Becoming set in one’s ways is not what we want from our creative teams. We want them to give them freedom to move naturally throughout the day, adopt productive postures, and shift as they come up with innovative solutions. Here are several reasons you want to consider a standing desk for your office.
1. Attract and Retain Employees
The average office doesn’t invest in new furniture frequently, so more and more individuals are choosing to build standing desks on their own. So great is the research against sitting that blogs are chock-full of DIY Standing Desk Tutorials, which, employees are taking it upon themselves to construct. Some workplaces have begun renovating to include standing desks to attract a healthier workforce; many more are opting to install adjustable height desks so that each person can select their own way of working.
Consider the impression this can make on visitors:
An interviewee enters your office, surveys the working environment, and finds that your workplace appears to be both progressive and mindful of its employees’ well-being. That’s a reassuring statement to potential employees.
When you’re given the choice of equipment that fits your needs, you’re immediately going to be more comfortable about getting down to business. Good employee experiences benefit your bottom line.
2. Set an example.
With the sweeping changes to employer-paid health care plans due to the Affordable Care Act, many CFOs are placing a greater emphasis on wellness programs to supplement health care. Promoting healthier working styles, environments, and giving financial benefits to nonsmokers are all impactful to both employees and employers. Medical claims drop when companies value ergonomics, so why not show your dedication to health and wellness, and set a great example for your employees?
3. Be More Productivity & Energetic
Productivity is both a mental and a physical conundrum. The sensation of standing is one of purpose. You have things to do, and when you’re standing, you are focused on completing those tasks.
Better concentration.
Sitting lets our minds wander – spooling our thoughts and generating new ideas. This is ideal for creative brainstorming, but it also allows us to distract ourselves from the task at hand. It’s why many office workers multi-task, flipping from Facebook to Minesweeper and back to Excel, repetitiously throughout the day. To do our best work, we need a palette of postures to move from task to task.
Standing is not a rest-and-recover posture. Forbes conducted an in-house study to try out standing desks and found that, overall:
“With a good desk fit and getting into the routine of both standing and sitting, people reported feeling more energized, creative and social.”
Rediscover your energy. Keep the energy level high and avoid the mid-day slump!
After eating, digestion causes your metabolism to drop—the culprit behind your daily drowsy spell. There is little metabolic activity during sitting. Standing yields much more metabolic activity, maintaining a stable rate. Combat the effects of the dreaded afternoon slump and fight fatigue by keeping up your activity in the early afternoon. Stand or take frequent walks if you don’t yet have a standing desk.
4. Long Term Health Effects
You could read your way through the many scientific studies that show sitters are 54% more likely to die of a heart attack, and a thorough sitting study of 700,000+ people that found that sitting not only correlated with a higher risk of heart disease, but also a greater risk of diabetes. Never mind all of those studies. Consider this one detail: Electrical activity in your leg muscles shuts down completely as soon as you sit down.
Why do I care?
For one, it limits our ability to adapt to other postures. It tightens our hamstrings and hip flexors, gradually shrinking our range of motion. Picture the flexibility that your young child has: squatting down easily to examine an ant hill, writhing in full-body protest when asked to set the table, or nimbly leaping up the stairs, two at a time.
Do you remember having that mobility? You once did, but your sedentary lifestyle created a habit of compressing those muscle fibers because you weren’t using them, shutting down their natural elasticity. This also hinders our ability to preventing injury. Lower back pain, neck pain, or shoulder pain? Blame prolonged sitting.
5. What About Women?
Fixed-height furniture has been standardized to the height of average American males for decades. Your desk is likely 29” tall, the industry-standard. Typically, women are 5 inches shorter than men, which means that their elbows and shoulders are positioned at an unfavorable angle for writing or typing. Raising the seat of their chairs to compensate can cause circulation problems in the lower body.
Forget the glass ceiling! All women in the workplace deserve to reach a comfortable position to do their job. While you could remedy this with some standing desks, there is more adjustability for normal physiological differences with an adjustable height desk.
Contact your Hyperspace team to discover which adjustable height desks will work for your office.