Website Design Newcastle - amongst the unhealthiest staff in the UK?
According to a recent report, employees in the IT and website design industry are some of the unhealthiest in the UK's workforce!
Less than 20% of workers get half an hour of exercise 5 times a week and only 14% claim to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables in a day. Perhaps more surprising though, the caffeine intake of IT and website design workers is said to be the highest of any industry!
Do website designers drink that much coffee?
The survey reports that IT and website design workers down, on average, 10 cups of coffee a day. Well that doesn't correlate with what goes on in these offices! To begin with our MD sticks to tea. Web designers here seldom drink hot drinks either, preferring caffeine laden Coke instead. Okay, we're being a little pedantic. However, their Coke intake isn't of the levels that the survey indicates as an industry average and even if tea was packed with caffeine our MD only gets through 3-4 cups a day.
Who did they survey?
The survey looked at 1,734 workers across the UK - so hardly a vast sample of the overall workforce. It reports that 63% of workers don't keep to healthy eating guidelines, though we'd argue that is probably a figure that be attributed to more than just 1,734 members of the UK workforce!
Revealing statement
When it comes to stating the obvious we found this quote, attributed to Rich Leigh of Fat Free Fitness, to be a nominee for any top award - "There is clearly a correlation between sitting at a desk or wheel all day and how active you're likely to be."
Did we really need a survey to tell us that?
So what about inside the doors of ClarityWEB Website Design Newcastle?
Well, we do walk to the vending machines at the end of the corridor that leads down to our main offices - so we can happily count that as exercise.
Web designers also have to negotiate a set of spiral stairs if they decide to leave the offices for a cigarette. So thats like getting on a stepper machine for 15 seconds 20 times a day.
We have a lift (elevator) that we never use. Primarily because it is too slow and you could hop down the stairs quicker.
We often have McChicken sandwiches instead of Quarter Pounders these days.
Pepsi Max doesn't contain caffeine and our MD drinks that by the truckload too - so that's got to be good, surely?
Yes, we're saying a lot of this in jest (honest!). However, we're also sayinig much of it in utter amazement that people have to conduct a survey to reveal things that, surely, everyone in the field of web design, IT or any other office based vocation could have taken a wild guess at and come up with reasonably accurate conclusions?
Call us cynics, but the world of web design or IT is an easy target for such surveys...
Anyway, time for a cigarette break.
Web Designers x 1,000
These types of statistics have to be put into context. There are well over 250,000 people directly employed in the website design industry in the UK. There are then over 500,000 others (minimum) in the IT industry.
So, if a survey assesses 1,734 staff, and not all of those are web design or IT industry employees (lets say 1,300 of them were), that accounts for a sample of around 0.2% of the total staff in both industries. Now consider the fact that the sample of office based staff of 1,734 is a TINY percentage of the total office based staff in the UK - and you can see how inaccurate these statistics are likely to be.
So, why?
Well, the simple fact is that website design and IT staff all inherit a stereotypical profile. Surveys love this. If you say something often enough, people will start to believe it.
Call us cynics, but it is a little tiresome to see website design and IT staff yet again boxed up and put in a corner for the convenience of news...
