As a result of recent research revealing that habitual dehydration is suffered by 96% of UK office workers, a new consumer campaign, ‘Keep it Light’, to improve hydration habits, has been launched by five-times Olympic Gold medallist, Sir Steve Redgrave.
The effects of dehydration in the workforce are manifold and are mainly represented by a loss of concentration and lower productivity. The shocking results from the workplace survey[1] , uncovered an overwhelming lack of hydration knowledge in the UK through a poll of more than 1,000 UK office workers, undertaken by Juice Doctor, the company jointly formed by Redgrave offering isotonic drinks to combat hydration.
Having spent his athletic career close to water to win Olympic gold medals over five quadrennial events, Sir Steve told The People Bulletin: ‘If we can improve our hydration habits in an easy way to benefit performance in daily life, the message is the same for athletes, taxi drivers, office workers, mums and kids alike.’
Keep away from the dark zone
The title ‘Keep in Light’ refers to one of our main health indicators, the colour of urine. The darker it is, the more dehydrated you are, so keeping it light is the ‘litmus’ test to know if you are in need of more water to hydrate or not. Redgrave said there was insufficient understanding in everyday life on hydration and that’s what Juice Doctor was all about.
He explained: ‘When I was an athlete we would go out on a training schedule and we never took water with us. We would just push on beyond and hour then gulp litres of water when we got back which was not ideal. As new younger team members joined our training group, they came armed with bottles of water, I became know as ‘The Camel’ as I took no water with me. I soon learned about hydration and we became more scientific about out training. We weighed ourselves before training then weighed the water we took with us. It transpired we lost 4kg weight in a one hour’s training session plus the 2kg of water we took, leading up to a 6kg loss overall.’
Don’t bottle out
Irrespective of whether your energy output is mental or physical, you need water to hydrate your body to minimise headaches, maintain concentration and perhaps also, reduce drowsiness through fatigue.
The Juice Doctor workplace survey found that two out of three people in the workplace (in a 1,000 survey sample) were unaware of the hydration issue as well as not knowing about isotonic input to help balance the body. The survey highlighted that 75% of UK office workers cited their first response to a headache as taking headache pills rather than drinking more water.
While the majority of office workers (60%) believed that they drink enough water, less than 4% are actually getting the recommended seven plus glasses of water per day. In fact, according to the survey, almost three-quarters of the respondents admitted to drinking either no water at all or only one to two glasses. The vast majority (83.5%) of office workers surveyed admitted that being thirsty affects their productivity at work, yet most continue with poor hydration regimes. Just a 2% in hydration can lead to a massive 20% drop in concentration. The ‘Keep It Light!’ campaign warns that a habitually dehydrated worker can be wasting up to one day per week in loss of concentration.
‘Our bodies have a natural early warning system for helping us know when we are dehydrated, namely the colour of our pee’, reiterated Redgrave. ‘However, the survey has shown that less than one-third of people (27%) admitted to checking the colour of their urine to see if they’re dehydrated. Even worse, only 7% of them, the more vigilant, said they notice when their urine is an odd colour, and when they do, they don’t know what it means.’
The ‘Keep it Light’ website includes a downloadable personal ‘Y’urindicator” chart[2] from which is designed as a pee-tone colour chart to help identify the stages of hydration, as well as other free materials to post up in washrooms, rest areas and offices. To spread the ‘Keep it Light!’ message, Sir Steve Redgrave and Juice Doctor have enlisted the help of some of the UK’s leading companies – including Birds Eye, Plantronics, The RNLI and TalkTalk – to help educate the British workforce about hydration by providing their employees with posters, fact sheets and other hydration resources.
Good Hydration Tips
Dr Paul Stillman from the Expert Group on Hydration has provided his top tips for good hydration…
- Start the day with a drink.
- Never go more than a couple of hours without drinking.
- Check urine colour when going to the toilet.
- Drink little and often.
- Keep a drink with you at work.
- If you exert yourself or do sports keep hydrated.
- Vary flavours to maintain interest.
- Always have a drink when you eat.
- Drink before you go to bed.
O2 options
To help avoid staff buying bottles of branded water at an escalating cost, there are various workplace hydration options available to employers. One of the most common is a bottled water cooler which is a free standing unit requiring a supply of 19 litre water (average volume) bottles inverted in the unit that chills the water.
A less cumbersome method is a PoU (Point of Use) water chiller that is plumbed into the office water supply, thereby dispensing with the need to purchase water bottles and making space for the storage of full and empty water bottles. As smaller units than the bottle cooler devices, PoU chillers can be free standing or desktop variants dependent of water source access points. These also have the advantage of a reduced carbon footprint because of the delivery and return of watercooler bottles.
The Health and Safety Executive has a useful leaflet explaining what welfare facilities employers are legally required to provide. In its leaflet Workplace, health, safety and welfare - A short guide for managers it explains:
‘You must supply high-quality drinking water, with and upward drinking jet or suitable cups. Drinking water does not have to be marked unless there is a significant risk of people drinking non-drinking water.’[3]
Redgrave’s research would suggest that this minimum compliance is not quite enough and there are productivity and wellbeing issues to consider when it comes to ensuring workers are properly hydrated.
[1] www.juice-doctor.co.uk/news/uk-is-urged-to-'keep-it-light'-as-new-consumer-campaign-is-launched-to-improve-hydration-health
[2] available from www.juice-doctor.co.uk/
[3] www.hse.gov.uk/business/welfare.htm