The Employee Must Act!

It was good to note that employers are taking an active role in promoting healthy eating (Mah-E's post) and ergonomically designed offices (Chantal's post). However, the reality is most employers do not want to spend more on infrastructure for employees than they really have to. Working in an office environment for a number of years, I've noticed that the farthest employers are willing to go is to provide some sort of money for a "Welness Account" or ergonomic desk set up. For anything more than that - it's really up to the employee.

If employers pay more attention to the organization's benefit cost, they will see that about 70% fall into about 6 categories: cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, respiratory, digestive, cancer, and stress. These categories represent the most commom types of illness and injury employees experience in the North American workplace. Indirect productivity costs due to premature death and disability, due to physical inactivity and obesity, costs in the hundreds of millions. In the long run it's the employer that suffers in lost productivity and revenues.

It's sad that employers don't realise that the workplace is better-positioned to influence a large segment of the population. Larger employers, like Google, have the infrastructure, human resources, and support networks to encourage participation. So for most employees, the optimun opportunites will exist within their peer groups. This is really the strongest way to affect change, rather than waiting on the employer to provide a healthy workplace. Even with infrastructure in place, nothing will happen unless the employee ACTS!