Speaker 1
Hello, you’re very welcome to this session today about our finished Workplace Challenge 2022. My name is Sarah Keene and I’m a wellbeing consultant with Zevo. And today I’m just going to give you a very brief overview of the competition, the structure and framework so that you can have a sense of how it works and what’s involved.
And I’m also going to talk a little bit about current trends that have been emerging in terms of health behaviours and lifestyle choices in the general population over the last 18 months or so, with the view to giving you a sense of what your employees may be currently dealing with, if perhaps you don’t have that insight.
So it just gives you some perspective on what individuals may be encountering, particularly those who are working remotely or in a hybrid model. We’ll explore the key benefits of participating in the challenge from an individual level to a departmental level to an organisational level.
And that will be supplemented then with some of the key findings from our first competition earlier this year, which we did a case study on and give you some perspectives from HR as well as the employees themselves. I’m hoping that all of this will serve to support you in figuring out whether this competition could be an ideal fit for you and your company heading into next year.
So very briefly, what is the Fiddlest Workplace Challenge? So this year was our first year, our inaugural event, and it was a huge success. We had 31 participating companies and over 2,000 employees involved, which was a really, really wonderful uptake. And we envision this is going to grow each year, which is wonderful.
And as I share the feedback towards the end of the session, we’ll see what a positive contribution this is to companies. So in essence, it’s a 14 day physical activity challenge, but that primarily uses step count as the metric. And what that means is you can participate in various forms of physical activity, but it will be translated into a daily step count tally per employee.
Each employee then is a member of a team and a team can comprise up to six members. And then a company’s total score is calculated each day based on an average of the aggregate of the team’s scores. So some companies, smaller ones, may only have two or three teams may only comprise of two or three teams and larger companies with 200 employees or more may have 10, 15 teams.
So what you have is that you have the ability for smaller companies to be able to still compete against larger ones. Now, as the competition is growing, we are looking at segregating that to smaller companies with less than 200 employees having their own league as it were, and then larger companies with over 200, 250 employees competing against one another.
In essence, it doesn’t really matter how many employees are involved. As I said, it’s an average of the aggregate team score. And the framework itself really serves to support that team cohesion within the company and especially helps to bridge that interdepartmental connection that might normally not be there, certainly in a social or novel setting.
Speaker 1
And we’ll explore some of the benefits of that in a moment. But just back to the operations and how it actually works. So to accommodate such vast numbers of individuals participating, we do this via the Zevo Health app.
So every employee will have their own profile on the app and where they’ll daily sync their total step count or accumulated physical activity metric will feed into their team and you’ll have your team average score. So that will all be viewable on a leaderboard. So where they can track their own personal daily activity over the 14 days, they can see their contribution to their team score.
And in addition to this, there’s also the company leaderboard, which is viewable. In addition to having their step count challenge, they’ll also have access to other dimensions of the app, such as mindfulness and meditations and other personal challenges.
If they’d like to run that as an adjunct to the step challenge, they’ll have access to many other features that are supportive of improving other dimensions of well being in addition to physical activity for the duration of the event.
So the main aim of the competition, very simply put, is really to support employees, employers, improving their workforce’s participation in regular physical activity. So this works on many ways, on many levels.
Firstly, it facilitates employees to attract their current physical activity, so making them more aware and seeing day by day what their kind of tally is, so really increasing their awareness around that. It also serves to promote awareness around the benefits of regular exercise through experiencing them, which is invaluable. It helps to mitigate the risks associated with side injury behaviour.
So outside of structured exercise, prolonged lengths of sitting have been identified as a major health risk. And again, we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.
So this constant awareness around physical activity and promoting regular movement throughout the workday helps to mitigate some of the health risks associated with that side injury behaviour, some of them including work-related, musculoskeletal disorders for desk-based workers, for example, low back pain, and also non-communicable diseases like the development of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes arising from that.
It helps to promote or provide an opportunity for social engagement, which again is invaluable at the moment when we’re looking at some workers potentially working remotely on either a long-term part-time or a full-time basis. So it gives an opportunity to create that team cohesion in a light and enjoyable context. It helps to support adherence to the regular activity every day of the events.
There’s no off days where you can just kick back and relax. It’s a continual build-up for the full 14 days and you have the group accountability to support that and to keep motivation high. And then lastly, it offers employees a positive focus during what has been tremendously difficult times for some people.
Speaker 1
So with regard to some of the current trends around lifestyle choices and behaviours, let’s go straight firstly to physical activity. And there’s been very mixed findings.
So at the start of this year in the British Medical Journal, there was a review of over 66 studies from last year published and 50%, over 50% of those studies concluded that the majority of adults decreased their physical activity, engagement and physical activity, and also increased their sedentary behaviour.
But it’s not all negative because it depends also on what demographics you’re looking at and certain timeframes across the year yielded different responses. So you’ll see in the middle there some national surveys conducted by Tenio and Sports Ireland actually had some positive findings that people were participating more in structured exercise and going outdoors for more walks frequently.
However, this was also paralleled by an increase in sedentary behaviour. So even though individuals were having these blocks of physical activity, sedentary behaviour was remaining high because that organic daily physical activity from being out and about or commuting to and from work or in office buildings was taken out of the equation for so many people.
In addition to this then, Fitbit and Garman published some research from first two, three weeks of the pandemic, so we’re going the whole way back to April last year, and what they saw again echoing what I’ve just said, there was no studies in terms of organic physical activity but a slight increase in participation of structured exercise.
So as I said, by and large it’s a mixed bag and you might find some of your employees, they significantly decreased. One research paper published by the University of Australia illustrated that there was something like a 27% of respondents.
and had decreased their physical activity 17% of increased and about 53% were in this sort of no notable difference category on 3% weren’t sure they didn’t know what was going on. So you can see that there’s, as I said, mixed mixed bag of results.
But by and large, another huge study conducted illustrated that 62% of respondents are more interested and more aware of the importance of physical activity than ever before, than pre-pandemic. And this could be something that to do with the government actively promoting the health benefits of exercise and issuing conflict in Ireland.
We received the staying well this winter conflict with you major in October of last year detailing World Health Organization guidelines, which we’ll talk about in a moment. So there’s a surge in public awareness, but not necessarily a comparative increase in overall physical activity to parallel it.
As an adjunct in terms of other lifestyle behaviors, which are separate really from the focus here today are in step challenging, but nonetheless are very relevant and factors that contribute towards manifestation of illnesses and issues down the line that we’re trying to mitigate.
Speaker 1
So the CSO published a report and again it was last year, but it indicated that there was a surge in consumption of alcohol and tobacco among certain demographics, a huge jump in the consumption of junk food and sweets and convenience foods.
This is echoed in research published by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology from earlier this year that really saw an increase in the consumption of crisps and chocolate and sweets across and that was a survey of over 5,000 Europeans.
So these are trends that we really want to be aware of again, as I said, giving you a snapshot of what might be challenging or presenting in your current workforce or among your employees. Time watching TV with exposure of immunities and the restriction of movement, again, a screen time sort of all of these factors combined.
So the low levels of physical activity, these other lifestyle choices, increased exposure to screen time, have averaging negative effects on our mental health and wellbeing. So we’re compounding the uncertainty and the fear around the pandemic with all of these other lifestyle choices that kind of work against us.
So some research published again with the CSO, this was from February this year, and we can see some worrying trends there, just shy of 17% of women feeling lonely all or most of the time, to a lesser extent 9.2% of men. When it comes to pandemic negatively impacting mental health, you’ll see a shocking three quarters of respondents in the ages of 18 to 34 saying it has negatively impacted on them.
And to a lesser extent, I find it interesting, the older cohort who may be more at risk, physically like their health at risk due to the pandemic and reporting less, lesser extent of negative impact mentally so it’s some interesting findings there. But lastly, on the right hand side, you’ll see a surge in depression from 5.5% of respondents in April last year, up to 15% in February 2021 so 10% increase in feeling down, downhearted or depressed all or most of the time, so quite a worrying statistic there. So as I said, this is largely due to the increase of secondary behaviour and the increase in these other unfavorable lifestyle choices, especially around diet and alcohol consumption. In addition to increased exposure screens, and as I said, on top of the uncertainty that presents us and the challenges that are unique to that. And as a result, we’re seeing higher incidence of burnout, post pandemic fatigue, increases in social anxiety as people are veering back into social situations and finding the challenges that come with that after such a prolonged time in isolation and social distancing. And lastly, increases in depression, as I said, I felt there in the CSO findings. As I said, we’re just sharing that from the perspective that it’s important for you to have this awareness around some of the challenges and issues that may be presenting among your employees.
Speaker 1
So now we’re very briefly gonna look at some of the benefits of participating in the challenge on many layers, from the individual to group and departmental and organization. So on an individual level, we’re all very familiar at this stage with many health benefits of regular exercise. So I’ve detailed some of them here. Most or all of them will be familiar to you, but no harm in reaffirming them.
So what we see is an improvement in sleep quality, immune function, better weight management, better management of energy levels, improved cognitive function, which I’m actually going to talk a little bit more about because it’s really interesting and maybe less aware of that, improved self-image and self-confidence, increased endurance, lower risk of non-cannual diseases, such as the development of metabolic syndrome and chronic illnesses that can arise from that, cardiac issues and type 2 diabetes, improved mood, which can lead into lower anxiety and depression, lower risk of falls, improved longevity and improved libido.
So there’s many, many health benefits and these are all derived from the physiological changes that happen within the body, some of which happen quite rapidly and dramatically within a relatively short period of time.
So we have improvements on a cardiovascular level, on a respiratory level, and then metabolically on a cellular level, with the increased proliferation of mitochondria, little batteries, little powerhouses in ourselves, actually increasing numbers with the increased demand for energy.
We’ve structural adaptations, really, really relevant, particularly if you’ve got employees that are part of an aging demographic. The incidence of stress fractures and fragility fractures, should I say fragility fractures in over 50s is quite shocking, one in every two women and one in every five men. So something maybe we’re less aware of.
So there’s hugely positive benefits of adding more exercise in the prevention of that and promoting bone density. We have hormonal changes as well, and also immune adaptations on immune levels, our immune system is so complex and we’ve adaptive and innate immune immunity, but exercise benefits generally across the board. So these physiological changes can happen, as I said, quite rapidly.
I think it’s interesting to just hone in on even what happens to the brain, because it’s quite fascinating if you’re not familiar with the research on this. So on an anatomical level, certain regions of the brain actually increase in size with regular aerobic exercise. The hippocampus being one of them, so that’s been really studied and largely associated with our learning and memory.
In addition to that, adaptations to the prefrontal cortex, the right prefrontal cortex associated with improved sense of happiness and contentedness and the growth factors has been an increase in the biomarkers for neurogenesis, such as growth factors like brain derived neurotropic factors.
Speaker 1
So this literally like the proliferation of the mitochondria I just mentioned, we have a proliferation of neurons as well to parallel that. So it’s essentially like the whole body, the whole system gets this upgrade in response to the additional stresses that are placed upon it. So the additional demand is met with this upgraded version of physiologically.
In a really positive setting, and really from a really positive light, these anatomical and neurochemical adaptations have a very strong neuroprotective effect. So it translates not only into improved cognitive function, but also offsetting the risk of developing certain forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s.
And then lastly, just on a cognitive function level, you also see a synchronization, increased synchronization of the hemispheres of the brain. And this is often associated with like finding individuals to access flow state. And these experiences of peak performance.
So on so many levels and layers, regular exercise can positively impact us in some surprising ways, as well as some very predictable and well-known ways. When it comes to anxiety and depression, I also felt just on the back of those current trends I mentioned. To highlight that, exercise can work on kind of both ends of what would seem to be a polarized scale.
So we’d often associate depression with low energy and lethargy and apathy, and perhaps anxiety with hyper being hyperactive and having excessive energy.
So the way exercise regular exercise helps on both ends, how it can alleviate both even though they appear to be opposites, the stimulation and activation of exercise and that improvement in energy levels and energy function can help to rebalance individuals who are veering towards depression.
And then also the forced recalibration of the system, how the body gets really great at shifting gears from that sympathetic nervous system, that drive in that fight or flight mode, to recalibrate back into that rest and digest with a person, repetitive activity.
And that flexing that muscle of being able to meet a stress response, such as the demand of an exercise of exercise, and then come back to resting to that relaxation space helps individuals to recalibrate and find homeostasis, particularly if they’re in that hypervigilant or anxious or excessive energetic state.
So exercise, even though it falls in the middle, can help both ends of what may appear to be polar opposites. And the findings and the benefits in terms of supporting regulation of these mental health issues are universal. So it’s not been just isolated to a certain demographic or a certain place. It’s quite global in its application.
And then this is echoed in the World Health Organization guidelines, which is built on mountain-mountain research and all of those elements I just mentioned.
And in October last year, when the government issued that pamphlet on keeping well this winter, the World Health Organization guidelines were documented in that, but they’ve since been upgraded or not upgraded, they’ve since been changed, updated, is what I should say.
Speaker 1
And now the current guidelines stands around aerobic exercise to aim for 150 to 300 minutes per week at moderate intensity and to strength train all the major muscle groups twice a week. And then the last key messaging is really about being proactive in reducing sense of behaviour, more aware about that time spent long sitting.
So according to the Healthy Ireland survey in 2019, only about 46 percent of Irish adults were meeting those guidelines. And we recently conducted a case study in a few large tech companies in Ireland last year also looking at the disability levels. And among desk-based workers, it was even lower than that.
So we were seeing trends of approximately 30 percent, 33 percent of respondents meeting these guidelines. So really, really an area, especially if you have employees who are desk-based, to be aware of, promoting these guidelines and offering interventions such as the Finnish Workplace Challenge to support them in meeting them.
So this slide just really is to hammer home that distinction, particularly if this is an area you’re not overly familiar with or you haven’t researched extensively, just being aware of that distinction between meeting structured exercise guidelines and then also reducing sedentary behaviour.
Because many individuals are under the false idea that they can meet structured exercise guidelines and still sit for eight hours a day and have no negative side effects that the exercise they engage in will protect them against that. But that isn’t the case. Saving for prolonged length of time in and of itself comes with its own host of health issues.
And some of these are structural due to prolonged poor posture for just the physiological adaptations that happen when you hold your body in a certain space, place and time, such as, for example, lack of recruitment of your gluteals, weakened abdominals, shortened hip flexors, all of these factors can combine to lead into hip instability as an example, which is manifesting for many individuals as low back pain.
So that’s just a tiny snapshot of some of the negative health implications of sitting for extended periods of time, like going for your runner doing yoga for that half an hour outside of your workday won’t necessarily protect you against. So it’s just increasing your awareness around this and employee awareness around this.
And of course, something like the Step Challenge fits in nicely with this, promoting that awareness of how much we’re moving on a continual basis throughout the day. On a metabolic level as well, just be aware that there is research indicating that not only when you sit for extended periods of time, your energy output, but also that your metabolic efficiency deteriorates.
So just like our body improves and upgrades when we have that external demand for stressor arises and we can adapt to meet it, equally the flip side is true. That whole adage, use it or lose it is quite true.
Speaker 1
And that becomes a double homie for some individuals, where not only do they have that lower energy output, but also their whole system comes less efficient, for example, at mobilizing fat. So it’s to be aware of this and to see how even small amounts of regular exercise can mitigate the risks of that happening.
So as mentioned with the year, year and a half it’s been, there’s been so many factors that have contributed to this increase in scientific behavior.
And something like this workplace challenge, something like an activity challenge with your colleagues, can really help people to get creative around exploring ways to weave exercise and movement more frequently throughout their day in a fun and light setting. So things like having the fake niche.
So if they are working remotely for a large portion of the week, that they replace the time they typically spend commuting with their own movement, whether it’s for 10, 15 or 20 minutes to help bridge moving from home life into work life. So it can serve many, many benefits.
Having more active breaks and associating movement with things they do frequently throughout the day, like going for a coffee, for example, or bathroom breaks. All of these little strategies can suddenly enter individuals’ awareness and with relatively simple tweaks, suddenly their days become far more active that over time can accumulate to really have significant health benefits and improvements.
So there are many benefits on an individual level and then you can see how this translates to benefits on an organizational level.
So the framework of the competition is purposefully designed so that individuals aren’t working solo and contributing their daily step count to the overall company, but rather as part of a team because it gives you an opportunity as an employer to mix colleagues from different departments and allow individuals that would not normally know or engage with other colleagues within the organization and giving them this sort of novel opportunity for connection and fun.
So the team cohesion, the collaboration and the social connection are really pillars that distinguish this challenge from other types of step challenges that we have out there. And this, of course, feeds into the lightness and the enjoyment, which has a knock on effect then on morale and the overall culture of the organization.
On a physiological level, we looked at the neurological changes that can arise because of regular exercise and this also can translate into improved creativity and innovation, which, of course, any organization is going to benefit from more creative and energized and engaged employees.
It’s a digital intervention and the main benefit of this, of course, in this hybrid world with some employees maybe working remotely or other individuals on site and having this sort of split in location.
The digital intervention allows for this unified platform where everyone can meet up and engage with one another and it allows for that adaptability as well as the instant results that you can be seen, which can be deeply satisfying and rewarding for our participants.
Speaker 1
The metrics of meaning element is really down to the company themselves to highlight or hone in on if there’s any specific areas, any key performance indicators that are relevant among their employees, anything that you’d like to measure pre and post the intervention that can also be monitored as an indicator of the benefit of an intervention like this.
What I guess the real thing here is that this is an annual event and real benefit is it’s an annual event which gives employees, employers and companies that are participating an opportunity to make this a rolling thing to be able to gauge a change in those metrics of meaning year on year.
So even though it’s technically a brief intervention, being only two weeks, really in truth, it can be extended as an annual intervention where you can see year on year, is there changes in participation rates? Is there changes in uptake? Is there changes in the outcome? Which can give you sort of a post check with employee health in a less sort of direct or invasive way.
It also allows you to gauge the well-being, the evolution of the well-being culture of the organisation and it’s a really powerful entry point for other well-being initiatives.
So we’d very much encourage using this not as a standalone solution, but rather as a way to engage employees and to increase involvement and then feed into other events or courses or interventions or supports that are available to promote physical health among your employees.
So we’re comparing the health benefits of exercise with the many levels of the social and organisational benefits to have this really powerful synergistic effect and promoting both the health of the employee and organisation overall.
So very briefly then to finish, I’ll share some of the feedback from our 2021 competitions, just so you can have a sense of who’s involved and what the outcomes have been like. So you see on the left here, this is a list of the sectors that were involved and you can just really appreciate the diversity there.
But this competition isn’t just for desk-based workers or individuals in a certain environment, but rather can fly across the board to various industries and various work bases. In our competition this year, it was the hospital workers, workers in recruitment and higher education that had the highest step count per capita.
So it can become not only an inter-company challenge, but also an inter-industry challenge if you want to go even further meta on it. And you’ll see here just the age profile of the participants, so of that 2,000 plus employees, approximately half of them were in the 18 to 24 category. But very promisingly, a quarter of them are 35 to 44 and a further quarter 45 to 65.
These are a cohort that can really reap the benefit from regular exercise in terms of mitigating the risks of what we mentioned before, the non-clinical diseases and what related must be the disorders with their age categories that would be a higher risk for developing these issues.
Speaker 1
You’ll see that there’s a gender split, so about 42% of male participants and 58% female. And interestingly, this is actually a really positive finding because in many workplace wellbeing health initiatives, research has indicated that sometimes it’s harder to recruit or engage male participants.
So it’s really wonderful to see that the fitness workplace challenge has quite a universal appeal across all gender. And then also on the right here, interestingly, just to share a snapshot of individuals who may be at higher risk of again developing metabolic issues or indeed musculoskeletal issues. We’ll see here that over half of our participants were in the overweight to obese category.
So again, just highlighting that this is a cohort that can have the greatest benefit in ways from participation in a challenge such as the fitness workplace. From a HR perspective, again, really, really positive 94% of respondents reported that the challenge had significant value to the company. Of that, 50% said it was greater excellence and 44% said it was some are moderate.
and 91% of HRO respondents said it improved employee morale during the challenge. So this is again why we’ve engineered the structure of the work of the challenge the way we have. So 69% with seven just shy of 70% said those improvements were significant. 32% said the improvements were small but still a really positive finding over a two-week period. 87.5% widespread employee interest in participating in the challenge. So kind of echoing what we showed around the gender split but it again has this sort of universal appeal and it’s also very much appealing to the vast majority of the workforce which again really really positive findings and off that 87% the vast majority were very interested so it’s really positive to find that and 93% of the HRO respondents perceived improvements in employee health so all of those benefits physiological adaptations we addressed were also observed by the HRO again even though it’s a relatively brief intervention but 80% saying those improvements were great or significant so really really positive. The last bit of feedback just seeing from the employees themselves, 78% said they could see a notable positive effect on their health, 89% really motivated them to move more, 88% said they’d sign up next year and 73% were interested in ongoing access to the app finding it very supportive for those other health behaviours as mentioned with the mindfulness meditation and personal challenges. So the top reported benefits for getting more active, the camaraderie, the fun competition, the real focus honing in on well-being having that time out to really focus on how you’re feeling and how you’re functioning as well as enjoying access to the app. So we were really delighted to receive such overwhelmingly positive feedback and we have great faith in the evolution of this competition it’s improving every year and we really hope that this might appeal to you and that you’ll be interested in learning more and perhaps signing up for your company to next year.
Speaker 1
So if so you can reach out and contact us on the hello at evilhealth.com email address or you can ring and talk to someone in our customer experience to guide you in the right direction. Thank you so much for your time and attention today. I hope this has lent some clarity around our competition and the many benefits involved and we might see you at the start of 2022.
