We have so many amazing teams and champions taking part in BeUpstanding. Check out our latest team profile from the awesome team at BreastScreen North Brisbane.
The impact of COVID-19 on staff taking part in BeUpstanding
In a previous article, we looked at how COVID-19 had impacted champions implementing the BeUpstanding program in the workplace. The snapshot survey found that working from a home environment, team communication, keeping staff motivated and increased workload during COVID-19 were the biggest challenges to implementing the program. Since COVID-19, 56% of champions reported their team had temporarily paused the program. In this article, we examine the impacts of COVID-19 on staff. Data were from a survey we sent in May 2020 to staff participating in the BeUpstanding program. The survey asked about sitting and activity behaviours, working arrangements, and health and wellbeing now and before COVID-19. Only staff whose teams were participating in the national implementation trial of the program, and who had already completed the needs assessment element of the program, were eligible. A total of 38 survey responses were received and are reported on below. Working Arrangements On average, staff worked approximately 40 hours/week before and during COVID-19. While there was no significant change in work hours, there was a major transition from working in the office to working from home with 97% working mostly or completely at the workplace pre COVID-19 and 87% reporting working mostly or…
New report examines occupational sitting and mental health in young people
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…
Tips from Champions for running a health and wellbeing program with a remote working team
With staff moving to working more from home as a result of COVID-19, this can present additional challenges to running health and well-being programs within a workplace. We have had many workplaces contact us to ask whether they can still implement BeUpstanding if staff are not located in the office or onsite and the good news is YES! BeUpstanding is designed to be able to be implemented with your staff no matter where they are working from and we have had many BeUpstanding champions who have successfully taken part in the program during the last few months whilst dealing with changes to staff working locations. Two of these champions share their experience below with running the program in their workplace before and during COVID-19 imposed changes, and provide insights and tips for how they were successfully able to engage staff in the program and encourage them to sit less and move more while “at” work. Our two Champions are Sabrina from CheckUp in Brisbane and Matthew from Breakthru in Sydney. How did COVID-19 affect your workplace? Sabrina: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, all CheckUP staff began working remotely from home throughout the course of the pandemic. In terms of…
3 Tips from a Health Coach to Staying Active and Healthy when Working From Home
One of the biggest problems from working at home can be inactivity. There’s no walking to get a cup of coffee, visiting a nearby colleague, taking the stairs to the bathroom or those incidental types of activity that come from being in a workplace with people and areas spread out. Everything is within easy reach at home. Couple that with a busy workload and this can mean sitting for as long as possible until the task is done. Suddenly hours have gone by and we’re still sitting hunched over the desk. Remaining in one posture for hours at a time can affect the muscles in your back, neck, hip flexors, hamstrings and calves. Excessive sitting can affect your metabolism, increase blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Staying active when working from home may seem easy. Without the daily commute and perhaps having more flexibility in your working hours, surely being at home affords you more time to spend on exercise? Whilst this may be true in theory, we may quickly fall into routines that do not prioritise healthy activity and the boundaries between work and personal life become blurred. The best…
Suddenly Sedentary: How I Learned to Move More in Medical School
A personal story of sitting less and moving more by Connor Soles Before coming to Queensland to study in the Doctor of Medicine program I considered myself an active person. I commuted by bicycle to my then-job as a medical scribe where I followed physicians into consultations and composed hospital charts on a mobile workstation. The hustle and bustle of the Emergency Department meant that I would cherish the rare moments that I would roll to a stop near the physicians alcove, cleverly positioned adjacent to the insta-coffee machine, and slump into a swivel chair to polish my notes. I had never experienced what it was like to be chained to a workstation seated, unmoving, for long periods of time before beginning medical school, and I’d never had to learn how not to be. In my newly (half) furnished apartment (in Brisbane) I found that I could not escape our IKEA table turned desk, which was the only assembled piece of furniture aside from the couch. As a medical student studying now consumed and overwhelmed the majority of my waking hours, that and maintaining my relationship with my fiance who had accompanied me to Australia, left little time for my…
How You Can Sit Less and Move More When Working From Home
These days many workplaces have flexible working arrangements that enable staff to work from home (telecommute) one or more days a week. Telecommuting can reduce business expenses significantly and increase employee satisfaction and productivity. The advantages for staff working from home are many: You can wear comfy clothes A custom environment with as little or as much noise as you like It’s easier to make calls No office distractions Zero commuting Save money However, even when you are working from home, the majority of your time is likely to still be spent sitting at a desk or table. Our main reaction to a busy workload is to sit for as long as possible until the task is done. Before you know it, hours have gone by and you have not moved from your chair. Excessive sitting can affect your metabolism, including your blood sugars and fats, putting you at increased risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Remaining in one posture for hours at a time can also affect the muscles in your back, neck, hip flexors, hamstrings and calves. Here are some tips to sitting less and moving more on your telecommuting days: Take regular breaks during your day to…
How are teams choosing to BeUpstanding?
A critical part of the BeUpstanding program is choosing three strategies as a team to BeUpstanding. Some of our previous blog posts have provided suggestions from the evidence for strategies to sit less and gain momentum for change. But what have our BeUpstanding teams been doing? Below are some of the more common strategies teams have chosen to date. Encourage workers to leave their desks during breaks Move bins, printers/scanners and mailboxes to a central location Have standing meetings Stand and move around when taking a phone call Provide information / maps / distances on convenient walks in and around the office Put height-adjustable desks in a standing position when leaving the desk Put stand and stretch breaks into meeting agendas Other strategies we have heard of teams adopting and think are great are: Stand up and shake it off. This was in a work environment where team members regularly experienced difficult phone calls. By standing up and shaking it off, it not only allowed the individual to experience the benefits of breaking up their sitting time, but also provided a non-verbal signal to other team members to check in. KPI bingo: Here, the team picked a key word (e.g., KPI)…
An Exercise Regimen Everyone Can Squeeze In
The following article was written by Emmanuel Stamatakis and published in The Conversation on the 21st February 2019. Have you recently carried heavy shopping bags up a few flights of stairs? Or run the last 100 metres to the station to catch your train? If you have, you may have unknowingly been doing a style of exercise called high-intensity incidental physical activity. Our paper, published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, shows this type of regular, incidental activity that gets you huffing and puffing is likely to produce health benefits, even if you do it in 30-second bursts, spread over the day. In fact, incorporating more high intensity activity into our daily routines – whether that’s by vacuuming the carpet with vigour or walking uphill to buy your lunch – could be the key to helping all of us get some high quality exercise each day. And that includes people who are overweight and unfit. What is high intensity exercise? Until recently, most health authorities prescribed activity lasting for at least ten continuous minutes, although there was no credible scientific evidence behind this. This recommendation was recently refuted by the 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Report. The new…