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A Step Ahead
A new contract appears to be taking shape between employer and employee. You might call it an offshoot of the dangerous byproduct of automation and technology: girth, a.k.a., flab. No longer are the majority of American workers standing at conveyor belts, going through synchronized upper-torso gyrations along assembly lines; wielding hanging pots of molten steel from intake to output; or trudging through the mouths of caverns for the long hike toward the coal-laden center of the earth. In short, most U.S. workers aren't moving around much at all. Almost regardless of the industry, the workplace has been transformed in the last 30-odd years into a sea of professionals, administrators, technicians, call-center operators, receptionists, etc., etc., all sitting at desks with phones and computers and fax machines . . . and probably lots of snacks in their desk drawers. The latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the percentage of obese U.S. citizens at 26. That's more than one-fourth, folks. Recent figures from the New York-based Conference Board and Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based RTI International, a research institute, puts the annual cost of obesity to U.S. companies at $45 billion. "We didn't have this problem 20, 30 years ago," says Bud Klipa, president of Caledonia, Mich.-based Details, a Steelcase company and maker of his answer to this national epidemic -- a whole new concept in workday mobilization called the Walkstation. "We're all just far too sedentary today." As he spoke, I could hear a steady hum; Klipa, himself, was walking through our interview on one of the company's 10 Walkstation units. He tells me he even keeps a log of how many calories he burns, and is now putting an average 6,200 steps into his day. (The CDC recommends a minimum of 1,000.) "Since installing this in my office in mid-January," Klipa says, "I've recorded 84 times I've used it and have walked a total of 248 miles while working. I've also lost 11 pounds." The Walkstation crusade actually got its legs in Rochester, Minn., home of the Mayo Clinic, where endocrinologist Dr. James Levine started toying with a treadmill/computer design years ago. It wasn't until Amy Langer, co-founder of SALO, a small Minneapolis recruiting firm, heard about his idea roughly a year ago and rigged one up for herself that the idea started to become a marketable reality. Langer and SALO co-founder John Folkestad are "committed to doing whatever they can to improve the health and engagement of their employees," says Erin Wombacher, the firm's spokeswoman. "[SALO's] the perfect office-without-walls environment, with piped-in music, Foosball, a Pac-Man game ... the most unique environment I've ever worked in." Levine seems to like it, too. He decided the SALO organization, including its HR executive staffing arm, Oberon, would be the perfect setting to try out his invention. Already engaged in research with Details on the health of American workers, he partnered with Klipa and his technicians and the manufacturing began. SALO bought four, then 12 more based on their popularity, then opened its doors in September 2007 to an official six-month Mayo Clinic study involving 18 willing participants that was featured recently on ABC's 20/20. Levine -- a longtime advocate of NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), which is based on the premise that daily moderate movement is more effective at achieving weight loss and better health than is the power workout -- puts the blame for America's rising obesity solely at the feet of the chairs we sit in; or rather, the sedentary souls who refrain from getting out of them. "We're chair-based," he told ABC prior to the airing of his study. "People being seated all day is crucial to why obesity occurred."
Employer's Responsibility One of Levine's test subjects was Craig Dexheimer, SALO's director of HR and operations, who oversees human resources for the 350-person organization. "It was amazing, Dr. Levine's 'Office of the Future,' " as the TV special referred to the project. "They literally came in and transformed our office into a mini-laboratory," Dexheimer says. "All 18 of us were wearing these little movement monitors. They taped a walking track around the office. Nurses traveled regularly from Rochester [N.Y.] to test us, our body weight, body mass, and so forth." Dexheimer lost 25 pounds in the six months, 7.5 percent in body fat. The 18 employees combined lost a total of 156 pounds, 143 in body fat. There was also a significant decrease in overall cholesterol; triglycerides dropped an average of 37 percent. The beauty of keeping employees moving while they're working, says Dexheimer, is that you're answering a pressing health problem in the country and the workforce without adding to another pressing problem of the 21st century: no time for family. "I have two sons, 6 and 4," he says. "The last thing I wanted to do was go to a gym and spend even more time away from my family." Walkstation proponents say companies need to be doing more in the new healthcare contract besides increasing employees' premiums and decreasing matches of company dollars. They need to go further beyond health-risk assessments, wellness programs and predictive modeling -- all of which are designed to give workers more responsibility for their own health. Indeed, says Dexheimer, just as employees are being asked to take on more responsibility for creating a healthier workforce, so too should employers be looking for ways to make that possible. "I've always thought employee engagement was a responsibility of the employer, and I think health initiatives are closely tied to engagement," he says. "Globally, employers absolutely need to be looking at the epidemic of obesity. We certainly are. We have walking meetings now, both outside and on our Walkstations. It's amazing how much more engaged and energetic you feel after them." I got to try the device out personally at the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference in Chicago last June. Once I 'got over myself'; that is, how I might appear to others interviewing Oberon Managing Partner C.J. DuBe while working up a sweat, I had to admit it felt good. I felt energized somehow. I couldn't help smiling. I certainly felt more engaged and attentive walking than I did standing still, peppering her with questions. So far, she told me, the companies installing Walkstations are letting employees share in their use. At Oberon, she said, they're even using four in a circle for meetings. The key to their mobility and ease of use is in a voice-over IP technology that Details and SALO worked out, allowing workers to simply plug their phones into the futuristic desk in order to be recognized on their organization's network. So ... I wasn't plugged in. I could only doodle while we talked. But I did capture a few things DuBe told me amidst the hustle of the SHRM exhibit floor -- namely, that this whole new concept in desk work is "really taking off." Klipa would support that. Some 20 to 40 units are now being shipped weekly from Details to customers, most of them still buying just a few to start (average cost is $4,000 per unit), with plans to test their impact on health, costs, turnover, productivity and more. Though Klipa didn't have a firm figure on how many employees are out there grinding out a healthier corporate America, he did say Fortune 500 companies, "the ones spending billions on healthcare, are the ones that are studying this now." Four units are being tried out at Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., though additional ones have yet to be ordered. They're also finding their way into some school districts and colleges to replace desks and create a truly "moving" educational atmosphere. At Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, Andrea W. Groth, a prevention specialist for KP Be Well, the health insurer's employee-wellness program, is working with her team and the HR department to design a study around the treadmill work station. Though purchase of the stations will depend on the final ruling by the company's institutional review board, which is expected soon, "it's our hope that we'll eventually have 10 units on-site, primarily for our administrative and customer-service people," who tend to sit more on the job than others there, Groth says. She isn't just interested in the weight loss and other health stats she'll be collecting, though those measurements will be pretty complete -- blood work, waist circumference, cholesterol, blood pressure, you name it. She also expects to "see improvements in productivity," she says, "which we plan to test through a self-reporting questionnaire. We'll also be measuring reaction time, recall of objects, ability to complete tasks ... .We think these will improve, too." Hard to dispute the positives. LuAnn Heinen, vice president of the Washington-based National Business Group on Health, does, however, have some concerns about the $4,000 price tag, a price that makes it "not for every office worker," she says. "Alternatively," she adds, "employees could walk briskly at lunch and on breaks, schedule walking meetings, use fit balls as chairs some of the time or employ a simple standing desk to incorporate the principles of NEAT while conserving costs and space." Both she and Helen Darling, president of NBGH, concur the desk can help workers realize a significant health benefit over time. At the same time, Darling stresses that "providing any such benefit has to be done in a way that doesn't raise equity [or fairness] issues, since others might argue that the employer must or should provide something similar for people with other needs or preferences." Nevertheless, says Groth, "there is a body of research out there suggesting that people who are more active during the day have a lower health risk than people who are not. That's very telling about the future of business, because I don't think employees of the future are going to become more active." "On the contrary," she says, "I fully expect they will become even more sedentary, and this will have a definite impact on business and become an important indicator for the future of employee-wellness programs. I fully believe companies will be seeing the importance of keeping employees more active during the day, and this will almost certainly redefine how they expect people to work."
February 1, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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