Employee diet to reduce absenteeism and increase productivity

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Rosalia Sgorbati

Hello everybody.

I would like start a new thread about the connection of wellness due to healthy nutrition to the Employee productivity and Quality at work.
Can a healthy diet of our workforce be the basis for achieving better results in terms of efficiency, quality and productivity?

Anybody here knows of similar experiences, projects for wellness due to nutrition of employee of big companies all over the world?
 
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Sidney Vianna

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Hello Rosalia, a simple Google search on employee diet and productivity resulted in 1.2 million hits.

As proper diet provides the employee with the energy level they need to carry out their jobs, I think it is an easy association between the two. Even more importantly for jobs that are very physically demanding and require a lot of replenishment.

Welcome to The Cove.
 

Ronen E

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Hello Rosalia, a simple Google search on employee diet and productivity resulted in 1.2 million hits.

As proper diet provides the employee with the energy level they need to carry out their jobs, I think it is an easy association between the two. Even more importantly for jobs that are very physically demanding and require a lot of replenishment.

Welcome to The Cove.

It’s obvious that people need to eat to do physical work. The question, however, was:

Can a healthy diet of our workforce be the basis for achieving better results in terms of efficiency, quality and productivity?
 
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Rosalia Sgorbati

An interesting Abstract from Pmc is "Obesity, diet quality and absenteeism in a working population"
The findings of this study as reported by the Autors "Can be used to guide and inform the development of workplace health promotion guidelines and polices. Specifically, the results indicate that improving modifiable health and lifestyle characteristics including obesity, physical activity and diet quality should be at the core of such guidelines and policies to potentially reduce rates of absenteeism. Owing to the growing prevalence of obesity and its association with absenteeism, workplace health promotion policies should be focused on promoting strategies that can effectively prevent and reduce employees’ excess weight through increasing levels of physical activity and consuming a healthy diet. Implementation of informed workplace health promotion polices may benefit employers in terms of lowering rates of absenteeism and employees in terms of improved health outcomes. "

From the amount of authoritative articles on the net that shows that proper nutrition is a basis for maintaining the efficiency of human resources, it seems reasonable to ask a question. Why was this topic also left out in the last revision of the ISO 9001 standard?
 
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Marc

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<snip> From the amount of authoritative articles on the net that shows that proper nutrition is a basis for maintaining the efficiency of human resources, it seems reasonable to ask a question. Why was this topic also left out in the last revision of the ISO 9001 standard?
ISO 9001 has never addressed absenteeism or productivity, nor has it addressed employee diet or health. If you do not have a copy of ISO 9001, you should buy one and get to know it, assuming you are interested in it.

Personally I don't know what standard(s) (if any) specifically address employee diet, absenteeism and/or productivity.
 
As Sidney said - "As proper diet provides the employee with the energy level they need to carry out their jobs, I think it is an easy association between the two. Even more importantly for jobs that are very physically demanding and require a lot of replenishment."

How this is viewed depends on where one sits around the conference table. An old boss of a medium size manufacturing facility put out a huge bowl of hard sugar candy EVERY DAY because his studies showed increased productivity because of it. Hardly healthy, but apparently effective.
 
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Rosalia Sgorbati

Why was this topic also left out in the last revision of the ISO 9001 standard?
In point 7.1.5 b the psychological factor was added as necessary to create a suitable environment. ignoring the nutritional aspect isn't a lack of the ISO TC 176 working Group?
 
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Sidney Vianna

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From the amount of authoritative articles on the net that shows that proper nutrition is a basis for maintaining the efficiency of human resources, it seems reasonable to ask a question. Why was this topic also left out in the last revision of the ISO 9001 standard?
Interesting question. For the most part, the TC 176 likes to leave ISO 9001 free of unorthodox, controversial subjects, which would make for difficult implementation and conformity assessment. In the 5[sup]th[/sup] Edition of ISO 9001, we have a note (not a requirement) under 7.1.4 related to psychological factors which could affect the working environment. Despite being a note, which, for the most part, gets ignored by most practitioners, some people freaked out with the mention to psychological factors in ISO 9001, falsely claiming that it would signify the end of times :mg:.


Even though, as you mentioned, most reasonable people would agree that proper nutrition is a very important factor for employee efficiency, can you imagine how to phrase this into a requirement that would be included in an international standard adopted by millions of organizations around the world, and subjected to internal and external auditing? It could be a "landmine".
:blowup:
 
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Rosalia Sgorbati

a huge bowl of hard sugar candy EVERY DAY because his studies showed increased productivity because of it. Hardly healthy, but apparently effective.
a huge bowl of hard cotton candy EVERY DAY in the long run can bring to this.
It may not be good for a storekeeper who has to travel several kilometers a day. I have known one of them. Whit a foot not like in the photo, but it's starting to have this problem
 

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Statistical Steven

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Let's look at this from a practical side of things. In the USA, it is nearly impossible for a company to mandate diet or lifestyle choices. Companies have tried to mandate abstinence of alcohol and tobacco, but the courts in many states view it as unconstitutional. Many companies have healthy lifestyle programs, but they are more geared towards reducing their health care insurance premiums. Even if there is a link between healthy lifestyle and better productivity, it becomes impossible to implement in a structured manner to be part of an ISO standard.
 
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