Standing up to work

Sit-stand desks are the current office must have.  Can your employer really value whatever you spend your day doing if they don’t provide a sit-stand desk to do it from? Schwarz and colleagues’ research indicates that if your boss has given you a sit-stand desk they may be disappointed with its effects because there aren’t clear links between having one and better professional performance. The investigators asked professional employees to spent time “working at a traditional (sit) or an interventional (sit/stand) workplace for 23 weeks.”  The sitting and standing height desks were placed very close to each other, for example, side-by-side.  The researchers found that when “Cognitive performance (working speed, reaction time, concentration performance, accuracy), workload and relevant covariates (salivary cortisol level, heart rate, physical activity, sitting time) were measured pre- and post-intervention . . . results did not show differences in performance parameters and workload, respectively, between sit/stand and traditional workplace users.” Data collected “demonstrated no differences in reaction time, concentration performance or working speed. However, text editing accuracy, as well as salivary cortisol levels, significantly increased for sit/stand users, suggesting that the intervention induced lower mental fatigue states.”

Bernhard Schwartz, Jay Kapellusch, Arnold Baca, and Barbara Wessner.  2019.  “Medium-Term Effects of Two-Desk Sit/Stand Workstation on Cognitive Performance and Workload for Healthy People Performing Sedentary Work:  A Secondary Analysis of a Randomised Controlled Trial.”  Ergonomics, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 794-810, https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2019.1577497