Get your people living well

Poor ergonomics contributes significantly to the burden of poor ill-health at work. With 14% of ill-health cases being attributed to poor ergonomics relating to workspace, seating and chair positioning.

Healthy ergonomics encourages movement through the correct balance between the person, their technology and the working environment, enhancing wellness and productivity. Colebrook Bosson Saunders continually designs ‘market firsts’ that help drive performance and improve user wellbeing. The core of the CBS design approach is to understand how people interact with their technology so that our products create harmony and balance between the two. For over 30 years CBS has offered a range of ergonomic technology to companies spanning from offices and universities to schools, hospitals, and trading floors.

We spend so much of our day in our place of work, a space that promotes wellbeing is becoming a key consideration for both existing and new employees. To reduce the impact of musculoskeletal injuries and the impact of sedentary behaviour the need to deploy ergonomic furniture and wellness initiatives has never been greater.

The case for change

Overuse or improper use of computers can cause workers long-term injury and pain, leading to lost productivity, absenteeism, and decreased employee engagement. Such risks are heightened with the rise of the agile workplace and the increasing dependence on laptops, tablets and mobile devices.

The Furniture Industry, which is more concerned with Ergonomics, has no real business relationship with the technology suppliers who generally, are less concerned with Ergonomics.​ This leads to a mismatch, ergonomically, for a person working with a desk and the IT equipment required to do their work.​ Workplace technology can pose a risk to the health and wellbeing of workers.

These risks can be categorised into two main types:

1. Postural
2. Vision Related. 

In partnership

CBS previously partnered with an international London based airport, recognising the airport’s need to create a functional and highly flexible ergonomically optimised check-in area without compromising on aesthetic simplicity and quality.

Staff were set up with the Wishbone monitor arm and post solution across their check-in desks made the check-in process more efficient. It also improved the long-term health and productivity of employees who benefited from the versatile height adjustment capabilities of their screens and the sit/stand nature of their role.

What can you do to support your staff to be active during the working day

Being active might not be the first thing we think of when we start to look at supporting workplace health, but we know from previous research that a physically active workforce has multiple health and business benefits.

The Active Workforce report focuses on understanding the wants and needs of SMEs when it comes to supporting their staff to be physically active, recognising that these needs will be very different from larger organisations. Findings, however, are applicable to any size of organisation.

Current workplace physical activity opportunities and support

The report highlighted some of the most popular types of workplace physical activity opportunities and supports that SMEs put in place.

Most frequently used opportunities & support

• Flexible working (47.1%, n = 32)
• Encouragement and support from colleagues (41.2%, n = 28) and role modelling from senior managers (27.9%, n = 19)
• Government schemes (e.g. Cycle to Work) (39.7%, n = 27)
• Physical activity challenges and competitions – e.g. step challenges (22.1%, n = 15).

Least frequently used opportunities

• Discounted/free gym membership - (premium e.g. David Lloyd) (7.4%, n = 5)
• Access to physical activity offers through employee benefit platforms (e.g. Perkbox) (7.4%, n = 5)
• Health and wellbeing allowance (5.9%, n = 4)
• Personal training or coaching (1.5%).

SMEs were most likely to put in place opportunities and supports for staff to be active that were easy to implement, were low or no cost, and allowed staff to connect and socialise. Support through providing flexible working and permission to be active was important.

Physical activity opportunities put in place were done so because they were seen to improve wellbeing (70.6%, n = 48), morale (57.4%, n = 39), increase staff engagement (57.4%, n = 39), and improve productivity (52.9%, n=36).

What can you do to support your staff to be active during the working day: tips for employers

A clear set of three recommendations for employers were highlighted in ukactive’s recent The Active Workforce report, of how to start building a workplace health culture centred around active behaviours.

1. Give employees time to be active at work 

Employers can support SME workplace physical activity opportunities by giving employees the time to be active during the working day. For example, through flexible working, meeting-free days or scheduled breaks between meetings to allow for movement.

2. Role model workplace physical activity 

Senior leaders have an important role in ensuring employees feel it is acceptable for them to take time to be active throughout the working day. Have senior leaders engaging in active behaviours and providing verbal and/or policy permission for employees to be active.

3. Keep workplace physical activity simple and social

Implement simple ideas (e.g. walking meetings or challenges) that are co-created with employees and that allow them to connect and socialise, focusing on removing existing barriers (e.g. lack of socialising, lack of time, reduced incidental movement). This might involve building connections with local fitness and leisure services/providers to increase access to support for employees.

pirkx creates a platform to provide affordable health and wellbeing benefits to all workers.

pirkx is a platform designed to deliver affordable health and wellbeing benefits to the contingent workforce - contractors, the gig economy - and employees of SME businesses. Historically only employees in large companies had access to affordable health and wellbeing benefits. Everything that existed in the market (core physical and mental health services) was either expensive, hard to access or couldn’t be used for a team of self-employed people. Driven by the experience of its founders, pirkx set out to find a solution.

The platform pirkx created has no complex onboarding processes. When people are on the platform or app, they have access to the full range of benefits, which currently include a 24/7 online GP, 24/7 dedicated counselling and mental health advice, access to an interactive app to improve mental health resilience, virtual gym classes, discounted gym memberships, discounted health insurances, money advice, credit score advice and debt help. Self-employed people can sign up and pay for themselves, business owners can sign up and invite their team for an affordable price. pirkx also offers complete flexibility, so people can pay monthly, quarterly or annually and cancel at any time in line with the chosen subscription period.

COVID-19 has highlighted the need for all elements of the UK workforce to be supported from a physical and mental health perspective. And it is particularly important that in an evolving world of work businesses keep up with these changes and provide relevant support to their teams.

The Journey

Encouraging plant-based diets in the workplace is a natural focus for both PwC and its caterer BaxterStorey, as both organisations are committed to driving change towards more sustainable business practices.

Few people in the UK are eating the recommended daily number of portions of vegetables and fruit, but a healthy, nutrition rich diet is key to employee wellbeing and productivity. That’s why PwC and BaxterStorey were delighted to sign up to the Peas Please campaign in October 2017.

Together, we committed to increase spend on vegetables sold in the Social Co. restaurants in PwC’s offices across the UK from 15% to 20% within the first year. We started to promote delicious, healthy, seasonal, vegetarian or vegan ‘hero’ dishes, encouraging our people to try new plant-based dishes, in a campaign called ‘Celebrate the seasons’. We changed the range of food on offer, increasing both availability and choice of vegetarian and vegan dishes, as well as vegetable sides.

We created recipe cards for the hero dishes so that people could replicate the meals at home. Moreover, we engaged staff in fun games that raised awareness of the environmental impact of a meat-based diet or highlighted ways to get the daily recommended amount of protein from plant-based food. Finally, we surveyed staff to understand the profile of our people by diet (meat-eaters, flexitarians, pescatarians, vegetarians and vegans), as well as to understand the barriers to a plant-based diet and to test whether people understood the environmental impact of different food categories.

The results so far

By June 2018, just eight months later, we hit our target and now 20% of the food we purchase are vegetables and we have increased the estimated total portions of vegetables sold. During the 28 days on which we ran our ‘Celebrate the seasons’ promotion, we sold approximately 850 vegetarian or vegan ‘hero’ dishes (9% of all meals). Just under 3,500 recipes cards were taken or downloaded from the Peas Please employee microsite. More than 200 people took part in the ‘Carbon and water challenge’ or ‘Protein challenge’ games.

Many different groups have welcomed the improvement in the quality and choice of vegetables, including:

• Employees looking to eat more healthily
• Those wanting to move away from industrialised food
• Those seeking to adopt a more environmentally friendly lifestyle
• Ethnic groups whose diet is culturally plant-based.

Surveys showed that a lack of availability and variety in what was offered was one of the main reasons why people didn’t eat sustainably – which supports the rapid uptake witnessed in PwC since we’ve introduced a better menu. We’ve been working to understand whether the change in diet has reduced the adverse impacts of feeding our people: a high-level analysis of sample data indicates that it may have helped cut our carbon footprint by around a fifth and our water footprint by roughly a quarter.

What next?

Moving forward, we’ve set our sights even higher, and declared a target for 2020 of 25% plant-based food, raising sales of vegetables another quarter above our Year One result.

Compass Group launched a new plant-forward range, ‘Plantilicous’, into their business and industry, college, university and healthcare business contracts in January 2020. The new plant-based range ensures the vegetable content of meals makes up at least two portions of veg and proved a hit with customers when it launched during Veganuary.

Mars revamped their menus in staff canteens so that rather than offering a single ‘healthy option’, menus now focus on ‘healthy as standard’.

The new menus include veg as part of the meal rather than as a paid extra and across three workplace canteens they have seen a 19%, 44% and 7% average monthly increase in veg portions being sold since they implemented this change.