Another Management Trend from Japan?

The country that brought the quality movement into mainstream American business has a cutting edge idea for managing employee health -- whittling away at workers' waistlines, aggressively.

A new Japanese law that's been in effect for several months forces companies to measure the body fat of employees between the ages of 40 and 74 with a goal of keeping men's waists below 33.5 inches and women's waists under 35.4 inches. Companies were told by the government to lower the number of obese employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015. If employees fail to meet government-mandated waistlines, their employers may be required to pay more into the national healthcare system.

Will those exacting standards be exported to the United States? According to Workforce Management, Japanese companies operating in the U.S. have no plans to implement the same policy here even though some large Japanese companies could face multi-million dollar penalties.

Why do U.S. companies, which aggressively target smoking as a key health concern for their workers, take far less interest in fighting obesity, which is more prevalent, and, according to many studies, just as costly? One possible explanation rests on the difference in employment longevity between U.S. and Japanese companies. The U.S. workforce tends to be more transient than in Japan, where it's still very common for people to work for the same company all their lives. A gradually expanding waistline doesn't translate into expensive health problems quickly and by the time it does, most American workers have changed jobs many times while the Japanese employee is the healthcare burden of the same company.

But a growing number of U.S. companies' are taking on obesity as a health risk and incorporating weight loss into wellness programs that include weight-loss contests, especially at small and midsize companies where there's a lot of social interaction among employees. According to Nicholas A. Christakis, a doctor and Harvard sociology professor interviewed by The New York Times, social networks in the workplace are a powerful force in fighting obesity; when one friend gains or loses a lot of weight, the odds improve that another will as well.

With peer pressure on your side, who needs measuring tapes?