Corporate Fitness and Active Aging

Have you ever heard the recommendation that healthy adults should try to do 30 minutes of moderately intense exercise most days of the week to help maintain health and reduce the risk of heart disease? If you want to lose weight, you'll need to tack on an additional 30 to 60 minutes of cardiovascular exercise most days of the week. But who has time for even 30 minutes of exercise?

To Improve Company Health Culture, Encourage Short Spurts of Exercise

Although it's ideal to aim for at least 30 minutes of exercise each day, it's not always possible or practical. Between commutes, packed work schedules, and other demands on our lives, many employees find it difficult to fit in three meals in a day, much less 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise.

So, if employees can't exercise at least 30 minutes at a time, should they skip it altogether? The answer is definitely no. Physical activity has benefits even if you can only do it in 10- or 15-minute segments.

Short Bursts of Exercise Benefit Employee Health By:

Improving Employee Cardiovascular Fitness

Research has shown that even 10 to 15 minutes of walking at 2 to 3 mph can improve cardiovascular fitness. This means employees can improve their heart's ability to pump blood and oxygen to the rest of their body. People who currently have a sedentary lifestyle see this benefit most.

Boosting Employee's Calorie Burn

Ten minutes of exercise can give your employee's metabolism a boost for up to an hour.

Lowering Employee Blood Pressure

Hypertension Journal reports that individuals can decrease their blood pressure for several hours by taking a few short, brisk walks each day. In fact, individuals can lower it for 11 hours after completing four 10-minute walks.

Relieving Stress

Exercise, even if only for a short period of time, increases endorphins (the feel-good hormone), decreases cortisol (the stress hormone), and provides an outlet for frustrations.

Giving Employee Brains a Much-Needed Break

Employees can clear their head and prepare to focus on the next task at hand after only 10 minutes of exercise. Based on the answers to a questionnaire, study participants said a 10-minute bike ride helped them "feel more clear-headed" and "reduced feelings of fatigue."

Controling Cholesterol

Ten minutes of activity can help lower triglycerides and raise HDL (good) cholesterol levels.

Where Does Your Company Go From Here?

Encourage employees to look for opportunities to exercise in three or four 10-minute segments. This could mean giving them a few minutes of paid time during their lunch break to exercise, or encouraging a 10-minute walk before they go into their afternoon commute.

Consider this fact: People who begin a routine of regular physical activity by walking only 10 minutes a day are more likely to stick to the routine and add to it than are new exercisers who start with a 30-minute-per-day goal.

In a tough economy, many of your employees are making logical changes in spending habits. They are probably taking fewer vacations, eliminating extras from TV subscription packages, and using e-mail more frequently to save a few cents on a stamp. One thing we hope your employees aren't sacrificing, however, is good, healthy and lightly processed food.

Encourage Employee Health by Providing Health Tips that Teach Them What to Look for on Food Labels

Buying cheap food is tempting when you're at the grocery store, but convenience and processed foods aren't necessarily the way to go. Purchasing frozen meals and other processed food items can drastically increase sodium intake.

Even items you wouldn't think contain salt might be sneaking it in to employee diets. For example, on a recent trip to the store for a bag of frozen peas, I glanced at the back of the package only to find the words “peas, water, and salt” listed as the ingredients. I looked at a few other brands and, wouldn't you know, several had salt listed, as well. I did find one that had only peas and water, a small success that can add up!

Let Your Employees Know the Effects of Excess Sodium

You're probably thinking “what's the big deal? It's just a little salt,” but Americans consume entirely too much sodium. What does excess sodium intake result in? Hypertension! And what does hypertension mean? An increased risk for heart attack and stroke.

Most of your employees don't even realize that hypertension is a preventable illness, meaning that people can actually do something to prevent hypertension from sneaking up on them. The best form of prevention is to monitor your daily salt intake by glancing at the nutrition label on the foods you eat and keeping a tally of what you're putting into your body. According to the American Heart Association, we should be consuming 1,500mg of sodium or less per day.

In addition to keeping track of how much sodium you consume, incorporating physical activity into your daily routine can reduce your risk of developing hypertension. 

Make Employees Aware of the Risks

Think about this: With all the hype about healthy eating and increasing exercise, shouldn't more companies be tuning into what they can do for their employees in order to reduce the cost of healthcare? Encourage employees to take the next step to a healthy lifestyle and start paying better attention to what they are putting into their bodies. Once people make this a habit, the performance they'll get out of their bodies will be even better!

You've had your morning coffee and breakfast and you're ready to begin your workday. You plop down at your desk to scan through the 50 e-mails you received since you shut down your computer last night. By the time you finish, more than an hour has passed, you've answered five calls, and your boss is begging for your help with an agenda for a last-minute meeting.

To top it off, stress is setting in. Guess what? Your brain is already fried and your productivity for the day will probably be minimal.

Exercise at Work Is the Answer

What if your company offered employees 30 paid minutes each day to exercise in its corporate fitness center? Would employee productivity increase? Studies show it would. Exercise has positive effects on the brain. It stimulates the brain and nervous system, decreases stress, and increases performance. I don't know of a single CEO who wouldn't want his or her staff performing better on the job. Fewer mistakes equals more company return, happier bosses, and happier employees.

Increased Productivity Can Outweigh the Cost of a Corporate Fitness Program

You're probably wondering whether the benefits of opening a corporate fitness center outweigh the cost. The right type of managed facility would. Many corporate fitness centers have trainers who can help individuals reach their fitness and health goals, which means lower insurance costs, fewer sick days, and increased productivity. Corporations can reap many benefits from having a corporate fitness or wellness center. 

What's Your Next Step?

Convince company decision-makers to consider the benefits of allowing employees to exercise on company time. If a worksite fitness center seems out of reach, suggest a company-wide walking program or an exercise class at work. Become a healthy workplace advocate by providing articles and research that show how productivity and efficiency increase with employee exercise (see above).

Imagine the positive change that could occur for you and your fellow employees if your company took even a few steps toward better workplace health!

Kickin’ Cardio…Butts and Guts…Get on the Ball…fun names, right? These energetic exercise class offerings belong to the realm of corporate wellness and offer unique aspects of fitness that keep a loyal crowd coming back week after week.

In my years of working in a corporate fitness center, I’ve identified three reasons why group exercise continues to be successful in enticing new employees to join the worksite fitness center as well as increasing participation from current members:

1. Adding a Corporate Group Fitness Class Allows for Social Interaction and Accountability

The phrase “buddy system” is used in so many settings because it works! Find any article about weight loss or exercise and it will cite accountability as a key motivational strategy. Telling a friend about a fitness goal—or in this case, meeting a friend at a group exercise class—makes one more likely to follow through. Breaking a sweat next to a friend ties in the social aspect that makes those squats more enjoyable…or at least tolerable.

As a group exercise instructor, I’ve often had to remind my class participants, “If you are able to carry on a conversation with your neighbor right now, you are not working hard enough!” They are having that much fun together!

2. Placing a Fitness Class into Your Calendar Makes It More Likely to Happen

When that friendly Outlook reminder pops up on your computer screen that says, “Kickboxing Class, due in 15 minutes,” it’s hard to ignore. We all know the typical pattern: For those who aren’t “morning people,” exercising before work is out of the question. During the day it’s easy to get wrapped up in deadlines, phone calls, and the like that push daytime exercise off the agenda. So, there you are at 5 p.m., mentally drained. So you think, "I’ll go home and just eat a snack or take a quick nap and then I’ll work out." Yeah, right.

Having a specific class that meets only at a certain time makes the idea of exercise more concrete because it can’t be pushed later and later into the day. Another bonus of adding a group exercise class onto your Outlook calendar is that if coworkers notice you are blocked for that particular time frame, they may try to schedule meetings around it.

3. Going to a Corporate Exercise Class Puts You on Mental Autopilot,  Saving You Stress

I quickly discovered that in corporate fitness centers, clients deal with high stress levels, never-ending meetings, and work piles waiting at their desks when they return from the gym. In other words, exercise is the escape.

The last thing a frenzied, number-crunching employee wants to do in the gym is spend time planning a workout. Leave it to the group fitness instructor to organize the muscle groups, time the circuits, and count the repetitions. Knowing that all you have to do is show up to a class, dressed in your workout gear, makes exercise seem like less of a second job and more of what it’s designed to be: stress relief, a physical challenge, and a recharge of the batteries.

Employees are already offered such an array of professional workshops and classes. Consider adding group exercise into the mix to liven up your worksite wellness initiative.

It's no secret that healthcare costs in the U.S. continue to rise. A USA Today article quoting a report from the Department of Health and Human Services predicts that the $2.5 trillion we spent on healthcare in 2009 will nearly double by 2019 to $4.7 trillion.

Employee Health Care Costs

The $2.5 trillion spent in 2009 equates to about $8,047 per person. Who couldn't use a little of their $8,000 in personal medical expenses back in their pocket? Seems like it might take a superhero—or maybe a really innovative, dynamic, creative, and engaging activity—to turn around this course and help manage health expenses.

One Superhero Can Help Corporations Turn Employee Health Around

Enter superhero, stage left...

Here's the thing: Walking, it turns out, is good for your health—if you have a body that lets you do it, if you have a place to do it, if you have the shoes in which to do it, and if you have the time and inclination to do it. Those are a lot of ifs, but employers have great potential to turn those possible barriers into clear-cut opportunities for their employees. Here are some tips:

1. Build the infrastructure for safe walking spaces at your campus. Create a "route" with maps available at your main entrances. If your building is big enough, make an indoor route for bad-weather days. Establish a buddy board where employees can post walking interests (such as time of day, pace, and desired distance) to match up with colleagues for group walks. Build a wellness incentive program around walking.
2. Give away gift certificates for free or discounted walking shoes to launch your new walking initiative. Your employees are a substantial customer base for a local walking/running specialty shoe store. The retail establishment might be willing to cut a deal to your employees on a long-term basis.
3. Help your employees understand the personal value of regular exercise. Nudge them toward developing a desire to be active. Tie this back to employee health and vitality rather than to the corporate bottom line. Teach them about their preventable health risks and how regular exercise is a proven means for improving health.

Try Walking as A First Step Toward Corporate Wellness

Turns out, it doesn't take a superhero to turn the tide. But it does take leadership in the workplace to put some structure around opportunities for walking at work. Take it one step at a time. For very little money, you can establish a health culture at your office fueled by walking.

A good way for employees to measure their fitness progress is with portable tracking devices. These can range from the traditional pedometer to more advanced equipment.

Pedometers To Track Employee Health Progress

Pedometers come in all shapes and sizes. Enter "pedometer" into the Amazon search bar and you'll pull up 1,711 different options. Some measure only steps, whereas others have additional bells and whistles. Pedometers range in price from $4 to around $60.

Other High-Tech Employee Health Tracking Tools

In the last year, a new fitness-tracking tool has come on the market. Fitbit is a handy little gadget that clips onto your waistband like a pedometer. However, this high-tech tool tracks more than a typical pedometer by measuring calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, and sleep quality. You can link the unit to your computer and store your data on Fitbit's robust tracking site. You can also join Fitbit's communities, follow its blog, and track other health markers.

At $99 per unit, the gadget is less expensive than the popular iPod nano and provides significant personal logging capabilities to track progress.

How Small Companies Can Use High-Tech Tools In Workplace Wellness Campaigns

Small employers: The Fitbit might provide a unique tool for your workforce to start moving more. Using the website tools connected with the device, you could easily build a workplace fitness program on which to base company wellness rewards.

Most employers have blocked social networking sites like Facebook on their company computers while simultaneously establishing robust social media policies. It’s not surprising; the reasons to block social media content from company computers are many.

Social Media and Workplace Wellness

The truth is, your workforce is still out there playing FarmVille, tweeting on Twitter, and sharing YouTube content. Maybe it’s time to get social with your employee wellness program, by not only allowing social media use but also by creating a social media presence for your wellness program.

Top Three Reasons to Revisit Social Media Policies

1. Your employees are already out there. According to Cisco’s 2010 Midyear Security Report, an alarming 50 percent of surveyed employees admitted to surfing the web socially even though they knew it was against company policy. In addition, 27 percent of respondents took matters into their own hands by reconfiguring the settings on company computers to allow access to previously blocked content.
2. Research tells us social networks matter. The Framingham Heart Study is one of the most well-known, comprehensive health studies in the industry. It followed, among other things, the impact of social networks on tobacco use and obesity trends from 1971 to 2003. It turns out that social networks have a very powerful influence on whether and how individuals will change health behavior.
3. Quiet leaders might surface through social media. We’re always talking about the importance of employee champions for your wellness program. It’s common for those individuals to take the superhero form of the already-in-shape and always-eats-right marathon runner who wants to encourage her coworkers to be like her. Social media allows the quiet champions—the unassuming former smoker, or the less obvious heart-attack-waiting-to-happen who made small changes over time to improve his health—a platform to speak out, encourage, and quietly motivate their colleagues to take baby steps toward improving health.

Consider How The Good Side of Social Media Can Work for Your Corporate Wellness Initiatives

Using social media to promote your employee wellness program is hard for most executives to buy into because of the productivity concerns. However, this free communication and sharing opportunity might provide more benefit than you expect. Your employees are already out there socializing. Why not meet them where they are with the messages you want them to hear?

Corporate fitness folks hear it all the time: "I really want to work out on my lunch hour, but I don’t want to sweat at work." It's a legitimate excuse. Some of us sweat in ways that it takes hours to recover from. And who wants to smell sweaty for the rest of the day?

Yoga – A Perfect Fitness Fit for Employee Health

That being said, avoiding exercise altogether will only result in overweight employees. Instead, think of yoga as the answer. We don’t mean that in an all-the-world's-mysteries-can-be-solved-while-you-meditate kind of way. But the truth is that yoga can challenge your muscles enough that employees will walk away from class feeling both relaxed and rejuvenated while barely breaking a sweat.

Employees Can Benefit from Yoga as Exercise

There is still debate on exactly how effective yoga can be for true, sustained weight loss. But yoga can positively impact flexibility and muscle tone as well as body image. Each of those pieces has a role in an individual's ability to maintain or lose weight.

How to Bring Yoga to Your Workplace

A great way to control healthcare costs is to start a yoga class at work. If you can’t afford to hire an instructor for a formal yoga class at your worksite fitness center or a vacant meeting room, try renting some DVDs from the library and borrowing a TV/DVD player combo from your AV room. Employees can also incorporate yoga into their day by using some yoga relaxation moves at their desks.

It’s rare for me to have a conversation with a prospective NIFS client these days without being asked something related to the return on investment (ROI) for worksite wellness. I can’t blame them; these folks are typically tasked with decreasing an organization’s healthcare costs. An organization can take one of several approaches to decreasing healthcare costs, such as decreasing the size of the workforce. But cutting staff offers diminishing returns. Wellness, as general as that term is, can be the solution.

Here’s the thing: ROI for wellness programs can be extremely tricky to capture. Not only do you need to build your program with the right pillars in place, but the evaluation can be hard to wade through and costly to calculate. Read what Dr. Ron Goetzel, an industry pioneer in measuring wellness ROI, has to say about this in his WELCOA interview.

What’s a company to do? Wellness is complicated and requires persistence over time to see the results you’re looking for. If you can’t get everything in your wellness program “just right” and you don’t have the means for full-blown evaluation, should you give up and not offer a wellness program for your workforce at all?

It’s at this crossroads that you’ll need to consider the true motives behind the wellness initiative. I suspect your goals have to do with more than just direct healthcare costs. I’d be willing to bet two things:

• The organization is interested in doing right by its employees.
• You recognize a responsibility to contribute positively to your employees' overall wellbeing and that happier employees are more loyal and productive employees.

The first part—doing right by your employees—is actually even harder to measure than health outcomes and changes in corporate healthcare costs. But if you watch your employees' faces and listen to the water-cooler conversations, the anecdotal evidence you capture will say it all: Treat your employees right—with programs and services that make the healthy choice the easy choice—and they’ll work harder for you.

According to the American Council on Exercise (ACE), time and cost-conscious exercise options will be among the top trends in fitness for 2010. 

What we love about this predicted number one trend in exercise habits is that it targets both time and cost which are two of the most common reasons reported for not exercising.  Even better though, is that it capitalizes on exercise programs that are both time- and cost- conscious which is great for employers who are looking for corporate fitness solutions to improve employee health.

To build a corporate fitness program with low cost exercise options to your workforce, consider these options:

• Set aside a small meeting room space as your new corporate fitness center.
• Consult with experts on space layout, exercise equipment selection, and liability reduction to maximize employee health benefits in your program. 
• Consider staffing solutions for your corporate fitness center to give your employees the expertise they need to get full health benefits from your fitness center.  
• Offer group fitness classes to support camaraderie and group accountability.

Remember, you don't have to make an enormous capital investment in exercise equipment to develop a robust and successful robust employee fitness program.  In fact, spending wisely on a few small, key fitness tools and toys may just put you ahead of the employee wellness curve!

There are more ways to build a corporate fitness program.  Share your best practices here and help other organizations get a solid start on their employee fitness program.