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How does the workplace environment impact on movement?

Latest evidence

Just take a minute to picture the environment of your workplace. What is the layout like? Are you required to get off your seat and walk to the printer located in a shared space, or do you scoot your seat to the end of the desk to retrieve that document? Are your colleagues or the partition in your line of vision? Is your workplace your home? The environment has a key influence on behaviour – including our sedentary and physical activity behaviour. The role of the workplace environment on movement behaviour was examined in a recent study by Holmes and colleagues. Here, the associations between workplace characteristics and movement patterns were examined in a group of 271 desk-based workers in the USA. The participants were part of a broader study that was conducted between December 2017 and August 2022, so the findings cross-over the COVID-19 period. They examined both physical workplace characteristics, such as the placement of office equipment, stairs, elevators, and access to common areas, as well as social characteristics, such as face-to-face interactions and workplace socialising. The workplace characteristics were measured by questionnaire, while the movement patterns were measured by an activPAL – which is a device attached to…

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Can we transfer what works in the office to the home work environment?

Latest evidence

COVID-19 has brought about massive shifts in working practices resulting in many employees now working at home/remote working at least some days of the week. While there have now been a number of studies addressing prolonged sitting at the workplace, how these strategies translate to the home work environment is less well understood.  An article titled ‘What works to reduce sedentary behavior in the office, and could these intervention components transfer to the home working environment?: A rapid review and transferability appraisal’ was recently published in Frontiers in sports and active living to help understand this issue. The aim of the review was to build on existing evidence to identify what works to reduce sedentary behaviour in an office environment, and consider whether these could be transferrable to support employees working at home. The results of a systematic search of databases CENTRAL, MEDLINE, Embase, PsycInfo, CINHAL, and SportDiscus from 10 August 2017 to 6 September 2021 were added to the references included in a 2018 Cochrane review of office based sedentary interventions. Informed by the Behavior Change Wheel, the most commonly used intervention functions and behavior change techniques were identified from the extracted data. Finally, a sample of common intervention strategies were…

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Champion Insights – How BeUpstanding has Impacted Workplace Culture

BeUpstanding Stories

The BeUpstanding program was developed to support work teams to address the emergent work health and safety issue of excessive sitting.  Through taking part in the program, it is hoped that the various strategies teams implement to sit less and move more in the workplace lead to sustainable changes in their organisation and create a culture where sitting less and moving more is the norm. In order to evaluate the impact of BeUpstanding, champions taking part in the national trial of BeUpstanding complete a survey through the online toolkit at three timepoints in the trial – prior to launching the program, upon completion of the 8-week program, and 12 months after launching the program. Champions also take part in a phone call with a member of the BeUpstanding team at these same time points and are asked a series of questions about their experience. During their 12-month sustainability phone call with a BeUpstanding team member, champions were asked the following question about their workplace; “To what extent do you feel the workplace culture and norms have changed to support sitting less and moving more?” Here are some of their responses: “We include the BeUpstanding program as part of our induction…

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How supportive are Australian workplaces for sitting less and moving more?

BeUpstanding Stories

The BeUpstanding program is about supporting desk-based workers to sit less and move more. However, sitting and moving behaviour at work is influenced by a lot of different things besides individual preferences, including job roles and tasks, the social environment (including whether other people are regularly up and about), policies (such as flexible work hours), and the physical environment (such as access to safe and well-lit stairs). To be able to design effective strategies to encourage desk-based workers to ‘sit less and move more’, there is the need to not only understand what factors influence sitting and activity time at work, but also their availability within workplaces. For example, it is not much use designing an intervention around centralising printers if nearly all workplaces have already done that, or have gone paperless. What did we do? As part of the BeUpstanding program, we ask workplace champions to complete an audit of their workplace. The audit asks about the presence (or not) of a range of factors to support sitting less and moving more. We recently published an article reporting on the audit findings from 291 champions (representing 230 organisations) who had completed the workplace audit.  We looked at the prevalence…

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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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Benefits of Walking to Work

The Evidence

By Anna Rasmussen On the 4th October it was Diabetes Australia Walk to Work Day. Walking has become an integral part of my daily routine. I spend between two and ten hours each week walking to and from destinations including university or the hospital where I study, the weekend markets, or the shops. The World Health Organisation has acknowledged active transport as a way to improve global environmental and health outcomes. My motivations are primarily to benefit my physical and mental health, but walking has other benefits such as being non-polluting, posing little danger to others, saving money, and, perhaps mostly importantly, I enjoy it. I am, however, one of the minority in Australia that uses walking as their main form of transit. The 2016 Census found that 69% Australian commuters travelled to work by car, and another 5% as car passengers, while 9% used public transport, 1% cycled, 4% walked, and 4% used multiple methods. This is largely consistent with rates from 2011, with a 0.5% rise in driving a car and a 0.7% increase in train use, while cycling and walking declined 0.1% and 0.3% respectively. Furthermore, infrastructure and culture is becoming increasingly car-centric. This is not to…

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How Can Using a Standing Desk Affect Your Productivity

Bite size facts

This article is re-posted from a Sedentary Behaviour Research Network blog post on 3rd July 2019. Recently, research into the topic of excessive sitting, or “sedentary behaviour”, has been making headlines. The risk for chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, that comes with high levels of sitting is becoming more evident (1). Office workers represent a population that spend a significant amount of time in sedentary pursuits as a consequence of their occupation (2). As more research is being published on the topic, many workplaces are seeking non-sedentary alternatives and solutions to the traditional office environment to keep their employees as healthy and productive as possible. One such solution has been the implementation of activity-permissive workstations. Activity-permissive, or alternative, workstations replace a worker’s traditional desk and are broadly categorized into either standing desks or dynamic workstations. Standing desks allow for a worker to stand while performing a task (e.g., typing, clerical work), and can be installed as additions to an existing workstation, or as height-adjustable replacement units (see Figure 1). Dynamic workstations are designed to allow for activity or movement while working, and include a variety of alternative workstations, such as: treadmill desks, cycling desks, and dynamic sitting desks…

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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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