Swedish companies enforce work workouts at the office
STOCKHOLM — Workers spending their lunch break at the gym may be commonplace in most Western countries, but in Sweden some employers are pushing the idea even further, making on-the-job exercise compulsory.
Every Friday, employees of fashion and sportswear retailer Bjorn Borg leave their desks at the company’s Stockholm headquarters to get their weekly workout at a nearby gym.
There is no getting out of it. For more than two years the company founded by the Swedish tennis legend has made on-the-job exercise mandatory at the initiative of chief executive Henrik Bunge, a 44-year-old built like a wrestler.
“If you don’t want to exercise or be a part of the company culture, you have to go,” said Bunge, without batting an eye. So far no one has quit because of the requirement, he added.
The main aims of the policy — shared by other firms such as city water company Kalmar Vatten and construction consultancy Rotpartner — are to boost productivity and profitability while fostering camaraderie in the workforce.
In 2014, a University of Stockholm study showed that exercising during the workday was advantageous for both employees — who were healthier and more concentrated — and the employer.
The study found there was a 22 percent decline in work absences, not negligible in a country where the average person is on sick leave 4 percent of the time, twice the European average.
“Most of us think it’s a really good part of the workweek,” said Bjorn Borg employee Cecilia Nissborg after a yoga session.
Swedes get more exercise than anyone else in Europe. A 2014 Eurobarometer poll found that 70 percent of Swedes exercised once a week, and 51 percent two to three times a week. At the bottom of the rankings, only 22 percent of Bulgarians exercised once a week.
Swedes also generally see being in shape as a duty to oneself and society, an expectation dating to the 1930s, when a cult of youth, vigor and “social hygiene” flourished, said Carl Cederstrom, an economics researcher at Stockholm University and the author of The Wellness Syndrome, a critique of the pervasive ideology of healthy living.
Bunge is convinced the workplace he has created has made employees happier and more productive, noting that all the company’s key numbers have gone up since the new regime was introduced.
But it is a development Cederstrom finds worrying.
“When you start to think that you’re a better mother or a better father or a better friend if you exercise, you can get to a point where you think that people who don’t live healthily, who are overweight or who smoke, are less good people,” he said.