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New report examines occupational sitting and mental health in young people

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A new report, funded by Wellcome, explores the potential health risks associated with high levels of occupational sitting and methods to reduce excessive sitting in the workplace or home working environment. Below is a summary of the report, taken from here. A full summary of the report can be found here, while a summary presentation of our key findings can be found here, and a podcast can be found here. BeUpstanding investigators David Dunstan and Genevieve Healy were co-authors on the report, which was led by Aaron Kandola. Full author list: Aaron Kandola, Jessica Rees, Brendon Stubbs, David W Dunstan, Genevieve N Healy, Joseph F Hayes Background Due to the rising prevalence of desk-based work, excessive sitting represents an emerging occupational health and safety issue. Employed adults are typically sitting for over 9 hours per day. Spending large periods of the day seated with insufficient active breaks increases the risk of several physical and mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety disorders. Allowing or facilitating excessive sitting in the workplace can affect employees’ mental health and compromise the duty of care between an employer and employee. Combatting excessive occupational sitting with regular breaks involving light activity for a couple of…

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What does and doesn’t work in gamification?

Latest evidence

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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How do office spatial environments influence sitting time and face-to-face interactions?

Latest evidence

Many people now work in office-based jobs, which can be highly sedentary. As high levels of sitting time are associated with increased mortality and chronic disease risk, there has been increasing interest in effective strategies to reduce sitting in workplaces. The spatial design of office environments may potentially influence sitting and other workplace behaviours. For example, people may sit more if they do not have other places to visit within the workplace, such as discussion spaces and meeting rooms. Office spatial design may also influence the frequency of informal face-to-face interactions with work colleagues by providing suitable places for conversations. Face-to-face interactions are considered important for improving the performance of knowledge-based workplaces. Given that workplace sedentary behaviour and face-to-face interactions may be associated with workplace health and productivity outcomes, identifying modifiable office spatial factors that can influence these behaviours can inform better office design. We conducted a systematic review to synthesise the evidence on links between office spatial design factors with workplace sitting and informal face-to-face interactions. What did we do? We searched six databases in November 2019 (before the COVID-19 pandemic began) for peer-reviewed articles that examined associations of office spatial design attributes with sitting or face-to-face interactions. We excluded…

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Using gamification to help workers sit less and move more

Latest evidence

Here at team BeUpstanding we are always looking for new ways to support workers to sit less and move more. You may have already read some previous blogs on this subject, like this article on mobile apps. In this next part of the blog series, Duncan Robertson, a final year UQ Bachelor of Health Science student, explores how gamification may be used to support behaviour change in the workplace. Read about his findings below. Diving into the literature To build a greater understanding of how gamification in the workplace works I took a deep dive into the literature. From thousands of results, 42 pieces of literature with value were found across nine databases, ranging from peer reviewed academic papers to grey literature, such as blog articles and opinion pieces. These were categorised into a table and colour coded based on the usefulness of each paper with green being most useful, yellow as average, red as not so much and grey aptly being used to designate any grey literature included. The search mainly focused on the term’s ‘gamification’, ‘workplace’ and ‘physical activity’. Several variations of aforementioned search terms were used to find specific points of data including ‘sedentary behaviour’ ‘usefulness’, ‘effectiveness’,…

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Health Apps: The solution for a healthier lifestyle?

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These days there’s just about an app for everything, so what about an app that helps improve your health at the reach of your back pocket? One of the marvels of the 21st century, the smartphone has come to the limelight and with it, the plethora of mobile applications, or “apps” accessible at our fingertips. These days there’s just about an app for everything, setting your alarms, tracking your diet, searching the news, playing games; you name it, you got it. In the public health sphere, apps have also become an increasing area of interest, and at team BeUpstanding we have been exploring whether they might be a useful next step for helping work teams sit less and move more. At face value, mobile apps represent a very accessible and potentially cost-effective way of delivering health information and perhaps even more. As a result, there has been a boom in research regarding mobile applications and their effects on health outcomes. This article, written by Jason Lin as part his placement with the BeUpstanding team, provides a brief overview of the current evidence for mobile applications and what we might be able to look forward to in years to come. Scoping…

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BeUpstanding features in a podcast

BeUpstanding Stories

Dr Ana Goode and A/Prof Genevieve Healy – the lead investigators on BeUpstanding – featured on the latest episode of the Physical Activity Researcher podcast – a Finnish initiative. They discuss the evidence that underpins BeUpstanding, the impact of COVID-19 on the program, and some simple strategies workplaces can do right away to start sitting less and moving more. Enjoy!

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Developing a workplace culture when working remotely

Latest evidence

During the recent COVID-19 outbreak, the Australian government had implemented social isolation in an effort to flatten the curve. Many office-based employees were encouraged to work from home in order to minimize the risk of individual’s exposure to COVID-19 through face to face contact. While working from home is reasonably practicable with the current available technology, this is often associated with a shift in workplace culture. Critical to maintaining a successful workplace culture is ensuring that there is knowledge sharing among employees. What is a knowledge-sharing culture?  A knowledge-sharing culture is a set of understandings that focus on disseminating existing knowledge among team members and bringing new knowledge from the external environment. It is a set of unwritten guidelines that promotes sharing knowledge, experiences, and insights that are critical for accomplishing team missions. The key elements in knowledge sharing are not only the hardware and software, but also the ability and willingness of team members to actively participate in the knowledge sharing process. Why it is important: Shared understanding is a collective way of ensuring organisation relevant knowledge, and can influence the ability of teams to cooperate and perform well. The internet enables knowledge exchange in ways such as online group…

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Health impacts of sedentary behaviour interventions: new evidence

Latest evidence

One of the questions that we are frequently asked is about the health impacts of supporting adults to stand up, sit less and move more. Our team has just published a systematic review and meta-analysis examining this question in relation to indicators of heart and metabolic health in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The group of lead authors have written a blog article for the Sedentary Behaviour Research Network, which we have reprinted below. Sedentary behaviour interventions in real-world conditions: what are the health benefits? In recent years, interventions to reduce sedentary behaviour in various settings, including the workplace, have become quite prevalent, in recognition of the potential risks of sedentary behaviour to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Systematic reviews evaluating their success have concluded that they do reduce sedentary behaviour, to varying degrees, but so far have yet to determine the extent to which these ‘real-world’ interventions provide the health parameters such as have been reported for acute laboratory interventions. Accordingly, we conducted an extensive systematic review with meta-analyses of interventions targeting sedentary behaviour in free-living conditions for ≥7 days, alone or combined with physical activity. We specifically focused on their effectiveness for adults on biomarkers of cardiometabolic risk, particularly those related to body anthropometry, blood…

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How to BeUpstanding by Cutting the Commute

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The 40-hour work week, a staple of modern office employment, is seldom questioned. In an article for the Canadian publication The Globe and Mail, author Cynthia McQueen asks us, in the age of the videoconferencing and interconnectedness though the internet of things why do we commute at all? The cost of a rigid 9-5 day is measured financially. The author cites a University of Guelph study that found a personal financial boon of between 8,800-23900 $CAD/year saved by eschewing the daily commute. Commuting, as the author points out also costs us time. While BeUpstanding Champions focus on harnessing the increased productivity of movement in the office, the time commuting by car to our places of work remains intractably sedentary. Should the saved commuting time of a flexible workplace be put towards movement the author points out, research shows a potential reduction in sick days by a stunning 27%. The Conference Board of Canada estimated that in 2012 alone workplace absences cost 16.6 billion CAD. In light of the mounting evidence it is no wonder that the majority of Canadian workplaces now offer some form of flexible work contract. With the mounting burden of evidence available to employers it isn’t hard…

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