Employees get paid to sweat: can pay back several times over
Esbjerg Airport has been successful in allowing employees to play sports during working hours.
Søren Dall Jepsen is in full swing with today's training. He is an incident commander at Esbjerg Airport Fire and Rescue Service, but over the past year, he and ten other colleagues have voluntarily swapped safety shoes and yellow vests for running shoes and exercise mats once a week.
And it has had an effect, he says.
- I have the mental and physical energy to do my job out here.
And it is not only on the runway that employees are flying. John Nielsen, the boss at Esbjerg Airport, can also see the impact of the training initiative on productivity and thus on the bottom line.
Coming back six times
The exercise at Esbjerg Airport is part of an ongoing research project at the University of Southern Denmark investigating the link between exercise and workplace productivity.
While it has previously been shown that getting office staff up to speed can be good business, the first partial results from Esbjerg Airport suggest that an hour of hard training a week during working hours can also be measured on the bottom line in manufacturing companies.
The interim results from Esbjerg show that the airport has increased
productivity by 7.3 percent over the duration of the project.
- The results we have here are impossible to shoot down. They are facts, and the measurements show it. It's fantastic, says airport manager John Nielsen.
According to the research team, the increased productivity of the airport is equivalent to a six-fold return on investment in exercise for the workplace.
- Employees achieve more. They are better and faster at loading the planes. There is more energy and energy surplus, which we can measure in a definite productivity improvement, says senior researcher Just Bendix Justesen from the Department of Sports Science and Biomechanics at the University of Southern Denmark.
But to achieve this improvement, it is not enough to pull out a pair of rubber bands at your desk. The heart rate must be raised for at least one hour a week before it has an effect, says the senior researcher.
- It is training that requires changing clothes and that you find it difficult to talk to the person next to you. That's where we need to go if we want to get the business benefits," he says.
The first half hour is paid
At Esbjerg Airport, boss John Nielsen has decided to pay for the first half hour, while the rest of the training takes place in the employee's free time.
And that makes sense, says Søren Dall Jepsen, the incident commander.
- Unfortunately, I'm not the kind of person who goes out and trains by myself. So for me it's really good, he says.
The interim results from the airport also show that 78% of employees were sleeping too little at night before the exercise project. That figure has been reduced to 38%.
Others should follow
At the Confederation of Danish Industry, Deputy Director Anders Just Pedersen has no doubt that other employers should look to Esbjerg Airport.
- "It is a very good result that we have succeeded in increasing the productivity of the airport's employees by 7.3 percent," he says.
But if a company wants its employees to exercise, it requires time, persistence and investment. That's why you have to think carefully, says Anders Just Pedersen.
- There's a big difference between running a campaign and something that's going to last. And if you want to reap the results, it's the latter that you need to get hold of. So you have to be prepared for it to be a long, hard pull before you get the good results.
