CHB 4: What is Corporate Health Building?
The implementation of various campaigns and strategies into corporate environments have shown great success in accelerating corporate growth. Thereafter, companies of all sizes implement different strategies to address an existing issue, to prevent issues from occurring, or to revolutionize current procedures. Each campaign or strategy intends to improve a specific sector/process within a business resulting in a multifold chain of outcomes, withholding the meta-goal of positively stimulating overall corporate performance. To mention a few, there are diversified marketing strategies, culture and team building campaigns, leadership developments, change management strategies… etc. It appears, the larger the corporate environment, the more sectors a company has, the more workers are employed, the more campaigns/strategies are implemented to improve performance comprehensively. Thereafter, specialists with diversified backgrounds are needed to fulfill the specific requirements of each sector and to successfully implement campaigns/strategies.
Current developments with the sudden shift to remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic have unveiled a new necessity for a highly valuable campaign for corporate environments: Health Building. The need for this campaign has been apparent for years, however, signs seemed to be not pronounced enough and specific approaches have yet to be developed, implemented and evaluated. However, historical data from a meta-analysis by Baicker et al. (2010) at Harvard University shows, that investing in health and well-being has shown promising returns of investment for companies. Though, it is well known that work tasks involving prolonged seating combined with little physical activity and exercise can lead to a cascade of negative health outcomes, such as the prevalence of MSKd. The present article has analyzed how rapid changes in working life to ‘remote work’ due to COVID-19 may act as a catalyst for MSKd, and holds the potential to initiate a back-pain pandemic (Kakar & Lomond, 2020) with far-reaching consequences for both employee health and corporate performance.
While team building campaigns utilize (fun) activities to create a community environment and hence lower individual barriers which intends to improve both motivation and productivity and hence corporate performance, Health Building is intended to target employee health on an individual level. In fact, Health Building provides a comprehensive approach to counteract the negative impact of (increased) remote work (due to COVID-19) with regards to physical inactivity, lack of exercise, weight gain on employee health, productivity, satisfaction, performance, retention and therefore aids to save costs for ill employees, ultimately ensuring both short and long-term corporate performance. It utilizes scientific evidence and translates its implications into a comprehensive approach of theoretical education and practical application. Thereafter, corporate consciousness needs to become aware of the importance and value of integrating and implementing Health Building Strategies as an essential tool for both employee health and corporate performance, considering their strong codependency.
