Two-thirds (66%) of UK employees believe they are in good or excellent heath, despite displaying two or more risk factors that could increase their chances of getting a disease.
While a significant proportion of workers surveyed in the Britain's Healthiest Company Report run by PruHealth and Mercer were at risk of conditions such as heart attack or stroke due to being severely overweight or refusing to give up smoking, many refused to change their lifestyle.
However, the research also revealed a strong link between healthy lifestyle behaviours. For example, those who got enough exercise were 10% more likely to not smoke, 25% more likely to eat a healthy diet and 37% more likely to not smoke and eat healthily.
Furthermore, those who eat healthily were 25% more likely to not smoke, 77% more likely to get enough exercise and three times more likely to do both, in contrast to someone who does no exercise and/or has a poor diet.
In contrast, the research showed that if someone is outside the healthy range for one lifestyle factor, they are more likely to be outside the healthy range for a number of others too, with 60% of employees identified as having two or more risk factors.
Due to an unrealistic perception of their health, over two thirds (69%) of smokers refused to give up, nearly two thirds (64%) were unwilling to change their eating habits and over a third (37%) were not prepared to change their exercise habits.
In addition, while many UK employees believed they were in good health, almost a third (31%) had never had a health screen and were unaware of the actual state of their health, meaning that the numbers of those outside the healthy range could be far higher.
Mercer employee health and benefits UK market business leader John Anderson said: "The data showed that whilst individuals were typically overly optimistic about how healthy they are, and ignore key risk factors, they were also open to change. Eight in ten (80%) wanted to improve their BMI and 61% wanted to become more active.
"It can take very little cost for employers to help facilitate such changes within their businesses. If allowing flexibility around taking lunch hours to allow staff to attend gym classes, or providing showers so that cycling to work is more attractive leads to just a 1% increase in productivity then that's a great investment for any business to make.
"We're being approached by more and more companies looking for help generating savings from their current benefit expenditure in order to make such initiatives cost neutral and to generate greater value from their spend," he added.
