Flexible working can reduce someone’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke, new American research has found.
Having a better work-life balance is so beneficial to health that some employees who work flexibly end up with heart health equivalent to what they had 10 years earlier.
The findings are likely to add to the debate about whether working from home more often, as more people have been doing since Covid, improves their health.
They also suggest that working in a stressful environment raises the risk of a heart attack or stroke, which between them cause about 160,000 deaths a year in the UK – 460 a day.
Researchers from Harvard and Penn State universities examined whether helping staff to reduce the “work-family conflict” in their lives lowered their risk of suffering a cardiovascular event.
They found that it did have that impact for two groups of workers – those over 45 and those already at higher risk of a heart attack or stroke, which is closely associated with unhealthy habits such as smoking and poor diet. And it did not make them any less productive.
“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”, said co-lead author Lisa Berkman, a professor of public policy and epidemiology at Harvard’s TH Chan school of public health.
“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”, she added.
For the project, the academics used a twin-pronged workplace intervention programme, which they designed to improve the work-life balance. Managers were trained in “strategies to show support for employees’ personal and family lives alongside their job performances”. And both managers and staff underwent training “to identify new ways to increase employees’ control over their schedules and tasks”.
They tested this approach with an IT firm, which had 555 workers of both sexes who typically earned a moderate salary, and a care company, which had a 973-strong, mainly-female, low-wage workforce.
At the start and end of the year-long research project those 1,528 staff underwent checks on their health, such as their systolic blood pressure, body mass index, smoking status and cholesterol levels. The academics used that information to calculate each person’s cardiometabolic risk score (CRS) – their risk of developing cardiovascular disease, such as a heart attack, within the next 10 years.
The workplace intervention “did not have any significant overall effects on employees’ CRS.” However, it did reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke for those at higher risk to start with.
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“Those employees of the IT company and of the long-term care company saw a reduction in their CRS equivalent to 5.5 and 10.3 years of age-related changes respectively.
“Age also played a role. Employees older than 45 with a higher baseline CRS were likelier to see a reduction than their younger counterparts”, Harvard said.
Co-lead author Orfeu Buxton, a professor of behavioural health at Penn State, said their conclusions should encourage employers to give their staff greater work-life balance.
“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”, he said. “Now we know such changes can improve employee health and should be more broadly implemented”, he added.
About 7.6m people in the UK have a heart or circulatory problem, which puts them at greater risk of suffering a potentially fatal collapse, according to the British Heart Foundation.
