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Surprising Data on the Cost of Sitting in the UK

The Evidence

Get Britain Standing’s page on costs of prolonged sitting for the employer has some surprising facts. The page breaks these down into three categories absenteeism, presenteeism, and costs to engagement and wellbeing. What is presenteeism you may ask? I’m sure we’ve all felt it before. I can recall showing up to work feeling “out of it.” Even when employees are present the tolls of prolonged sitting can impact the quality and quantity of work. Absenteeism is easier to quantify. Average sized employers (250 persons) loose an estimated 4800 GBP/week due to absences with all businesses forgoing a total of 15 billion GBP annually. Of this 1/3rd (5 billion GBP) is due to low back pain, an ailment directly related to sedentary behaviour. The financial boon of wellness programs in part accounts for their eager adoption overseas and here in Australia. Trades Union Congress (TUC) of Britain estimates that wellness programs can reduce absences by as much as 42%. Reorienting the workplace to support dynamic movement with sit-stand desks, walking meetings, and active breaks may seem daunting to employers but resources like Get Britain Standing and Australia’s own BeUpstanding have the tools to get your workplace started. This article was written…

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How to be a Safety Champion

Bite size facts

This month is Safe Work Month and the theme is Be a Safety Champion. Comcare hosted a series of regional events to mark Safe Work Month, with BeUpstanding featuring as an exemplar of a program that uses a train-the-champion model. You can download and view the presentations from here. One of the key things to help you be a safety champion is good work design. It is important to consider health and safety issues when designing work as this can help to eliminate hazards and manage risks. Effective design of good work considers: the work work systems the physical working environment the workers. Taking into account these things can help improve performance, job satisfaction and productivity. Take a look the Handbook – Principles of Good Work Design* to learn about the ten principles to good work design. Hierarchy of control The hierarchy of control can help identify ways to eliminate or minimise risks to health and safety. The most effective control is to eliminate the risk. However, if that is not possible, working through the hierarchy helps to find the most effective measure. For sitting less and moving more at work, substitution and redesign strategies could include provide high table options in meeting rooms…

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Safe Work Month – Free Community Breakfast

Key events

This October is National Safe Work Month, an initiative of Safe Work Australia. Safe Work Month focuses on asking workers and employers across Australia to commit to building safe and healthy workplaces for all Australians. To launch Safe Work Month, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland are hosting a free breakfast on Wednesday 2 October 2019 at King George Square, Ann St, Brisbane from 7am to 9:30am. There will be free food, lucky draw prizes and giveways, cooking demonstrations and more. The BeUpstanding team will also be there to talk to you about how your workplace can sit less and move more and you can even sign up to be a BeUpstanding Champion on the day. We hope to see you there!

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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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Six Strategies For Sitting Less

The Evidence

Six Strategies for Sitting Less Scratching your head on how your team can BeUpstanding? A recent study by Hadgraft and colleagues and published in the journal BMC Public Health, explored office workers attitudes around reducing workplace sitting. They also sought out workers opinions on a variety of strategies aimed at reducing occupational sitting, which were commonly identified from previous workplace interventions, and their perceived barriers to achieving this in the workplace.  A number of strategies were viewed as acceptable and likely to be adopted by workers with some of the strategies addressing multiple influences on sitting and catering to a range of different jobs and preferences.  Why not give some of the strategies a try in your workplace! Make use of standing meeting. Sick of sitting through endless meetings? Look to change it up by changing your posture. A standing meeting can be used for a quick check in with the team, while putting stand and stretch breaks into the agenda can help your team reset and refocus. Why not step it up by having a walking meeting for those one-on-one catch ups! Communicating face-to-face. Whenever there’s a short message to be conveyed to a co-worker, employees can tell the…

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Standing Up To Sedentary Working

Latest evidence

The following article was written by Sophie O’Connell and published in Occupational Health and Wellbeing on the 7th June 2019. The modern world and the constant pursuit of technological growth have almost eliminated the need for movement in our daily lives. While commuting we sit in our cars or on the bus; at work we sit at our computers or in meetings; during our leisure time we sit watching TV, playing computer games or socialising with friends. Because of technology advancements we do not even need to leave the comfort of our own homes to socialise, stay in touch with friends and family, to shop, to work or even be entertained on a screen. This means that, on average, Brits spend around 9.5 hours a day spent sitting. Typically, the amount of time spent sedentary each day increases with age. In working-age adults much of this sitting is done at work. Evidence shows that office-based workers spend around 75% of their working day sitting, with a third of sitting time being done for a prolonged period. Many of us are guilty of spending time sitting for extended periods due to work, travel or various social commitments. But with the growing…

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What is the link between Stress, Team Cohesion, and BeUpstanding™?

Latest evidence

At team BeUpstanding™, we are not only interested in how our program impacts on raising awareness, building culture, and changing behaviour to support workers to stand up, sit less, and move more, but also on its broader impact on health, productivity and wellbeing. The following blog is written by Jemieca Loeffler who undertook her honours with the BeUpstanding™ team here at the University of Queensland. She worked with some of our amazing champions and teams taking part in BeUpstanding™ to find out in a bit more detail if there was any impact of the program on occupational stress and group cohesion. What she found was that the more stressed employees were and the more cohesive they felt with their team, the less time they spent sitting at work and the more likely they were to engage in BeUpstanding™.  Sound interesting? Read below to find out more! Some background info As we know, prolonged sitting can be detrimental for our health, and many of us fall victim to this public health concern through our jobs. A study by Thorpe et al. showed that call centre workers, in particular, are at highest risk of sedentariness, spending up to 90% of their work day sitting,…

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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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Healthier Workplaces WA BeUpstanding Lunch ‘N’ Learn

News and Events

Check out this amazing Lunch ‘N’ Learn seminar that Healthier Workplace WA held in November. It was led by Leon Straker who is a professor of Physiotherapy at the School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science at Curtin University. As an expert in the field, Leon provides a thorough review of the benefits of moving more and sitting less, and the dangers of too much sitting. He also gives a great overview of the BeUpstanding™ Champion Toolkit, what it means to take part in BeUpstanding™, and how you can start your BeUpstanding™ journey today. Lunch ‘N’ Learn seminars are a fun and engaging way to educate the workforce about the benefits of taking part in BeUpstanding™. They can also help people understand how the initiative can fit into their workplace. If you hold a session like this please share it with us! We love to hear your experiences and feedback so we can learn from you!

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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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