Like other Sprint employees, Kent Turner has adjusted to the company's new office park here on a former soybean field in a suburb of Kansas City, but he does wonder why the elevators are so pokey when the buildings are new.
"We believe," he confided, smiling, "that it's a sinister plot to get us to take the stairs."
Sinister, no; plot, yes.
Sprint planned its 82-hectare world headquarters with an eye to fitness. It banned cars, forcing employees to park in garages on the far side of a road ringing the campus and walk between buildings as much as a half-mile apart. It put in hydraulic -- that is, slow -- elevators and wide, windowed staircases to encourage people to walk rather than ride between floors.
Across the country, companies, states and schools are taking more aggressive -- if perhaps passive-aggressive -- measures to get an increasingly overweight society to move more and eat less.
The new methods go beyond putting gyms in office buildings or teaching children (or adults) the virtues of broccoli.
Union Pacific Railroad has begun offering some employees the latest prescription weight-loss drugs as part of a study to determine how best to get its workers to slim down. At the new headquarters for Capital One outside Richmond, Virginia, the architects set the food court at the end of a string of buildings, rather than at the center.
"It's a place one has to walk to," said Jim Carter, an architect with Hillier, the firm that also designed the Sprint campus. "We want people to get out of their desks and out of their offices and move around."
Programs that nudge people to move more or eat better are responding to a growing public health crisis: The federal Department of Health and Human Services puts the cost of overweight and obese Americans at US$117 billion in 2000 and said that being overweight resulted in 300,000 deaths a year.
"There are times when we as a nation feel that personal responsibility is not getting the job done, and so we have to take action," said Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. "We could count on parents to get their children immunized, but they don't, therefore we require it. We could count on people being responsible and not smoking cigarettes, but we have a huge health crisis brought on by people smoking cigarettes."
Obesity surpassed smoking as a public health concern in a poll commissioned in May by the Harvard School of Public Health, with 79 percent saying it was a major issue.
At Union Pacific, 54 percent of the 48,000 employees are overweight. Looking at injury claims and illness records, the company estimated that reducing that percentage by one point would save US$1.7 million; five points, US$8.5 million.
But weight loss campaigns have proved difficult. About 15 years ago, the company began a comprehensive wellness program. Cholesterol, smoking and blood pressure dropped. The percentage of overweight employees, however, has risen, from 40 percent in 1990.
Company officials' best guess is that the mostly male work force is simply getting older, their railroad jobs increasingly automated and sedentary. But Union Pacific set out to find a solution, starting five separate studies with employees motivated to lose weight, including one in which 234 employees receive some combination of diet drugs, counseling, weight loss manuals and pedometers.
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