News and Events

Hack for a home office – article from ABC online 31st March

This article was posted by the ABC online on the 31st March, 2020. You can find the original article here.  Working from home during coronavirus shutdown? These hacks may help keep ease the pain of your home office ABC Health & Wellbeing – By Genelle Weule Working from home can be physically and psychologically challenging. (Getty Images: Planet Flem) Kitchen benchtops and dining room tables around Australia have become workspaces as office workers have been advised to work from home in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Where the opportunity to work from home in your PJs might have once seemed like a treat, the rapid shift to working from home — if that is even an option for you — is challenging. Suddenly, you may find yourself working in the same space as your family, bent over a laptop instead of sitting or standing at a dedicated workstation with ergonomic equipment. The combination of long hours on a laptop on the kitchen table can be both physically and psychologically stressful over the long haul. “It’s worth investing some time thinking about how to make this work to protect your physical and mental wellbeing,” said Jodi Oakman, who leads the Centre for Ergonomics and Human…

Safe Work Month – Free Community Breakfast

This October is National Safe Work Month, an initiative of Safe Work Australia. Safe Work Month focuses on asking workers and employers across Australia to commit to building safe and healthy workplaces for all Australians. To launch Safe Work Month, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland are hosting a free breakfast on Wednesday 2 October 2019 at King George Square, Ann St, Brisbane from 7am to 9:30am. There will be free food, lucky draw prizes and giveways, cooking demonstrations and more. The BeUpstanding team will also be there to talk to you about how your workplace can sit less and move more and you can even sign up to be a BeUpstanding Champion on the day. We hope to see you there!

Why Some Employers Are Paying Their Employees to Exercise

This article written by Katie MacAskill was originally published on 31 July 2019 on The Sedentary Behaviour Research Network (SBRN) website. Exercising has been proven over and over again to benefit physical and mental health. In the context of the workplace, countless researchers have seen improvements in employee time management, productivity, focus, personability and more from exercise interventions. As part of their “Power of the Hour” series, a BBC article was published earlier this year on exercise breaks during the workday. The article references a variety of professionals, employers and employees to discuss the values of exercise breaks, noting that some offices even pay their employees to exercise. In recent years, an increasing number of offices are finding and setting up headquarters with a gym or workout studio available in the building. Employees in such offices who make use of these facilities are more productive and tend to leave the office more satisfied with their performance at the end of the day; not to mention the regular benefits that physical activity has on health including immediate cognitive boosts. Setting up big tables and cafes as work spaces in view of treadmills/ellipticals or gym spaces is a new idea companies are…

BeUpstanding features in Canberra

On the 1st of August, lead investigator for BeUpstanding – Associate Professor Genevieve Healy – spoke at a Commonwealth Safety Managers Forum event in Canberra to promote the BeUpstanding program and the exciting new updates that are now available. If you haven’t seen any of the updates, make sure you head over to BeUpstanding to check them out. We are currently recruiting for our national evaluation trial of the program, with participating champions provided with free health coaching from our expert BeUpstanding team.

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