How to keep fit in the office

The Office Bantomime Team -

Remember when you were at school and you had a break in the morning, a lunch break and then an afternoon break? Seems like a long time ago right? Well, imagine if the school break time agenda was introduced into business's up and down the country as compulsory.

At the moment you are probably chained to your desk because you are a very busy individual. You have over a thousand unread emails in your inbox, a meeting scheduled within the next ten minutes, several conversations going on in your messaging tool and your manager calling you on the phone.

There is not a chance you are going to leave your desk for the entire day, and your bladder is most definitely suffering from it. If your colleague makes you a coffee, it saves you from going to the kitchen. If your colleague pops to the supermarket in their lunch hour, they can grab you some lunch.

Once the working day is over, you will walk a short distance to the car park where you made sure your car was parked near the entrance, to save gaining any more steps than you should need to.

On arriving at home you will sit on the sofa and eat dinner in front of the TV. This routine repeats itself daily, weekly and monthly and then you find yourself stuck in a paradox.

Just an example of employees who are exhausted and have not left their desks for hours, Apart from the chap in the blue jumper

Introducing the School/work break agenda will be as follows:

Playground Duty Rules

  • Human Resources will be responsible for covering all break time duties. They will use a whistle and visit each department in the office to inform employees to take a break when instructed.

  • Once everybody is outside they can play on the swings, climbing frame, roundabout and slide in the car park. This may cause issues with parking, however, you don't need to drive to work. You could walk, run, jog or bus it. If you live miles away set your alarm clock an hour earlier. Think of the exercise.

  • Bullying in the playground will not be tolerated and HR will have the power to pull individuals apart if fights break out. Directors and certain heads of departments can be more forceful with individuals in the office, but in the playground, would be treated as disciplinary.

  • All employees will be entitled to play hopscotch, skipping, basketball and football.

  • Mobile phones will have to be handed to HR and not allowed in the playground.

  • All customers will be informed not to bother employees during their designated lunchtime hour

  • Any employee caught smoking, selling food or drinking alcohol during the hour will be reprimanded.

Disciplinary Action

Disciplinaries and warnings are normally associated with employees underperforming or being constantly absent from their work or gross misconduct has played a part in some way.

Most organisations, if they are following the official employment law, will carry out a three-stage warning process which would give the employee the option to improve or ensure they do not repeat any of the offences against company policy that was brought against them originally.

There could be a real benefit with introducing exercise as part of the disciplinary process.

To ensure there is no discrimination of age, gender, background, disability etc and as part of the first warning, all individuals would need to carry out 100 press-ups within the first month in a single session. If you manage to complete 100 push-ups in front of the HR team and your colleagues, you will not face any further disciplinaries.

If you fail, then you would get a chance to attempt this on the second warning and finally the third. If you can't fulfil the number of pushups required then you would be terminated immediately from your position.

The rules for a healthy and long-living workforce

1. Treadmills at desks

2. Keep food vending machines constantly out of order

3. Reception to not allow any pizza deliveries into the building

4. Soup and salad to be served once a day in the company car park.

5. No one is allowed outside of the business during the day, even in your lunch hour which is required for you to stay in the playground.

6. If required to attend a meeting at another clients office, you will be forbidden to bring or purchase any food on your way to the location. Your wallet/ purse would need to be handed to HR at the business you work for when you sign in.

7. If you want to work from home, you will be required to remain on a zoom call all day where you will have to carry out specific exercises set by your line manager. The camera will need to be positioned adequately to ensure the entire room you are working in is easily viewable.

8. If a family member is picking you up from work by car, security will need to search the vehicle for food, prior to entering the company car park.

Interviewing - Survival of the fittest

Another convenient way of finding the ideal candidate for a job role would be to base the requirements for the position on how many push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups an individual could do in a single session. Everybody would need to demonstrate how many at the interview they could do.

Also, this would help the interviewer to make a simple selection for the role based on how many reps were carried out per exercise set.

Of course, you're not going to offer Joe Wicks a position as a Data Architect for an IT company if he can carry out 100 push-ups. This would be ridiculous based on how many individuals have the background and experience to do this role, but if he could do 100 sit-ups as well, I think you would be easily persuaded.