Researchers from Utrecht and Cologne have discovered that workmates are more likely to eat vegetables and fruits and exercise if their colleague encourages them. Additionally, there is a strong correlation between employees’ healthy eating behaviors and their coworkers’ intake of fruits and vegetables.
Coworkers can encourage each other to eat healthily.
However, one coworker exercising much doesn’t inspire others to do the same. Consequently, explicit encouragement of physical activity has a favorable impact, but workers refrain from copying the behavior of their physically active colleagues.
Overall, the researchers concluded that colleagues’ encouragement and personal health practices could foster a mindset of wellness at work and help all workers make healthy decisions.
Healthy food and exercise are personal decisions and are affected by family, friends, and neighbors. However, more needs to be understood about the effect of colleagues, a significant interpersonal factor. People spend numerous hours at work, mostly with the same coworkers, who may greatly influence their (un)healthy decision-making.
By concentrating on two pathways—coworkers who can promote a healthy habits or be role models whose actions can be watched and imitated—the researchers investigated the extent to which coworkers may influence one another’s exercise and eating habits.
The group used data from the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, which included information on 4345 workers across 402 teams and 113 businesses. The study found that workers are more inclined to eat fruits and vegetables and exercise whenever their coworkers promote a healthy lifestyle.
Exercise is not easy to emulate without overt encouragement presence
However, contrary to their predictions, researchers discovered a negative link between workers’ and coworkers’ physical activity when no overt encouragement was present.
University of Cologne’s Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology’s Dr. Lea Ellwardt suggested that one justification for the unfavorable outcome could be the fact that most physical exercise occurs after hours when it is barely noticeable to coworkers. In addition, people frequently eat at work daily with coworkers, whereas exercise happens in private and is less susceptible to social impact.
