We've been talking a lot about how sitting is the new smoking. We've been screaming it from the roof tops in fact. Sitting all day while you work doesn't just lead to bad posture. It increases your risk of not one but three different types of cancer. It ups your blood pressure and puts you on the path to developing one (or many) of 34 potential chronic conditions. Heck sitting even cancels out your hard hours spent at the gym...
But if you think we've been talking about the dangers of sitting too much we've been talking about the benefits of standing even more. Standing desks like the UpDesk PowerUp or SquaredUp corner desk don't just help you burn calories work more collaboratively and be ready at a moment's notice for an office dance party. Now it turns out that using a height adjustable desk will actually help you be even more productive at work.
According to an article in the Business Insider standing desks aren't just a trademark of hip offices like Facebook and Twitter anymore. They are actually an effective and powerful tool in helping employees accomplish more during the workday. The findings come after an Eastern European company decided to scientifically test their employees' "productivity well-being concentration and ability to work" when using a standing desk compared to when they were sitting.
Using an app called DeskTime Draugiem.lv tracked the time their employees spent at a stand up desk while working. Then they tallied up the total time spent working divided it by the amount of standing time tracked by the app and figured out a percentage of productivity. Finally they did the same tracking and calculating for time spent sitting. And what did they find out? So glad you asked.
"Compared to a period of time when a person was not using the standing desk we found that standing led to up to 10% more productivity."
You read that right - employees productivity increased by 10-percent. And that's not all. The case study also found that employees experienced higher energy levels better concentration in completing tasks fewer headaches and some people even found it easier to quit smoking. And one thing that turned out to be unequivocally true for everyone who used a stand up desk even for a short time: better focus.
"While standing you feel a sense of urgency which causes you to be focused on the completion of tasks. This works ideally when you're working with tasks where you know what the outcome should be and it's just a matter of completing it."
If you've been making a list to convince your boss to buy you that UpDesk add this to the top of the "pro" column. You can even add that employees in this study used an electrically-powered height adjustable desk which meant that even if they were sitting they were able to adjust their desk so that they weren't hunched over encouraging bad posture and nasty back pain.
