Are flexible work hours good for your heart health?

While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced millions of people to the concept of ‘flexible working’ – that is to work from home and not work from 9 in the morning to five in the evening – many offices are now calling their employees back. Now, a new study has shown that flexible working can be beneficial for heart health and reduce the chances of a cardiac event. But what do we know about the study? And how does flexible work help our hearts? Let’s take a closer look: What do we know about the study? The study, conducted by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Penn State University, was published on Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health. It was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is one of the first studies to note the impact of work environment on heart health.

The study saw researchers poll employees of two companies – an IT company and a long-term care company.

Five-hundred and fifty-five employees from the IT company and 973 employees from the care company participated. The employees from the IT company were men and women who are paid moderate salaries to do technical work, while the long-term employees were mostly women caregivers paid low wages. The 1,528 employees at the beginning of the study were measured for:

• Systolic blood pressure
• Body mass index
• Glycated hemoglobin
• Smoking status
• HDL cholesterol
• Total cholesterol

These were once again recorded at the end of the study. The researchers used this data to assign each employee a cardiometabolic risk score (CRS). The higher the score, the more chance that an employee would develop heart issues within the decade. Supervisors were taught how to care for employees’ personal lives as well as their job performances. Both supervisors and employees also got hands-on training on how to maximise workers’ control over their own work lives. What did the study show? While the study did not show that flexible work improved the employees’ CRS overall, it did note reductions in those who began the study with a higher baseline CRS. Employees of the IT company and long-term company that began with a higher baseline CRS witnessed a reduction of 5.5 and 10.3 years respectively when it came to their heart risk profiles. This was particularly true for older workers. Employees over 45 that began with a higher CRS were more likely to see their score come down than their younger co-workers. In plain English?

Flexible work could be better for the heart health of older employees.

“The study illustrates how working conditions are important social determinants of health,” said co-lead author Lisa Berkman, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School and director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. “When stressful workplace conditions and work-family conflict were mitigated, we saw a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease among more vulnerable employees, without any negative impact on their productivity. These findings could be particularly consequential for low- and middle-wage workers who traditionally have less control over their schedules and job demands and are subject to greater health inequities,” said Berkman. “The intervention was designed to change the culture of the workplace over time with the intention of reducing conflict between employees’ work and personal lives and ultimately improving their health,” said co-lead author Orfeu Buxton, professor of biobehavioral health and director of the Sleep, Health & Society Collaboratory at Penn State. “Now we know such changes can improve employee health and should be more broadly implemented.” Yahoo.com quoted a 2021 study as showing that altering your job timings lowered the likelihood of stress 20 per cent. Doing so also increased the chances of job satisfaction by 62 per cent. With inputs from agencies