance on how to eat out and what ingredients to use when making food at work. “We try to give individuals choices that they can easily make in their everyday life and are not too complicated.”
David Arbib, director of Fruitheads, which delivers boxes of fresh fruit and other products to companies, says government incentives to eat more fruit and to eat a healthy diet are influencing people’s awareness about their own wellbeing. “People who sit in the office all day are getting more critical of themselves because they don’t get out to doexercise,” says Arbib.
Food for thought - A workplace health survey, commissioned by Medibank Private, surveyed 3620 employees from corporations (74 per cent) and small businesses (26 per cent).
* 46 per cent live on high−fat diets.
* 8 per cent eat five or more daily servings of fruit and vegetables.
* 62 per cent are overweight. Of these, 28 per cent are clinically obese and 34 per cent overweight as defined by the World Health Organisation.
