We are kicking off our Small Business Wellness series with our most recent wellness option here at Home Health Testing.  After reading a blog post by Gina Trapani at Smarterware about switching to a stand up desk, I became intrigued with offering some desk alternative in our office.  Since we are an online company, we all spend our days in front of a computer at a traditional sit down desk.  We also spend time taking online webinars and classes which is a perfect opportunity for an alternative to sitting down.

Our treadmill workstation was added in an extra office and is available for our entire staff to use.  We purchased a basic treadmill on craigslist and positioned it in the corner of the office with the monitor on a shelf on the wall in front of the treadmill.  Since the treadmill had two large cupholders in front of the display panel, we were able to fit recycled yogurt containers in the cup holders to mount a keyboard and mouse tray over the display panel.  The cost of the project was about $105 which was used to purchase the treadmill and shelf.  We recycled or reused an extra computer and the keyboard tray from an old desk here in the office.

Treadmill desks have been promoted over the last few years by Mayo Clinic researcher, James Levine.  Dr. Levine studies daily activity or inactivity and obesity.  His focus is on how people burn calories when not exercising or basically during their daily activities.  Dr. Levine’s studies have shown that adding extra movement into your office routines by using a treadmill desk can burn 100-130 calories an hour at slow speeds of less than two miles an hour.

Additional research is currently being conducted at Rutgers University by Brandon Alderman to see if using a treadmill desk and exerting low level of activity actually improves productivity.  “We’re learning that people perform better when given the opportunity to stand and move around while they’re at work,” Alderman said. “So from a productivity standpoint, it might be best if they’re also moving while they’re working.”

In a recent NY Times article, Is Sitting a Lethal Activity,  Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center said:

This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

There is plenty of compelling research to support moving during your workday, but really it just makes sense.  You feel better when given the opportunity to move around versus sitting in the same position all day long.  To promote that general feeling of health and well being, a treadmill desk is a great option for any business and a very affordable option for small businesses to encourage healthy lifestyles.

When we hear about corporate or employee wellness programs, we typically think about on site gyms, health fairs, healthy food choices in the cafeteria and health insurance discounts for participation.  But many of these choices are not possible for small businesses.  Establishing an on site gym for five employees is cost prohibitive for most businesses.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation about 59% of small businesses with three to nine employees offer health insurance.  Most likely, thoughts of health and wellness stop once the health insurance premiums are paid.  And for the other 41% of small businesses who do not offer health insurance – wellness may not even be on the radar.

There are many definitions of wellness programs that are rife with corporate jargon, but the core of any wellness program is:

“To Promote Healthy Lifestyles”

When you work in a small business you want to work with healthy co-workers.  Small teams depend on each other so when one out of five people is sick then 20% of the work force is missing.  If twenty percent of Home Depot’s employees didn’t go to work today that would be 64,000 of their 321,000 employees!

Small businesses have every reason to be interested in promoting healthy lifestyles to their employees.  Not only to reduce absenteeism, but to improve morale, comraderie, communication and to show that they cares about their employees.

At Home Health Testing, we believe in healthy lifestyles and are beginning a series on our blog called  “Small Business Wellness Programs”.  We will highlight the initiatives that small businesses have taken to promote healthy lifestyles.  We will share ideas from our own workplace and share stories from other small businesses – we want to hear from you!  If you work in a small business and have programs that you feel “promote healthy lifestyles”, please contact us.  For the first small business chosen in our blog series, we will give you a free cholesterol test for every employee!