By Nathan Donaldson
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Opinions on standing desks differ, ranging from extolling the health virtues to gentle mocking, but the team at Boost have taken to their new desks like ducks to water.
At Boost we’ve always been interested in team health and well-being. Stand up desks provide health benefits and are a great fit for our highly collaborative way of working.
There’s plenty of evidence showing the health benefits of stand up desks, for example this New York Times article details a study undertaken by the American Cancer Society that tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The article also looks at weight gain. An experiment by James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, entailed participants receiving 1,000 additional calories each day. The experiment found that the people who were unconsciously moving around a lot gained little to no weight. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.
We spent a week trialling three stand up desks and a week later we took delivery of 6 more. Since then most people in the office have spent at least 4 hours at a stand up desk and comments have been very positive. We’re finding it’s much easier to have quick conversations as people are a lot more approachable standing at their desks.
A quick survey of the office garnered the following comments in favour of the new desks:
Our stand up desks can be raised and lowered with electric hydraulics, this enables team members to choose to sit at any point. We like them so much we’ve just ordered enough for the rest of the office.
