Work(Out) Buddies: Why Corporate Wellness is Getting Social

Recently, the city of Charlotte issued a challenge to its employees: log your workouts on a website that tallies points for each department. Amongst City Hall, trash talk ensued. Christina Fath, the city’s wellness administrator, recalls that, if Human Resources was in the lead, ‘Budget would come back with a reply-all, saying “We’ll walk at lunch.”’ The six-week challenge garnered the participation of 469 municipal employees, which is twice the number of people involved compared to other years. The 8,800 hours of exercise logged by this year’s group is equal to almost half an hour per employee per day – and now more employers want a piece of the wellness action. According to John Tozzi a corporate wellness writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York, ‘Tying workplace wellness programmes to online games or social media lights a fire under workers as no number of posters in the break room can.’

 

But why does social media work so well in corporate wellness programmes? Brad Bell, an associate professor of HR at CornellUniversity, explains, ‘That social aspect creates some level of accountability. You know that if you don’t show up, people are going to notice.’ Tozzi adds that this motivational aspect is no small thing. ‘Getting staff to take care of themselves isn’t easy,’ he says. ‘In a recent survey of 512 employers by Towers Watson (TW) and the National Business Group on Health, companies called workers’ bad habits their biggest challenge to keeping health benefits affordable and cited lack of engagement as the toughest obstacle to changing employee behaviour.’ Perhaps this is why Charlotte isn’t the only town that has put its faith in the social aspects of corporate wellness programmes.

 

San Francisco start-up Keas runs a website where its clients’ employees can form online teams of up to six players and compete to earn points. Like in Charlotte’s city hall, workers do this by working out more, but Keas takes it one step further by asking employees to also eat better and manage stress. Participants are also rewarded for taking surprisingly addictive online health quizzes. Keas co-founder Adam Bosworth comments, ‘People would literally spend hours a day taking tens and tens of quizzes. The HR people, frankly, were not thrilled to see people spending an hour a day learning about their health…At the end of the day, it’s the social support of the game that keeps people playing.’

 

Tozzi details, ‘Fitbit, a San Francisco company that makes a pinky-size wireless gadget that helps people track their walking and other activity, didn’t target the corporate wellness market but quickly got pulled into it. In early 2010, six months after the $99.95 Fitbit went on sale, semiconductor company Tokyo Electron bought one for each of the 1,100 employees at its U.S. subsidiary. Since then, Fitbit has supplied hundreds of employers, including 25 Fortune 500 companies…The novelty factor draws in employees who wouldn’t ordinarily participate, especially gadget-happy men…A study in progress involving staff at one insurance company suggests participants take 40% more steps six months into the programme. And the website encourages competition without forcing workers to get too personal.’

 

Then you have a company like HealthPrize Technologies, who draw on the same psychology that gets people to play slot machines or join airline loyalty programmes. When employees refill prescriptions or log on to record taking their daily dose, they are rewarded with points that go up on a leaderboard. While those at the top of the leaderboard gain prizes such as a $100 gift certificate to Starbucks or Amazon, Katrina Firlik, the neurosurgeon that co-founded HealthPrize Technologies, asserts that employees are more concerned with the gaming and social aspect of the programme. She even recounts, ‘There was a woman who was going to have major surgery the next day, and she e-mailed us that she was worried she was going to slip in her rankings.’

Categories: city hall, corporate wellness, corporate wellness programmes, employees, healthprize technologies, motivation, people, san francisco, social aspect, Social Media, Wellness programmes

HIV Prevention v/s Pain: The Pros and Cons of Circumcision

Over the years, parents have been faced with a sexual health issue right in the early stages of their child’s infancy; circumcision. While proponents tout the wellness benefits of circumcision, opponents argue that the barbaric nature of the procedure does no good to a boy’s wellbeing. Now, the latest to join the fray is an anti-circumcision group in San Francisco, who are pushing for a ban on the practice. Unsurprisingly, those in favour of the procedure disagree with the proposal, citing the procedure’s history as a religious ritual, as well as its sexual health benefits, as some research suggests that circumcision helps prevent the spread of HIV. The debate that rages on is, therefore, “Is circumcision a good idea or not?”

 

We can date the process of circumcision as far back as to the Ancient Egyptians in 2,500BC, but the ritual later became more associated with Jewish people. Reasons for this included marking a boy’s passage into manhood, marking to distinguish those of higher social status, male “menstruation” or sign of the onset of puberty, and a way to discourage masturbation. Now, however, circumcision is not just a Jewish ritual but the most common surgery performed on males in the United States. According to a recent survey by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between the years of 1999 and 2004, 79% of men reported that they were circumcised.

 

The main health reason to be circumcised is that the process is believed to prevent diseases, such as HIV, and some research suggests that circumcision reduces the risk of male-to-female HIV transfer. This is possibly due to the fact that, when you are circumcised, the Langerhans cells in your foreskin are removed, and these cells are more susceptible to HIV infection. Langerhans cells are equipped with special receptors that may allow HIV access into the body. In 2009, three studies published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews – which included data from more than 11,000 men in South Africa, Uganda and Kenya between 2002 and 2006 – showed that circumcised men were 54% less likely to get HIV than their uncircumcised counterparts.

 

However, while HIV prevention is becoming a well-supported argument for circumcision in developing countries, it is not as strong of an argument for the United States or for us here in Britain. A report from the CDC notes, ‘A number of important differences from sub-Saharan African settings where the three male circumcision trials were conducted must be considered in determining the possible role for male circumcision in HIV prevention in the United States.’ It continues, ‘Studies to date have demonstrated efficacy only for penile-vaginal sex, the predominant mode of HIV transmission in Africa, whereas the predominant mode of sexual HIV transmission in the United States is by penile-anal sex among [men who have sex with men].’

 

Still, is that a reason to ban the practise, especially considering the fact that there’s a lack of strong evidence showing negative side effects? Proponents of the San Francisco ban have now delivered more than 12,000 signatures to the Department of Elections, and, if enough signatures are deemed to be valid, this ban will appear on the ballot in the November election. Under the ban, circumcision of any male under the age of 18 would carry a fine of up to $1,000 and jail time of up to one year. Lloyd Schofield, the leader of the proposal, comments that circumcision is ‘excruciatingly painful and permanently damaging surgery that’s forced on men when they’re at their weakest and most vulnerable.’ However, Scott Bryan, a spokesperson for the CDC, argues, ‘Data has shown that with anaesthesia, the majority of infants have no objective pain reaction.’

Categories: ban, circumcision, HIV, HIV prevention, hiv transmission, langerhans cells, male circumcision, predominant mode, research suggests, san francisco, sexual health, united states

Reusable Bags: Good for the Planet, Bad for Your Family

Your reusable shopping bag may be helping you to do your bit for environmental wellness, but you could be doing so at the expense of your family’s well-being. This is according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University, who note that your reusable shopping bag could be filled with enough wellness-damaging bacteria to send your family to hospital. Why? You’re not washing it enough.

The use of plastic bags by retail stores was banned in Seattle in July last year, but this followed a much earlier plastic bag ban by San Francisco in 2007, who eliminated the use of plastic bags in large supermarkets. In fact, in October this year, San Francisco will call upon all stores and restaurants to give up the plastic, so it seems, then, that plastic is starting to head for the exit door. However, three months after San Francisco’s first ban went into effect, an unusually high number of patients started going into hospital for emergency treatment of E. Coli infections.

When University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University looked into state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne illness deaths, they discovered that, after the ban, the number of food-born illness deaths in San Francisco rose by a whopping 64%. The authors wrote, ‘Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths.’ Even though wellness experts have questioned the study, based on the fact that it raised more questions than it answered and may have been conducted with “sloppy” research, one thing is clear — reusable bags can be contaminated with germs, and need to be washed properly.

In 2010, researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University tested reusable bags for bacteria, discovering coliform bacteria, an indicator of pathogens, in 51% of them and the potentially deadly E. coli in 12%. Only 25% of the bag owners used separate bags for meat and vegetables, and 97% admitted to not washing their bags regularly. Considering that throwing your reusable bag into the washing machine once a week reduces bacteria by more than 99.9%, surely it’s worth the bother.

 

 

Categories: e coli, george mason, illness deaths, plastic bags, Research, reusable bags, Reusable Shopping Bags, san francisco