A control group got to stay at their old desks and weren't nagged by email.
Surely to be a proper control group they should have been nagged that they must not, under any circumstances, use the new desks?
Convertible desks that allow you to sit or stand don't have a measurable impact on productivity, according to a pilot study of 30 call centre workers. The study, conducted by Sydney University’s School of Public Health at Australian telco Optus and published in the Preventive Medicine Reports explains that its premise was to …
And this matters because that means there was no Hawthorne effect for the control group. If despite that there was no difference in productivity between the groups, then you could conclude that standing makes you less productive.
I don't think they tested productivity in the right sort of setting. Call centre workers are pushed to the absolute limit no matter what kind of desk they have. You spend a whole working day with your mind separated from your body as you talk back and forth and record details on keyboard without thinking about it. Being really uncomfortable doesn't much impact productivity.
Let's see how productivity is affected when you test the sort of environment where a comfortable Airon chair is an invitation to tip back with feet up and browse the Internet with the mouse. At a standing desk, you'll remain alert and your full range of tools and supplies are always within hand's reach.
One last thing is that the article's title almost sounds negative about standing desks. Spin it a different way and you could have said that the healthier desks did not *impact* productivity, so readers see that it's an advantage.
I agree. Also they only covered just one type of environment. Surely a good study would have included call centres but also a wide range of environments. I do note - having a brief flick through the paper that although there isn't much of a difference pretty much every area saw a very small change in favor of standing desks. I am about to replace the desks in my home office with sit/stand ones as it gives me the choice.
In the cube farm where I work, most people spend a good bit of time away from their cube often walking or standing. I do not know if there would a productivity increase with these types of desks if where I work is reasonably typical. Also, call centers are not the average office.
I agree too, but one thing mentioned in the article and then not expanded on is that those with the sit/stand desks felt better about themselves and more energetic.
That may not directly affect productivity on an hourly or even a daily basis but if people feel better about themselves they are less like to be looking for a new job (for whatever reason). A happier workforce will be a more loyal workforce and stay longer. Less staff churn means less recruitment, less staff training (ie new staff "bedding in") so less cost and better productivity in the longer term.
This is something accountants never get and few HR people get, never mind the PHBs of the world.
> And they save a small fortune on chairs!
$20 exercise ball, forget the chair AND the stand-up desk. Keeps you moving a little, and discourages bad postures which cause more back/neck tension and disc problems.
Also, frequent movement/exercise breaks. Flex the muscles, get the blood flowing & lungs pumping, oxygen to the brain, adrenaline or something... wakes you up... good for productivity.
I thought you were going to go with the cattle-prod approach.
Hallway/pathway/cubicle monitors are assigned to randomly wander the environs. If they see anyone "sitting" down on the job they get a prod. And of course the prodders are given commissions based on how many discharges they had during the day.
------------------------------------------------
Bend over to our corporate overlords!
and blather to 'suckers' on the phone then the more of your colleagues (no not co-workers) you piss off due to you more like to be in line of sight to them who may well also be standing.
If you do have sit/stand workstations you must compensate for the sound deadening effect of cubicle walls or the lack thereof when standing.
I've got a sprained sacroiliac joint from sitting down too much (20 years of sitting 8-9 hours a day at a work desk with not enough breaks from sitting). I'd also got a bit of a pot belly & high cholesterol.
Then about 7 years ago, I started working from home & mounted a monitor at standing eye level with a cheap £11 adjustable arm above my desk. I also added a small foldable stand fashioned from some left over wooden flooring planks for the keyboard and mouse. Voila, I had my own home brew convertible stand up / sit down workstation.
I can report that my sacroiliac problem is a lot better (although it seems it might always be a bit of a weak spot after all the prolonged abuse it suffered in the past), the pot belly has disappeared & cholesterol levels are pretty much normal. & yes, I do feel better in myself.
Yes, I have been more productive, but it's hard to say if that's a result of not being in a noisy open plan office so fewer distractions, or whether some of its down to the better health. Probably a bit of both, but everyone's different so ymmv obviously.
Now sitting and working in the sun makes me definitely more productive. I wonder how much better it would be if I stood up & worked in the sun? But that's a whole different topic...
Yeah, I don't really understand the negative tone of the headline.
There's plenty of evidence which is hardly more anecdotal than this study, which agrees with your findings. For example, I moved to work in an office where they used the adjustable desks and found I was able to concentrate more during the mid-afternoon slump (the 3pm wall) at least. As other posters have suggested, I don't think the nature of their work provided a fair test.
Glad you feel better!
The study was limited in scope, as all studies are. It was designed only to study productivity in a time-and-motion style.
It was only over a 19 week period, so would not have been able to pick up on any medium to long term health benefits.
There is plenty of existing evidence, obtained by different methodologies, to support the idea that sitting down continuously for long periods is bad for one's health. This study just provides some evidence that standing desks don't negatively impact productivity, thus reassuring any employer that is considering installing them.
There are plenty of such studies that have examined longer term health benefits. However, an employer would want to know if any change they make will affect productivity in the short term. That was the purpose of this study.
Fortunately, their finding suggest that standing desks don't negatively affect productivity.
There are 6 of us in my role using a couple of desks 24x7 and we like things in slightly different positions (oo-er!) - I'd love to be abel to easily adjust the desk and monitor heighta for periods of standing and sitting. Sadly I think I am the only one who likes the idea of standing up once in a while.
Hmmmm....a few servo motors, an arduino or Raspberry Pi, maybe some NFC gubbins and write some software similar to those cars which have personalised, customised seat positioning for different drivers. Set and store your desk/seat heights for each user which can be restored from a button push of NFC fob. Maybe I'm over thinking this. :-)
If it's not been done yet, I'll have the patent, thanks.
“little is known about the impact of sit-stand desks on actual worker productivity in a real-world setting.”
“This is an evidence gap which needs to be addressed before organizations invest in sit-stand desks as a measure for preventing chronic disease and promoting wellness in their workforce.”
I am guessing it's the way it's written and a comprehension fail on my part but otherwise, they do realise that those things do not exactly correlate don't they?
Anyway I think moving around helps somewhat as well, I was told its movement that tends to persaude your joints to pump/move synovial fluid about, likewise it helps your kidneys stop producing stones. (plumbers have told me that there's lots of sludge in call centre and office toilets, the start of kidney stones that come around from sitting all day).
Exactly. I've never heard this promoted as improving productivity, but that companies would want to do this as the benefit would be improved employee health, hopefully resulting in fewer sick days and maybe reduced insurance costs.
Though having seen it in action in a workplace with adjustable desks, I think you need higher cubicle walls to make it work. The standing employees look like meerkats having a look around, and when they're on the phone their voices aren't blocked like sitting employees who are shielded by the sound deadening cubicle walls.
1. Getting rid of "Open Plan" offices, and give me a door I can close when I am working on complex engineering tasks.
2. Making email optional. I'll get to the email at the beginning / end of the day. If it's urgent, call me
3. Shove the marketing people in their own soundproof, open office plan cube, and keep them away from me.
4. Get rid of the "Diversity" programs and stop hiring dead weight dip sh*ts. Then I can do my job and my job alone, and not picking up the slack for someone who was hired based on sexist / racist grounds.
5. Use "blind resumes" to select talent and skills/task based interviews.
Have an up vote sir - first and foremost for the suggestion that Open Plan should be scrapped.
It's increasingly being suggested that for some of us - those who are not out and out exhibitionist extroverts - open plan is the single worst contributor to loss of productivity. The one size fits all, you must be a visible team player always in the midst of others approach fails to acknowledge that some people need that quiet, undistracted isolation in order to complete those tasks with which they have been charged - the sort of tasks that can easily make up 70/80% of their working week.
There is a reason as to why so many sets of headphones appear in open plan offices!
I guess all the people going on about having to have raise the hight of cubical walls to block the noise of people standing on other calls have never worked in a call centre, and are probably american.
Most call centres don't have cubicles, in Europe, and Asia at least, as cubicle walls take up space, that could be user for more staff, and generally make the place feel very poky and small. Its the same with most offices too you just have to have some consideration for others, not a strong point of our american friends. It would be horrible to have to work in a 2 x 2 x 2 meter cube, open plan may not be perfect but its got to be better than cube farm.
My most detested working environment was pure open plan - right in the centre of the desk farm - people in front and behind, to the left and the right. It was truly vile.
My best ever - an office of 5 people. Enough to be social but not so much that the noise levels and the intrusions in privacy became an issue.
The cube was a fair compromise. It had at least one high wall to help cut some (but by no means all) of the noise that intruded from other parts of the office. It meant that it was easier to block out more of that distraction and concentrate and it was infinitely preferable to the full open plan that replaced it.
For some of us - open plan just does not work and while that may be unpalatable to the office planners and the bean counters, they ignore it at the risk of lost productivity.
The Icon - because sometimes it felt like that - and it led to an overwhelming desire to ask some people to STFU
I guess all the people going on about having to have raise the hight of cubical walls to block the noise of people standing on other calls have never worked in a call centre, and are probably american.
Granted not a call centre, but definitely not american. And over the years the partitions between desks have gotten lower and lower.
Obviously very personal thing, but open plan office does not suit me at all. Way too noisy, too many people talking on telephones or near someone's desk.
It would be horrible to have to work in a 2 x 2 x 2 meter cube, open plan may not be perfect but its got to be better than cube farm.
Again, depends on person. Having visited offices across the pond, I'd take the cube any day over this horrible open plan office.
All you need is the Dilbert blow-up cubicle door (not sure if they still sell those mind) and you almost have an old fashioned office again. :-)
"open plan may not be perfect but its got to be better than cube farm."
What? Cube farm partitions don't protect you from the voice of the braying marketroid in the next pig-pen or the un-muffled dot-matirix printer that someone insists they need on the other side. They're still open offices.
"For some of us - open plan just does not work and while that may be unpalatable to the office planners and the bean counters, they ignore it at the risk of lost productivity."
Indeed. I provide legal advice on complex matters of information law compliance and I work in a room full of techy gobshites who can apparently only communicate by SHOUTING! at each other, utterly ruining my ability to do the kind of deep considerative work I need to do, day after day.
I could be MASSIVELY more productive if I had peace and quiet - but that'd involve spending money (and accepting just how wrong open plan can be), and HM Gov won't be having that...
So much this. We recently moved from a space with about 15 people in it to one with 70 people in it because "it will help improve cross-team working", and apparently our density (head count to space) was lower than average across the organisation.
What it means is that I now sit in an office space surrounded by people whose roles appear to require them to talk, on the phone, to each other, random other people, constantly, all day. My concentration gets broken repeatedly and out come the headphones and some AC/DC to drown them out, which is also not desperately conducive to clear thinking.
The annoying thing is that they'd moved the sources of noise out of the 15 person space about a month before they decided we could all jam in together - just enough time for the quiet thinkers amongst us to breathe a sigh of relief before having our hopes and dreams of a bit of peace crushed...
Two very well paid financial analyst types had them installed, electrically adjusting height as required.
Day 1: both desks raised morning and afternoon for alternate hours
Day 2: desk 1 up morning and afternoon, desk 2 morning only
Day 3: desk 1 up morning only, desk 2 at seated height all day
Day 4: both desks raised when a colleague visited to show them off, otherwise no height change
Day 5+ : desks were in, lets call it powersaving mode, workers were in seated mode
There's nothing new in standing up, at work. I started work in a factory, as an apprentice. There, sitting down at work was not only not an option, it was specifically not allowed. Later, I moved to one of the drawing offices. There you had a high stool, unpadded and unbacked, only to find that it was not possible to sit and work on a drawing board at the same time. The only sitting you did was when working on calculations (long hand). Even the foremen, who spent a lot of time writing, had a stand up desk, in the middle of the machine shop, amid the noise and dirt. They could not argue that they couldn't hear anyone on the 'phone, since there were none.
The idea of the standing desks is to benefit the workers health-wise surely. The claim there is no short-term productivity gain is moot. Long-term there is certain to be a gain as healthier people are less likely to have days off sick, or be performing under par due to back pain etc.
P.S. anyone who says back pain doesn't affect productivity has never had back pain!
"anyone who says back pain doesn't affect productivity has never had back pain!"
Very true. My back pain was the result of a single ill-judged movement when stretching to lower my car off its jack and had dogged me on and off for years. It's aggravated by standing for any length of time. Standing desks & stand-up meetings would have resulted in a lot of time off sick followed by resignation.
Hypothesis: Standing desks improve general health in later life, increasing lifetime workforce participation and national productivity.
Experiment: Test effect of standing desks on short term minute to minute productivity metrics.
Conclusion: We didn't measure anything worth measuring, give us more money.
"This made it possible to measure call handling time, time spent talking, time spent on hold and time spent wrapping up calls, metrics call centres love to harvest"
Metrics which have a common factor of being easy to measure. Calls closed to callers satisfaction? Far too difficult to measure, possibly too embarrassing for management to be aware of but the only real measure of a call centre's effectiveness.
No, actually. Lots of call centres now close a call by asking to rate the experience from 1 to 10, to calculate net promoter score. Agents who aren't getting 7 and above get coached, then fired if things don't improve.
Net promoter score is very influential at present. I even had a storage vendor claims theirs is higher than rivals'!
"No, actually. Lots of call centres now close a call by asking to rate the experience from 1 to 10"
Really? In 40-ish years of dealing with call centers, I have never seen this.
"to calculate net promoter score. Agents who aren't getting 7 and above get coached"
Ah. Marketing.
"then fired if things don't improve."
No loss, then. No plus, either. The next under-trained flunky will do the exact same thing. Lather, rinse, repeat. Hint to marketing: Doing the exact same thing, over and over again, each time expecting a different result, is one of the clinical signs of insanity.
If you're chained to your desk, it doesn't make much difference if you're standing or sitting I would have thought. I bet all those people who have standing desks in their home office can also wander out to the kitchen and make a cup of tea any time they like. I believe the research is already in on that, what helps is to stand up and actually walk around for five minutes; it seems to work for me.
I can sit all day, or I can walk all day, but standing for more than about 3 minutes gives me very bad backache, which I find just a little distracting from concentrating, on anything.
My productivity would plummet if I were forced to stand.
And I can't see that walking is a good way to type.
Having been both first-line tech and a programmer, I can tell you that first-line can be relatively active, for a job that nominally involves sitting around with your ear glued to a phone. Every time you switch from one context to another (e.g. from call logging suite to third-party diagnostic portal), you shift a little in your seat. And then you might get out of your seat completely to go and ask the supervisor for advice. All this only happens 3-4 times a day, but my back tells me it makes all the difference, in comparison to sitting down, "getting into the zone", and not moving at all above the elbows until lunchtime.