Canadian HR Reporter Weekly

2 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2018 CANADIAN HR REPORTER WEEKLY As yet another holiday season approaches, many employ- ees will be striving to maintain a healthy lifestyle despite many sugary, fatty temptations. Increasingly, employers have stepped in, offering different kinds of workplace programs to help workers combat the bulge or improve their overall wellness. But too much of a focus on individual responsibility for health — versus organizational responsibility — could be having a negative effect, in inadvertently facilitating stigmatization and discrimination against overweight people, according to a study out of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. "ese workplace health promotion programs (WHPPs), even though they are implemented with the best of intentions, can actually have substantial backlashes that nobody really anticipated," said Susanne Täuber, associate professor and Rosalind Franklin fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen. e research is based on the results of three studies — one surveying 255 people, another involving 96 undergraduate students, and a third surveying 250 people — looking at WHPPs and issues around weight, controllability and stigma. Controllability, stigma In the end, the researchers found the mere presence of a WHPP in the workplace is associated with perceptions that being overweight is more controllable. "Ultimately, we know that there are myriads of different factors that contribute to people's health, and while there is for certain an element of personal responsibility, there is a much wider responsibility that's ultimately impacting people's health," said Stuart Flint, a senior research fellow at the Carnegie School of Sport at Leeds Beckett University. "People aren't informed enough about the uncontrollable factors, and we focus on placing the blame on individuals." ere are many other factors that are also related, such as income, genetics or marketing, he said. "It's not just simply how much you eat and how much exercise you do. And… that's why we have continuous simplified messages about 'You can lose weight easily by eating less and moving more.'" e study also found there is greater stigma around weight when an WHPP emphasizes individual responsibility compared to organizational responsibility for health. ere are basically two sides of the coin, said Täuber, co-author of the study. "Employees who are normal weight and pursuing a healthy lifestyle… the more they think that, for instance, weight is something in the responsibility of employees, the more they find colleagues with obesity not very nice anymore, and not very competent, and you see outright discrimination." On the other hand, if people with obesity are exposed to a program that emphasizes individual responsibility, they feel responsible for their weight, but they also find it uncontrollable, she said. "is is a horrible situation for people, so that you feel responsible for something but, at the same time, you feel you have no control about it in motivational terms — it's quite a doomsday scenario. It basically leads to learned helplessness, so I think that the consequences of emphasizing employees' responsibility too much are quite negative, just for how people relate to each other Health promotion programs can lead to stigma, discrimination: Study Looks at issue of individual responsibility versus organizational responsibility BY SARAH DOBSON Sign up for the Canadian HR Newswire today for free and enjoy great content from the publishers of Canadian HR Reporter. HR News at Your Fingertips THE LATEST NEWS THE BEST COMMENTARY DELIVERED WEEKLY FOR READING ON ANY DEVICE Visit www.hrreporter.com/ canadian-hr-newswire

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