Colleagues affect healthy eating and exercise behavior

Abstract

Exercising and eating healthy are not just an individual choice, but influenced by the social environment. Family members, friends or neighbors influence (un)healthy choices individuals make, yet little is known about other important contacts: colleagues. Many people spend at least 8 hours a day at work, mostly surrounded by the same colleagues. As a third of daily calories are consumed in the workplace and a lot of time is spent sitting there, colleagues could be important in shaping the (un)healthy choices employees make. We study to what extent colleagues influence each other's eating and exercise behavior. We focus on two pathways: colleagues can encourage a healthy lifestyle or act as role models whose behavior can be observed and copied. We use the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, with data on 4345 employees in 402 teams in 113 organizations. We measured healthy eating as how often employees eat fruit and vegetables. We measured exercise by the number of days in the past week employees did sports/physical activity for more than 30 minutes. Colleague encouragement was assessed by the extent to which employees said their colleagues encourage them to eat healthy food or exercise frequently. We computed colleague behavior by taking the average fruit and vegetable consumption, and exercise, of all colleagues in a team. We fitted multilevel models with employees nested in teams and controlled for gender, age, education, working hours, job physical demands, self-rated health, sector and country. Preliminary results show colleague encouragement for healthy eating positively affected fruit consumption (p<.01), colleague fruit consumption did not(p=.62). Both colleague encouragement (p<.01) and colleague vegetable consumption (p=.04) positively relate to vegetable consumption. Colleague encouragement positively (p=.03), and colleague exercise behavior (p<.01) negatively, affected exercise. Worksite health interventions should emphasize the role colleagues may play. Key messages Next to family, friends and neighbors, also colleagues influence each other’s eating and exercise behavior. Worksite health interventions should the role colleagues may play into account when attempting to improve employee health.