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Personalising workplace wellness through leveraging AI

Latest evidence

Imagine your workplace as a bustling city, with each employee navigating their daily routines like vehicles on a highway. Some travel smoothly while others hit roadblocks disguised as fatigue, stress, or lack of motivation. Traditional workplace wellness is like traffic signs that provide general guidance that may not be suitable for all. Thus, the integration of AI is like a smart GPS that assesses the individual needs of the user and offers personal routes to better health. Behavioural science and AI AI can impact the operational function of workplace wellness programs by introducing interventions that are individually tailored, more engaging, and effective. A useful way to put this into context is through the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). It is a psychological model explaining how beliefs shape actions. TPB suggests that our behaviour is influenced by three main factors: Attitude Toward the Behaviour: Do I believe this health change is beneficial? Subjective Norms: Are others around me doing it too? Perceived Behavioural Control: Do I feel capable of making this change? By integrating AI into wellness programs, we can influence these factors, making it easier for adoption by employees and ensuring sustainable healthy behaviours. Personalising Wellness Programs One of AI’s…

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Educate to Elevate: The Theory Behind BeUpstanding Weeks 2 and 5

BeUpstanding Stories

Feeling foggy? You’re not alone. When we sit for too long, our blood flow and metabolism slow down. This means less oxygen is supplied to our brain and we can feel fatigued and sluggish. So why not jump up and start feeling more focused and less tired? That’s exactly what the BeUpstanding intervention is all about, especially during weeks 2 and 5, where the focus is on education and empowerment. These crucial weeks centre around the risks of prolonged sitting and the benefits of standing and moving more. But this isn’t just about throwing facts at you—it’s about strategically targeting the barriers and facilitators of behaviour change, as recommended by the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW). Let’s break down how this messaging works through the lens of the Capacity, Opportunity. Motivation (COM-B) model and the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). These frameworks have been explored in more detail on our previous blog post. Capability Understanding the risks associated with sitting too much and the benefits of being more active is one of the biggest barriers for people to sit less and stand more. Weeks 2 and 5 of the BeUpstanding intervention address this by enhancing psychological capability, with a focus on the…

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The Science Behind Getting Up: How Theory Shapes the BeUpstanding Program

Key resources

BeUpstanding encourages workers to “stand up, sit less, and move more.” This 8-week program uses a “train-the-champion” approach, equipping workplace leaders with resources like posters, videos, and email templates to promote a culture of movement, resulting in better health, higher productivity, and reduced stress. But what ensures the program’s effectiveness? The answer lies in the behavioural change theories that underpin it. In this blog, we’ll explore how theory guides intervention development and how BeUpstanding uses evidence-based frameworks. The Importance of Theory in Behaviour Change Theory is the backbone of behaviour change interventions. It helps designers understand not just the behaviour they aim to change but the context in which it occurs. For BeUpstanding, understanding why people sit at work and what motivates them to move more was crucial. Further, theories identify triggers and drivers of behaviour, guiding the selection of techniques most likely to succeed in a given context. Without theory, interventions may fail to address the root causes of the behaviour. Selecting the Right Theory Choosing the wrong theory or applying it poorly can undermine an intervention. Many interventions fail because they: Choose an unsuitable theory, Use the theory incorrectly, Reference the theory superficially, or Address too few behaviour…

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Why are workplaces wanting to BeUpstanding? Part 2: Knowledge and the Environment

BeUpstanding Stories

As part of the sign-up process to the BeUpstanding program, we ask workplace champions what they aim to achieve with the program. We have had our clever UQ psychology students analysing the responses and sorting the findings into main themes. In a previous blog article we reported on two of the most common themes, which were around improving health and wellbeing and supporting workers to sit less and move more. In this blog, Gilbert Leung examines findings around the themes of knowledge and environment. A quick recap on methods We received and analysed over three hundred responses regarding what teams hoped to achieve by taking part in BeUpstanding. Our team independently identified key response topics and grouped them into wider themes. We then came up with the final list of six themes: knowledge, behaviour, culture, health, work, and environmental change. We then coded all the responses into their corresponding themes. Some of the responses only applied to one of the themes, while some could be applied to several. We founds six key themes: This article focuses on responses around the themes of knowledge and environment. Responses themed around knowledge Do you remember how long you sat during work yesterday? Do…

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Stand Up & Stand Out for All the Right Reasons

The Evidence

Making the first move to engage in standing behaviours and to promote a standing work environment can be intimidating as your team is challenging social norms ingrained over a lifetime of seated environments. That is why week 3 of our BeUpstanding program focuses on raising awareness and challenging these social norms. While biologically speaking the human body was made to be up-and-moving, for centuries, people have spent long hours of their days working while seated – from weavers, to fletchers, to the clergy. Even though work and work spaces have evolved since then due to cultural, technological and social factors, some normative behaviours, such as prolonged work sitting, have prevailed. Social norms are the rules that dictate how a person should act in a given group. They develop over time and become hardened to the point of being subconscious. That’s why engaging in prolonged sitting at work has always felt natural for most people. But social norms are not set in stone. They can – and should – change as we become more conscious about the issues they entail. Breaking social norms can be hard and making the first move to do so can be frightening. It can be difficult…

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Achieving Social Change: How Programs Like BeUpstanding Make a Difference

The Evidence

BeUpstanding wants to help make workplaces everywhere more dynamic, active, and healthy. Built on a foundation of over ten years of research signalling the benefits of sitting less and moving more in the workplace, the BeUpstanding program was designed to change the way we work and think about our health for the better. But if we know that an “upstanding” workplace culture is a healthier workplace culture, how do we get the word out? And, maybe more importantly, how do we make it stick? Large scale behaviour change, like behavioural public health interventions, are understandably very difficult to implement—but here’s the gist. Firstly, we need to consider who we can help the most. Even though it would be great to help everyone affected, finding target populations of those particularly “at-risk” helps interventions target resources where there can be maximum benefit. Target populations are found during the research stage of program development, long before the implementation of an intervention. Our VicHealth review in 2012 helped to identify desk workers as a key target population.  Obviously, the dangers of spending most of your day sitting affect everyone, but the BeUpstanding champion toolkit particularly targets workplaces and organisations. This is where sedentary behaviour…

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Being The Best Champion For Your Workplace: Understanding The Psychology of Leadership

The Evidence

As a BeUpstanding champion, you will be leading your organisation in forming healthier habits and creating a dynamic workplace culture; but it’s no secret that taking on new leadership roles like this one can be daunting, especially if you feel as though you don’t fit the bill. Recent research suggests that just having self-doubt about your successes and leadership abilities may in turn stifle them. Findings from a study on the consequences of imposter feelings and self-doubt showed that they negatively impacted students’ ability to career plan and strive, and decreased motivation to lead in a professional working environment. Previous and more traditional psychology theories of leadership might perpetuate these imposter feelings by focusing on the “innate” qualities that all great leaders have, or a prescribed reward and punishment system that all great leaders use. For example, the Great Man theory of leadership is the idea that “leaders are born and not made”, possessing inherited qualities which make them better suited to lead (i.e. confidence or assertiveness). Transactional leadership theory, on the other hand, asserts that great leadership is determined by one’s ability to set expectations and enforce them with the effective use of rewards and punishments. These theories are…

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