When did you last take your full hour lunch break? If you’re anything like the average UK employee who was found in a recent study to only take 26 minutes and 28 seconds the answer is likely to be ‘not very often’.

This, they say, is like working without pay for 18 days (assuming of course that none of the lunch hour is spent booking holidays or catching up on those vital Facebook updates).

The survey caught my eye because it provides further evidence of the death of the lunch hour. Of course, as the company that sells luncheon vouchers, we would love nothing better than a revival of the café or canteen lunch hour which used to be part of our working lives.

More pressingly for HR and benefits practitioners, in an environment where the emphasis on employee health and wellbeing is growing, this survey shows just how inactive our workplaces have become and the extent to which we need to change habits in the working day.

I’m not talking about coercing people to join the one in ten who already spend their lunch hour at the gym. It is more about understanding the devastating impact that sitting around all day can have on every employee, fit or otherwise – something which is accepted as a given in virtually all office environments.

In the past year a growing body of evidence has emerged to show our sedentary working days have a much bigger impact on people than we previously understood.

While we have long focused on the musclo-skeletal consequences of bad posture – RSI, migraines and bad backs – sitting is now being shown to be destructive in other different ways.

As this Time Magazine article shows, in addition to making us more prone to obesity, long term sitting appears to be rewiring the way our bodies work in a way which increases the risk of silent killers like heart disease and diabetes.

It also dumbs down our ability to concentrate and think effectively as a lack of exercise – and here we are talking about taking the shortest of walks – impairs our cognitive ability and leads our mind to wander off-task.

Teams who sit and restrict their movement all day have a hidden impact on organisations too. Opportunities for innovation and accidental idea generation are lost as employees remain separated in silos. A reliance on email means the opportunity to build working relationships and trust – key elements in high performing teams – are lost with the disappearance face-time.

There is a lot of talk about health and wellbeing and our own survey showed that in 2015 it will be a priority for increased investment for 65% of organisations. However, unless we understand the basic challenges to good health, we have no chance of overcoming them.

I am the sales and marketing director at Edenred, a leading benefits provider. You can follow me on twitter at @andy_philpott and get more insight and research from Edenred at www.edenred.co.uk/ehub