BeUpstanding™ Blog

Behaviour Change

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What motivates desk workers to sit less and move more?

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How often do you find yourself sitting down for a long period of time? Due to the nature of our modern-day lives, this probably happens regularly. Maybe your job requires you to be seated at a computer for most of the day, or maybe you have found yourself reading BeUpstanding™ blog posts for hours. Do you want to be less sedentary and move more during your work time? If so, what motivates you to do this? Increased computerisation and modernisation of the working environment allows desk-based employees to complete most of their tasks seated. Too much sedentary time is now acknowledged as a public health concern, as well as an emerging work health and safety issue. Prolonged periods of sedentary time can increase the likelihood of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other lifestyle-related diseases, as well as detrimentally affect mental health. In contrast, regularly interrupting sedentary time, including by standing up, doing simple resistance activities (like going up and down on your toes), or going for a walk, can help reduce these impacts. The BeUpstanding™ program is designed to help create a culture where these regular movements, or a dynamic workplace, is the norm. Over 95% of participants in our…

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How to motivate your team and keep them motivated

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You are the nominated Champion for your work’s BeUpstanding challenge. Congratulations! But, now you are wondering how to keep your team motivated to stick with it. How will your communications help your team feel driven to see out the challenge to the end? Fortunately, there’s more that you could consider in addition to the helpful resources, reminders and shout-outs at morning meetings. We’ve applied a theory that provides an effective way of supporting sustained motivation as a leader, and adapted the approach to best suit your role as a BeUpstanding Champion. Consider this – if you had all the money you needed to survive and be content for the rest of your life, would you still do some form of work? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say “no”, if your primary reason for working was to earn an income to sustain your living. If you thought “yes”, what would be your reason for wanting to continue working, when the need to earn money or status is no longer a driving factor? Thanks to Self-Determination Theory (or SDT) co-founders, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, we’re able to understand how different types of human motivation drives our behaviour. Ryan and Deci formulated…

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What does and doesn’t work in gamification?

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A few weeks ago, this blog discussed how gamification might be used to support workers to sit less and move more. In this blog, Duncan Robertson reports on the second part of his literature review, which examined common features that worked and didn’t work for gamification, as well as some key considerations used to change behaviour using this approach. What works Social contact & social contracts: Referring back to the first of the three key psychological principals discussed in my previous blog, there are several social methods used in interventions that work well. For example, peer support between participants helps everyone reach their goal. Additionally, accountability between participants goes back to individuals being more motivated by loses than gains. Clearly defined goals: Interventions must provide participants with a purpose for participating. Clearly deciding on a reachable goal helps maintain motivation and engagement. An intervention that has been designed well can regularly adapt goals based on participant progress. For example, ensuring goal difficulty increases with participants progress in order to always provide a challenging activity. Friendly competition: Friendly competition between participants is encouraged. This can come in the form of leaderboards or a points system that everyone can see or is…

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Forget Standing Desks: To Stay Healthy, You’ve Got To Move All Day

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The following article, written by Christopher Keyes, was published by The Guardian on February 6th, 2019. If you want to dedicate yourself to a lifetime of good habits, don’t start at the gym. Start at the office. A few years ago, James Levine, a doctor of endo­crinology at the Mayo Clinic, sparked a radical change in America’s office furniture. His research had inspired a pile of viral stories cataloging the negative effects of sitting at a desk: leg muscles shut down, blood pressure increases, good cholesterol plummets, your children starve. OK, I made up that last one, but the real takeaway was no less dire. “Excessive sitting is a lethal activity,” Levine, who has studied sedentary behavior for nearly 20 years and is the most widely quoted expert on the topic, told the New York Times in 2011. And the solution – at least the one people heard – was to start standing. Cue the office makeovers. Over the next several years, workers all across America embraced stand-up desks. At Outside’s headquarters in Santa Fe, New Mexico, our building manager furiously reconfigured work spaces. Desks were removed from their shelving brackets, raised a foot and a half, and remounted. Walking the hallways,…

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