Philips focus on more sitting comfort, better air for staff

Some corporate companies in the city seem to have taken to heart the rule that a healthy employee is a more productive employee, the operative word being 'more.'

With enough scientific evidence to show that workers do better when put in an enabling environment, some of them are acting to make the work place cleaner and safer.

Companies such as Philips are paying attention to ergonomics, cultural nuances and even the quality of air in the workplace.

Such efforts, aimed at making more than a superficial impact on the health of the company's employees, include this year an attempt to see if norms available in countries such as the United States can be adopted to workplaces here, Bob Hoekstra, chief executive officer of Philips Software Centre Pvt Ltd, told Business Standard.

One set of norms was prescribed the US Department of Labour's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which, according to its website, aims to ensure worker safety and health in the United States by working with employers and employees to create better working environments.

"We are going to bring in the OSHA norms here and see if we can make our workplaces conform to them," Hoekstra says. "Until last year, we have been doing several things in an unconnected fashion.

For instance, at the Philips centre here, there is a doctor on call, who is also a specialist in the types of diseases people can get through incorrect posture and because of the nature of their work, such as repetitive stress injury (RSI) or carpel tunnel syndrome.

We also have a counsellor for people who were finding it difficult to handle stress, from work or otherwise. There is a dietician to advice people on healthy diets," Hoekstra says.

When a new batch of employees join the company, there are people who will take them through instructions such as "don't sit and work in one place for too long... take a coffee break and stretch your legs."

When "some of us wondered if the air quality in our centre was okay, we brought in a sophisticated machine to analyse the air." All these things were being done in a disjointed way, but this year, "we plan to bring them together under an integrated umbrella programme to improve the health of our staff", he adds.

"Eight years ago, when we started here, we were doing small parts of the whole, but now there are people here with eight years of experience and our teams have built software that go into entire products, such as DVD players and recorders."

So monitoring the health of such staff becomes a priority.

Over the last two years, the company kept track of sick leaves. "These could have been due to anything... people taking leave to deal with a bad cough or something more serious. But over the time, we have tried through our efforts to bring down the sick leaves from 1.2 per cent of all leave applications to 0.8 per cent," he says.

Conforming to OSHA norms is a more ambitious next step. Since its inception in 1971, OSHA has helped to cut workplace fatalities by more than 60 per cent and occupational injury and illness rates by 40 per cent, according to its website.

In the same time employment doubled from 56 million workers at 3.5 million worksites to more than 115 million workers at 7.1 million sites, in the US.

The administration does its work through authorised inspections, enforcement of its norms (in the US) and strong outreach programmes, telling companies why its norms were important and made economic sense too.

Last year, OSHA spent some $460 million urging businesses to make things safer for people to work, from construction firms with giant cranes to software labs with computer workstations.

In the case of Philips' India centre, compliance would be voluntary, to ensure workplace safety and health. Philips planned to collaborate with OSHA, Hoekstra says, which in the US provides goals addressing training and education, outreach and communication and promoting the national dialogue on workplace safety and health.

The company was also trying to make its workplaces better suited to Indians.

"For instance, we have found that their average size is smaller (than that of Europeans) and the height of the desk has been a bother to some. There are adjustable seats but at our new campus we are trying to provide adjustable desks as well."

At Hoekstra's office in the present campus, there are prototypes of what such an office might look like.

"We are 1,500 people now and by 2007 that figure would be doubled. A new campus near the Hebbal Lake will take them all and we will vacate our present campus. The new campus is being built-to-suit on a 12.5 acre plot. It will have built-up space of 700,000 sq.ft. and we will start moving on August 1 at 10 a.m," Hoekstra says.