28 BUSINESS WOMEN SCOTLAND feature
‘stand up while you work’.
But would you ever do it?
TIPS TO GET YOU MOVING IN THE OFFICE
1. Ban reading or writing emails for certain periods (e.g.
‘No email 2-5pm on Wednesday’).
2. Stand up and walk about when talking on the phone.
3. Install small and inexpensive step-exercise devices in
the company’s conference room.
4. Bring your MP3 player into work to encourage you to
take a musical stroll.
5. Take a 5-10 minute walking break each hour.
6. Hold walk-and-talk meetings.
7. Move bins and printers further away from your desk.
8. Use hand weights at your desk.
9. Do arm curls with a ream of paper and knee-bends
under your desk.
But I do foresee more environments where people
regularly take chair-breaks — as nature intended.
I
f too much sitting is the modern health equivalent of
smoking and more people are spending longer hours
sitting in front of their office computers, are standing
desks the solution to rising rates of diabetes, heart
disease, and obesity.
Stand-up desks are the latest trend at start-up offices
- at least in Sillicon Valley. Some say they improve
productivity. Some say if you stand for three hours a
day, it’s the equivalent of running 10 marathons over the
course of a year. Entrepreneur Josephine Fairley isn’t
convinced the trend will ever catch on in Britain.
Meet the ‘look at me’ desk. Of course, it’s not really
called a ‘look at me’ Desk; it’s the £275 ‘varidesk’,
and designed to help tackle the very real health
challenges brought on by long days in a seated
position – which is not what humans were designed to
do. We squatted, to eat. We sprinted, to catch dinner.
At the very least, we stretched to reach for berries
and nuts. But today? I’m probably not that unusual
in regularly putting in 12 hours days at the ‘computer
coalface’, often much longer – with the only exercise I
get, occasionally, sauntering to the Ladies or heading
kettle-wards.
Standing desks are apparently very popular in Silicon
Valley, where long hours go with the tech territory –
and where they’re always first to embrace a trend. But
actually, they’re not new. According to The Economist,
Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin
and Ernest Hemingway were all famous advocates of
the ‘standing desk’ (although in Hemingway’s case,
probably only till mid-afternoon when he keeled over
drunk). But they do require a bit of bottle, surely (and I
don’t mean the type Hemingway favoured).
Indulge me a sweeping generalisation, here, but my
observation is that the British are generally way shyer than
Americans, and putting a head above the parapet in an
office setting – even to stand and work at a raised screen
– goes against a fairly widespread ‘I’d rather be the spear
carrier in the back than Henry-IV’ attitude to the limelight.
In Silicon Valley, I’m pretty convinced it’s all ‘see how
hard I’m working as I stand here in the middle of the
office!’ Here, I suspect any ‘varidesks’ that a company
invests in will be tucked away in nooks and individual
offices with doors that can be closed. The ingenious thing
about the design, though, is that it boasts a lifting (and
dropping) mechanism which returns it to ‘normal’ height,
promising (very important, this!) that ‘users can change
position without disturbing their cup of coffee, let alone the
flow of their day.’ Apparently it comes with a free app that
tells users when they should be switching between sitting
and standing. It’ll be interesting to see a study of how
long, in the UK, the desks spend up – or down.
But certainly, there’s no getting away from the fact that
employers have serious responsibilities towards the health
of workers who spend long hours in a seated position. A
health and safety manual (and we all need them) has to
address ergonomics: the positioning of screens at eye
level, the importance of taking breaks in order to give
mouse-clicking hands a break (and thereby hopefully
sidestepping any risk of RSI), relieve aching backs, and
all the other potential problems that may be caused by
sitting on our behinds, including sluggish circulation and
fat metabolism. If you sit for more than 23 hours a week,
you’re 64 per cent more likely to die of heart disease,
according to Varidesk, which displays this graphic on its
website, uk.varidesk.com n