Background
Methods
Organisations
Organisation and size | Industry |
n
| Gender (% women) | Age median (min-max) | % Managers | Occupational sitting time (hr) Median (min-max)a |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Organisation 1 250– < 500 employees | Not for profit charity | 7 | 71 % | 36 (23–52) | 43 % | 7.2 (4.2–8.0) |
Organisation 2 > 30,000 employees | Retail | 9 | 44 % | 43 (25–62) | 44 % | 8.1 (6.4–9.5) |
Organisation 3 < 50 employees | Information Technology | 4 | 25 % | 29 (27–32) | 75 % | 6.6 (4.0–8.8) |
Total | 20 | 50 % | 36 (23–62) | 50 % | 7.2 (4.0–9.5) |
Participants
Procedures
Introductory questions | To start, could you please briefly tell me a bit about your role, including the types of tasks you do on a typical day? |
Is your job predominately desk-based? | |
Do many staff in your organisation have predominately desk-based jobs? (managers) | |
Current workplace activity | Is your desk adjustable to allow you to move from a sitting to a standing posture? |
Does your workplace provide staff with desks that are adjustable to enable them to move from a sitting to a standing posture? (managers) | |
If so, what are the criteria for getting one of these desks?
| |
How satisfied are you with the proportion of time you spend sitting, standing and moving in the workplace? | |
Barriers and facilitators to reducing workplace sitting | Thinking about your current job and the existing policies and procedures within your workplace, can you identify anything that would make it difficult for you to reduce how much time you spent sitting at work? (employees) |
Does the workplace culture influence how much time you spend sitting or how often you take breaks?
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Thinking about the sorts of jobs that people do and the existing policies and procedures within your organisation can you identify anything that would make it difficult for staff to reduce how much time they spend sitting at work? (managers) | |
Does the physical environment, such as access to furniture and the facilities, influence how much time staff spend sitting?
| |
Can you suggest any way that your job could be altered to assist you to sit less and move more throughout the day? (employees only) | |
Are there any tasks that you could perform away from your desk?
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Strategies to reduce workplace sitting | Can you please tell me about any strategies your organisation has implemented that encourage workers to move more and sit less during the workday? |
Are you aware of any other strategies that people in your workplace might be able to use to reduce sitting time at work?
For example:
-Standing or walking meetings -Computer prompts to reminder you to take a break -Walking to communicate with a co-worker Are these strategies that you have mentioned likely to be broadly feasible and acceptable in your workplace? | |
Which of these strategies would be most/least likely to be feasible?
| |
Productivity | I am now interested to know whether you think these strategies would have any impact on productivity within your workplace? |
In particular, do you think these would affect:
-Task completion and work flow -Communication -Collaboration | |
Organisational influences | What level of priority do you think your organisation places on reducing sitting time at work? |
Do you think there should be less or more priority given to reducing sitting time?
| |
How important do you think it is for employees to have “permission” from management to break up prolonged sitting or reduce their sitting time? |
Analysis
Results
Key themes
Barriers to reducing workplace sitting
It would be hard because we’re so email based. A lot of our work comes via email so I don’t think there’d be a way to reduce that [sitting] because that’s just the nature of the beast. E2: female employee, 40–49y
It’s just, like, you have to get it done by a certain time. If you take 5 or 6 breaks in between, that 2 or 3 minutes is quite valuable. M20: female manager, 30–39y
I think you can definitely get distracted and just caught up in your work. ‘Cause like sometimes I’ll look at the time and I’m like, “how is it 4 o’clock?” and I’ve realised I haven’t gone outside all day. E6: female employee, 20–29y
I think we’ve evolved from paper to IT which has sort of hindered us from all that other stuff we used to do like walk around and talk to people. M20: female manager, 30–39yI guess another barrier is actually the way I’ve learnt my job and the way I should do things, is to have everything in writing, so you know you do spend time when you could speak to someone to make sure it’s all confirmed, it’s all in writing, it’s all backed up. E5: male employee, 20–29y
But I guess there’s also that people don’t want to stand out, people don’t want to look like, you know, they’re different from the rest of their peers. E5: male employee, 20–29yMy gut feeling is that if no one else was standing then you probably wouldn’t? We do tend to copy one another’s behaviour I think. E10: female employee, 30–39y
…probably anybody who’s standing needs to talk about why they’re doing it, like, “Why am I standing? Oh, I’m trying to get healthy, I’m trying to reduce my chance of injury, stretch my back, I want to be more active.” If they can explain the why to others then it’s more likely the other people are likely to do it as well, buy into that vision. M11: male manager, 30–39y
Or maybe if there’s a couple of people that are, I guess, commissioned to use that [standing workstation] for a certain amount of time so it becomes more of a workplace norm rather than an outlier or someone doing something real random thing out there. E5: male employee, 20-29y
[Organisation] does have some standing desks that we all share but they’re not actually very configurable for your own personal ergonomics which is one reason that I don’t use them ‘cause I get a sore wrist within minutes of using it. So I don’t really find that an option for me. E10: female employee, 30–39yI can go over to the standing zone and stand for a bit, and I do that some times. Not as much as some of the others, but I find I’m less efficient there without my screen. I’m sure I’d be able to manage, but I feel like I can get a lot more done on my big screen. E1: male employee, 20–29y
Strategies to reduce workplace sitting
Strategy | Feasibility and acceptability | Quote/s |
---|---|---|
Height-adjustable/standing desks | Most participants were supportive of height-adjustable desks as a strategy to reduce sitting time, however noted that cost was the main factor influencing the feasibility of providing them to all staff. Factors influencing the feasibility of existing standing or height-adjustable “hot desks” included design issues, such as configurability to suit individual ergonomic and work needs, and location. | You have to be careful because when you say reduce sitting, people immediately think about stand up desks. And I am conscious that we are a not for profit organisation, so it’s not feasible. M20: female manager, 30–39y. |
There are standing desk areas but then you have to take your laptop, go and stand there and you don’t have the big monitor, you don’t have your own set up and everything. M13: female manager, 30-39y | ||
Centralised facilities (e.g. bins, printers) | All three organisations had centralised facilities to some degree (printers and/or bins). This didn’t always seem to lead to frequent interruptions from sitting as some participants admitted to saving up jobs so they only had to make one trip. | But usually I just keep a little pile on my desk and at the end when it starts annoying me at the end of the day or at the middle I go and discard it. E7: female employee, 20–29y |
Communicating face-to-face | All three organisations encouraged in-person communication to varying degrees as it was perceived to be beneficial for collaboration and relationship-building. However, time pressures and the need to have conversations recorded in writing often acted as barriers to carrying this out. | If you need to, you go and speak to the person but sometimes it’s easier to write people an email ‘cause then you’ve got a document trail as to what’s been discussed. E2: female employee, 40–49y |
Standing meetings | Standing meetings occurred in parts of all three organisations, mostly for shorter, progress or catch up meetings. These were generally considered to be acceptable and feasible, although generally only if most people were standing. Standing meetings were considered by managers to also have a business benefit through encouraging shorter meetings. Office furniture (i.e. seated desks in meeting rooms) was seen as a barrier to longer standing meetings. One organisation had previously had height-adjustable meeting room tables which were perceived to have been acceptable. | The aim is if you sat around a table and had that meeting it would be 1 h of sitting versus 10 min of standing and the movement before and afterwards. Which encourages people to get straight to the point. So there’s a business, a benefit to that meeting, a business benefit and outcome, and there’s also a physical one as well. M11: male manager, 30–39y |
There are some people who are a bit weirded out when a couple of people are standing in the meeting room and others aren’t. M17: male manager, 30–39y | ||
Prompts to reduce sitting (such as a specific software program or calendar reminders) | There were mixed views about prompts to reduce sitting. While some participants thought they would be a feasible way to break up sitting, others thought they would get irritating. | That’s something easy to implement ‘cause you can literally just put it in people’s calendars and it will come up with a prompt…That’s probably sort of like a small change but could make a big difference. E6: female employee, 20–29y |
Yeah well, the thing is you override it. So if I’m in the middle of trying to work out some finance numbers I’m not going to get up I’ll just override it. M20: female manager, 30–39y | ||
Walking meetings | Walking meetings were not widely carried out, nor considered to be particularly feasible, apart from less formal, 1-on-1 catch up meetings. | One of our managers…sometimes he might walk to the shop and there’s a meeting as he walks along. But I don’t know that it’s actually, if you like, encouraged or anything like that…I think maybe it’s a time issue more than anything with him. E4: male employee, 60–69y |
Knowledge and awareness raising | Some participants believed that education and awareness about the health impacts of excessive sitting and potential strategies could potentially be helpful as part of a broader intervention. Some organisational leaders thought that a broader communication campaign around excessive sitting could be considered. | Yeah, I think it’s so normal to sit down throughout your whole day that people think it’s fine. If people knew that it wasn’t as great as… if they were educated about it. A bit like smoking cigarettes, before people knew it was bad for you, everyone did it. E5: male employee, 20–29y |
Activity trackers, smart phone apps, competitions | A few participants suggested that activity trackers (such as pedometers) or smart phone apps that provided real-time feedback on behaviour could be helpful in motivating people to reduce their sitting. It was also suggested that this could assist in creating a discussion around sitting less and moving more. However, the sustainability of these approaches was questioned. | I suppose the other thing with this steps [competition]… it’s okay at the beginning but sometimes it drops off. You know, once the excitement etc. is all gone by the by. E4: male employee, 60–69y |
We don’t have any bins at desks so all staff need to go to a central location to put rubbish in a bin. The intention was that people would do that regularly but now what we’re finding is people.... they have a mound of rubbish that sits there for a week and they go to the bin once. Great. Good idea, but in reality it doesn’t quite work. M19: male manager, 30–39y
There are some parts of the organisation that still do have standing meetings and it’s literally that kind of, the more traditional standing meeting of, this is going to be a five minute meeting… we’re going to talk about what’s really important and we’re not going to bring all our wads of stuff with us. M18: female manager, 50–59yI guess it really depends what type of meeting it is and whether you’re like, taking notes and stuff like that. If it’s a meeting where it’s just an update, happy to stand, but if it’s a meeting where you’re like, really concentrating and taking notes, I think it’s sort of difficult to be standing. E6: female employee, 20–29y
As much as we encourage more conversation and just getting up and walking and talking, it’s very easy just to get stuck and time passes and the day’s gone and we’ve been sitting all day. M14: male manager, 40–49y
There are some jobs where you are chained to the desk because it’s all data entry and in that space maybe the different challenge is the leader creating those times and space to actually physically remove people from that space. M18: female manager, 50–59yWe from time to time need to check things in the filing room so we need to get up and go there, but yeah, it’s maybe breaking up the job a bit more too. If we had, I guess, other tasks that involved getting up for a period of time that would probably help as well. E8: male employee, 40–49y
There are some wonderful standing desks on the market but they’re also prohibitively expensive…it’s just not attainable for us as a small business. M11: male manager, 30–39y
I reckon if we were to talk again in 12 to 18 months I’d be telling you that we had a lot more standing workstations. M14: male manager, 40–49y
I’ve seen organisations with the best standing desks on the market but no one stands at them, they just sit there down the whole time. M11: male manager, 30-39yCertainly I think sit to stand workstations are great to a point, but I think there’s still that opportunity to get people physically moving. M18: female manager, 50–59y
We’ve also had people use them 100 % or 90 % of the time and they then have issues because they’re standing up all the time. So there is a.... there’s got to be a balance between how these things are used. M19: male manager, 30–39y
I’ve often thought, “oh what I should do is bring in a little alarm clock to prompt me that I’ve been sitting here too long”. And as I said earlier on, sometimes I get focused on what I’m doing and I forget the fact that I’ve been sitting here too long. So a prompt I think would be useful. E4: male employee, 60–69yOne of the challenges I think with that is, depending on the work you’re doing, you’re sometimes on a roll. And you don’t want the interruption, or when it comes up it will break the train of thought so it’s a bit hard to know what will work for everyone. I think that sort of thing would probably work for a number of people, I’m not sure it would work for everyone. M17: male manager, 30–39y
Overarching perceptions around addressing workplace sitting
Ultimately you, the employee, controls how often you take a break, if you work your hours, if you go home on time, so it is your own initiative. E7: female employee, 20–29yYou can’t force people to get up and move around. You can only do so much. M19: male manager, 30–39y
I think as individuals we never do anything unless we’re actually held on to it by other people. M12: male manager, 20-29y
It’s still seen as a bit of, “oh that’s a bit of a luxury”, whereas if they were more widespread I think that would be less the case. M18: female manager, 50–59y
Sit to stand workstation is something that everybody wants all of a sudden, it’s great, it’s the “it” thing. Use it for a week or so and then it ends up in down position and everybody’s sitting back down and not used. M19: male manager, 30–39y
If you’ve just sat at your desk all day you can really feel, like when you leave to go home you’re just like, “oh I’m really sore” or I just feel really lethargic because I’ve just been inside looking at a computer screen all day. E6: female employee, 20–29y
The hardest thing is actually linking back the benefits of why you should be moving more. I think that’s a really hard message to get across. You’re not going to break a leg if you sit too long. It’s not an immediate impact; it’s a long term impact on health. M11: male manager, 30–39y
I personally find it a bit helpful sometimes if you’re a bit stuck on something, you can just walk away and get a glass of water and come back. It’s sometimes just giving your brain a little bit of a break. E10: female employee, 30–39y
If the information was compelling enough to say that prolonged sitting causes or contributes to x, y and z. Don’t know if the information is that compelling at the moment. I think it’s just general awareness and generally people will say you shouldn’t sit for long periods of time. M14: male manager, 40–49yWe facilitate that but we don’t necessarily point it out as a problem, so we don’t say to people “this is a problem in our organisation and we need to fix it”, ‘cause I don’t even know if it is a problem. M11: male manager, 30–39y