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Quick Tip – Water Bottle Replacement

Tips and tools

Are you looking for ways to move more at work? Here’s one of our favourite tips to get you out of your seat and onto your feet. Replace your water bottle with a glass! This simple strategy forces you to stand up and walk to fill your glass every time it is empty. In addition, this is helpful because it helps remind you to drink enough water which is also important for your health. The most sustainable strategies are sometimes ones that will easily become part of your daily routine. An empty glass on your desk is a subtle reminder to stand up often. We hope this simple tip will have you up and moving about without even thinking about it. Happy moving!

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Motivational Email Tips

Tips and tools

Stuck for ideas? Are you looking for email tips to motivate your team to stand up, sit less, and move more? If so, read on because we have some topic ideas and tips to help you keep your team excited! Colors, images, tone of voice, and content can all be used to make your emails motivational. If you already have an idea of what will motivate your team, go for it! The suggestions below are simply some topic ideas that you are welcome to use. Current events To keep your emails engaging and relevant, try to tie current events into the theme of your email. You can do this by mentioning seasons, holidays, or sporting events! For example, you could use the Commonwealth Games as motivation: “Inspired by the Commonwealth games? Consider trying a new activity or revisiting one you used to play. Maybe you could try a race walk to your next meeting! You don’t need to be training for Birmingham 2022 to get the benefits out of sitting less and moving more.” Activity outside of work Now that staff are getting used to more activity at work, this is a good opportunity to encourage physical activity out of office hours. Activity outside of work can include moderate…

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Office Design Impacts Employee Wellbeing

The Evidence

Research shows that in order to create sustainable behaviour change in desk based workers it is important to target individual behaviour, the physical environment, and organisational components. An article in The Conversation by Libby Sander recently highlighted impact of office design on employee wellbeing. Creating an environment which encourages employees to make healthy lifestyle choices can help instigate sustainable behaviour change. Although it may not be feasible for all businesses to invest in massive office redesigns or luxury items such as sleep pods or stairway relocation, the good news is that there are simple and cost effective changes that most businesses can make. These include centralising frequently used office materials, such as printers, recycling, rubbish bins, and mail collection. This small change in location will create more movement in workers’ days by default. Company-wide investment in sit-stand desks may not be feasible for some companies. If there are some resources available, prioritisation should go to those in highest need (i.e., those with less flexibility in their job tasks to be able to leave their desk). Long-term planning may help the organisation allocate a budget for non height adjustable desks to be replaced with sit-stand desks in the future. Full height-adjustable desks (i.e., the whole desk moves…

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BeUpstanding™ Champion – What’s That? And Can I Be One?

Bite size facts

What’s a champion? A BeUpstanding™ workplace champion is the primary person who runs the BeUpstanding™ Program in their workplace. They get access to the BeUpstanding™ Champion Toolkit which provides free resources and a step-by-step easy to follow guide to help them run the program. The toolkit provides resources such as free posters, videos, and email templates to help create culture change in the workplace. From over 10 years of research, we know that in order to create change it is key to have a workplace champion leading the way. After all, one person really can make a difference! Who can be a champion? ANYONE who has the desire and capacity to run the BeUpstanding™ Program in their workplace can be a BeUpstanding™ champion! No, you do not have to be CEO or management to become a champion. As long as you have management approval, a passion to create a healthier work environment for you and your colleagues, and capacity to run the program, you’re good to go! We have had a wide variety of different champions from all types of workplaces sign up. You can check out the workplace characteristics here. Just to give you an idea… We have had champions from a…

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Benefits to heart health of reducing workplace sitting

The Evidence

We know that significant reductions in workplace sitting are achievable. But how does reducing sitting impact on workers’ health? We examined this using data from our Stand Up Victoria intervention  – a 12 month intervention in office workers that used organizational-, environmental- (including sit-stand workstations) and individual-level approaches to reduce prolonged workplace sitting time in desk-based workers. What did we do? We recruited 14 work teams and over 200 workers (136 intervention; 95 control) from the one organisation to take part in this cluster randomised controlled trial. We measured 14 biomarkers of body composition, blood pressure, glucose metabolism, lipid metabolism and a composite overall cardio-metabolic risk score in both the intervention and control participants at three time points: before the intervention, after three months of the intervention (end of the intensive intervention phase), and after 12 months. What did we find? We found a significant, beneficial intervention effect for fasting glucose and the clustered metabolic risk score at the 12 month assessment. This beneficial effect for fasting glucose was mainly due to the control group getting worse over the 12 months. There were no significant intervention effects observed at 3 months. Notably, sitting was primarily replaced with standing. What does this…

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Are competitions all they’re cracked up to be?

Tips and tools

Nowadays it seems you can sign up to a team challenge for almost anything and there is a good reason why; friendly competition is a great way to boost engagement and help maintain momentum for change. When we talked to staff and champions nearly all of them said that team competitions like stepathons and stair challenges were (or should be)  a key part of their BeUpstanding™ journey. So what’s the science behind competitions? Well, we know that peer support (or peer pressure?!)  is a key  technique for supporting behaviour change. As one staff member said I’m the type of person that needs to be reminded to do things for myself and my health. It was much easier with everyone being on board. I guess it was contagious.. in a good way What are you waiting for? Start a friendly BeUpstanding™ competition today! Sign up to the Toolkit now!

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Policies relating to occupational sedentary behaviour?

Latest evidence

Your workplace is likely to have policies regarding leave, fire safety, employment conditions, etc. etc. but what about sedentary work? Dr Pieter Coenen led a qualitative review of existing national and international occupational safety and health policies relating to occupational sedentary behaviour. He concluded that although there were no occupational authority policies that focused specifically on sedentary behaviour, there were a relevant aspects of existing policies that could be modified to address occupational sedentary behaviour. Do you have a policy addressing occupational sitting in your workplace? Please share your story with us.

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