Forget hygge, lagom and sisu. The Nordic trend we need to adopt for 2022 is ‘friskvårdstimme’ - the right to take a break
This is one Nordic ‘lifestyle trend’ that could actually improve your life. Loosely translated as ‘wellness hour’, Swedish employees can take 60 minutes a week to look after their well-being during paid working hours — anything from going to the gym, to taking a walk with a friend or getting a massage. For their employers, it cuts down on burn-out and sick leave. So,could Irish companies use it to tackle our unbalanced performance culture?
Hygge, lagom, sisu — what’s next in Nordic lifestyle trends to help determine the cushions we buy and the delicacies we devour? I suppose you could say the lockdown lifestyle has quashed any need for aspirational inspiration from abroad: the obligatory tracksuit bottoms and low-level anxiety have worked just fine for both sitting-room workouts and home-schooling, thanks very much.
As someone who’s pretty much always worked from home, I’m quite happy to keep working through emails while wearing my tracksuit bottoms, even as we leave the most extreme forms of isolation behind. But then again, perhaps that’s our greatest current lifestyle challenge in a nutshell — we’ve become so used to our protective bubbles and the frenzied stressing between Zoom calls and deadline busting that we’ve forgotten just how to snap out of it. And with around half of full-time workers in Ireland experiencing burnout and two-thirds citing the pandemic and lockdowns as significantly contributing factors, maybe that’s the epidemic we should be worrying about.
Enter friskvårdstimme, or ‘wellness hour’, a contracted right for Swedish employees to exercise or look after their well-being in other ways for an hour every week during paid working hours.
“I’m just off for a friskvårdstimme,” your colleague might say as they stroll out of the office randomly halfway through the morning, their gym bag casually thrown over their shoulder and the gym membership paid for using their friskvårdsbidrag, a tax-free wellness contribution employers can give staff as part of their salary package. Or they’ll return an hour late from their lunch break looking all plump-faced and sleepy, because they’ve been for a relaxing massage — on the company. This, my friends, is the Nordic lifestyle trend I want for 2022.
It was an acquaintance’s post on Instagram that triggered the epiphany. She could never bring herself to go for a run, she said, because every minute at the laptop while the kids were at school was so precious. Could fellow self-employed people and freelancers who only work when the kids are at school relate? Why yes, they could. I used to work more than full-time hours with a toddler and a preschooler doing less than three days a week in childcare, and a door salesman stealing a few minutes of my time would be enough to make me snap — so yes, I too could relate.
But it wasn’t just her fellowfreelancers who were nodding in agreement. The goalposts have moved quite a bit over the past two years, and the lines between work and home life have blurred, if not altogether disappeared. With the freedom to work from home comes the responsibility to always deliver — and as anyone who has tried it will know, it very often comes with a tendency to over-deliver, and certainly with a gnawing sense of guilt any time the laptop is further than an arm’s reach away.
If a person is working and no one’s there to witness them do it, are they even working at all? Better respond to every email the moment it comes in and check in with your colleagues on Slack every five minutes. A run during normal working hours — are you mad?
The Swedish concept of friskvårdstimme came about, you could say, in response to a trend of an increasingly unwell labour force, the irony being that Swedes tend to top global charts for healthiness and happiness, while at the same time being right up there at the top among the nations who take out the most sick leave.
In 2003, in an attempt to flatten a curve that saw 15pc of the working population off sick, at an annual cost for the state of kr113bn (equivalent to just over €11m), it became mandatory for organisations to report sick leave in their annual reports.
The issue had to become part of public debate, the government reasoned, and employers had to work harder to create a preventative work environment. As such, according to Sweden’s Work Environment Act, friskvård must be available to all employees.
How exactly to define friskvård, however, is a matter of some contention. Literally, the word translates as ‘health care’, but in the context of preventative efforts, it has taken on a new meaning. Loosely, you could define it as any active measures taken to promote health at individual or group level, with a focus on lifestyle and habits.
Some add an emphasis on agency and argue that friskvård is the process that enables individuals and groups to gain control over the factors that impact their health, thereby giving them the tools to improve it. At the heart of it is the notion that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, but ideally, you should never have to find out; in other words, good habits can prevent the need for more costly, troublesome health-care measures when illness or burnout strikes.
What these preventativemeasures look like in practice varies. Not all organisations put the wellness hour in the employment contracts, and those that do define it in different ways. Some allow staff to divide it up and use it freely as and when they prefer, and some give more than an hour. Others use some of it for health-promoting group activities, while the tax-free contribution can vary in size too.
What many have seen, however, is that it pays off — literally as well as figuratively. Employees at organisations that work proactively with friskvård efforts both feel and perform better. They take less sick leave, and the organisation becomes more attractive from a recruitment point of view; 92pc of managers confirm that they invest time, energy and money in different kinds of wellness measures, with a significant majority tracking and monitoring the impact closely.
In terms of hard numbers, studies suggest that every quid invested into wellness measures gives at least a four-fold return through minimised sick leave and improved efficiency.
How is this not a no-brainer?
In many ways, what I find most interesting about conversations about schemes like these is how they tend to put the spotlight on the very core of our culture and the way we view work. One common objection is that some people will undoubtedly abuse the freedom of their wellness hour, perhaps saying they’re going for a walk and simply meeting a friend in the park. It’s funny, isn’t it, how our productivity culture has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, to the extent where even well-being is seen as something that must be optimised? As though the contributing employer gets more bang for their buck if we just burn more calories on a rapidly moving treadmill. As though switching off, checking in with a friend and getting some fresh air is somehow cheating.
That’s obviously not the case. We don’t burn out because we’re short on a hardcore spinning class a week. On the contrary, most experts seem to agree that it’s the relentless pressures of modern performance culture that make up our biggest threat. Natural movement and healthy relationships, meanwhile, are among the most effective tonics — along with proper rest, of course. And it’s true, some people use their friskvårdstimme for a power walk with a friend. I see it on Instagram all the time — and honestly, to me, that’s borderline utopia.
A burnout researcher once told me that we need a culture shift — and it needs to be supported by employers. It’s the ‘top down’ thing, isn’t it? If we’re valued based on the number of minutes spent with our bum on a seat, that’s bound to be internalised as a sense of guilt over every minute spent away from it. And yet, if anything can prove that getting the job done can be the sum of many parts that don’t rely on strictly set hours, it’s a pandemic with repeated lockdowns. (That’s in addition to the many studies that time and time again demonstrate the very same thing, be it with regards to a shorter working day or a four-day week.) So, how come we still haven’t learned?
I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the wellness hour to become the next lifestyle trend. As some will have clocked by now, it’s not really a lifestyle, anyway — it’s more of a policy, perhaps a labour market debate.
However, it’s worth remembering that the foreign lifestyle trends we’re sold are rarely lifestyles in their country of origin. Hygge may be a compelling concept that captures much of the essence of what Danish culture is like, but it’s not a Danish lifestyle trend as such. The notion of lagom runs through a lot of Swedish society, but it’s not a lifestyle. They are mere ideas we can cling to for inspiration, concepts to provide a new perspective and remind us of something we’re striving for — and at a time when exhaustion and busyness are more norm than exception, I reckon we could all do with remembering the importance of friskvård.
It’s also worth stressing that there’s a reason why some foreign concepts become trends and others don’t. Employment rights are very hard to flog to individuals in a material sense; a run, even a chat with a pal in the park, is free — there’s nothing to sell there. And yet, even more sellable concepts like hygge rest on a foundation of security that can only be achieved by generous welfare systems or exceptional wealth.
As I tried to argue in my book Lagom: The Swedish Art Of Balanced Living, the concept of lagom actually encapsulates a lot of the policies and welfare supports that underpin and enable the kind of contentment that other nations envy. Because you can plaster any lifestyle trend you want on top of a fear that you won’t be able to afford the healthcare you need or over that constant, low-level stress of paying the equivalent of a second mortgage for childcare you can’t use because you need to keep your kids home any time they sneeze — but candles, woolly socks and hikes in the woods won’t make it go away. It’s hard not to feel like we’re being fooled.
Maybe friskvårdstimme is not material for a lifestyle trend, after all. Maybe you should go to your boss about it, line up the evidence and aim for systematic change and a culture shift instead. But in the meantime, even if I, as a freelancer, only get paid for the work I actually get done and deliver, I know deep down that an hour of pounding the pavement gives me many hours back in efficiency and clarity afterwards. And whatever 2022 throws at us, I know that friskvård will get me through.
