ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

A pilot study is giving Swedish hospital cleaners shorter working hours for a year-and-a-half. This report from Scandinavian correspondent Lotte Printz.

Playing football or doing exercise workouts has a positive impact on health. That’s hardly a surprise. But a recent study carried out by the Danish National Research Centre for the Working Environment in cooperation with a Danish, a Swedish and a British university among 116 cleaners shows that half of the participants who did this type of exercise two times 30 minutes a week over four months, improved their cardiac autonomic regulation.

Increased heart rate variability – as it is also called – has proved especially important for the rest and restoration of cleaners with high levels of occupational physical activity and may help prevent them from being worn out.

If struggling like most of us to fit in fitness routines after a full-time working day, this is perhaps particularly good news for a number of hospital cleaners in Sweden who have just been granted more time to exercise – you could argue.

Full pay

On March 1 the cleaners at the hospital of Skellefteå, close to Lapland in northernmost Sweden, started a pilot study where they are going to work for only six hours a day while still being paid for a full-time job.

The trial was initiated by the county council and not as a result of the said exercise study. But it’s no secret that cleaners – in general – are less fit and more likely to suffer from coronary heart diseases such as high blood pressure than other job groups. So this may add to its value. If they end up spending their extra leisure time on exercise that is!

Creating attractive workplaces, thus increasing the chances of recruiting and maintaining staff, building better working environments and having fewer sick days were the main motivations for implementing this pilot project.

Its kick-off came, however, just after a similar pilot scheme in an old people’s home in Gothenburg in January was doomed for being too expensive. Nevertheless, head of department of the involved hospital cleaning company, Anna-Maria Rudolfsson, is confident and pleased that the project will boost the company and its employees, she told the trade magazine Rent.

Output maintained?

This Swedish experiment in Lapland will run until the end of September 2018 and will have cost a total of about € 314,000 by the end, it is reckoned.

By then Anna-Maria Rudolfsson and the hospital in Skellefteå will know whether the employees are more pleased about their working environment, whether output will be maintained even if hours were shortened, and whether stress levels have been reduced and the employees take fewer sick days than the reference group from the hospital at Lycksele. The Lapland county council will then decide whether it’s worth continuing cutting the working day for cleaners.