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New way to work: Standing up
Doctors
say chair-free offices lead to employees burning more calories and also
warding off diabetes
This
autumn Simon Marshall, 33, landed a great new job: lovely leafy location,
excellent salary, go-ahead US company. Simon was joining a small,
newly-formed UK sales team for software management firm VM Turbo.
Just before Simon started, he got a call from his
new boss, Sanjoy Bhose, to let him know that, by the way, the entire team
would be working standing up. All day, every day. "It seemed a little
bit eccentric," Simon says with a laugh.
Sam Hesketh, 21, also joined Bhose's team in the
summer, having already worked a few months at VM Turbo's modest offices in
Fleet, Hampshire. Overnight, his job went from sitting down to standing up.
"I thought it was ridiculous," he says.
But there they are: Sam, Simon, Sanjoy and three
more colleagues, sharp-suited, polished shoes, audio head-sets, laptops and
straight backs, all gathered around their bank of standing desks. They come
in at 7.30am and finish around 5.30pm. At lunch and break times they can
wander off and sit or even slouch around in the bean-bag room down the
corridor. Actually, there are a couple of chairs and desks in the main
office, available but rarely used.
Incredulous at first, all have become converts to
standing up at work, as Hesketh testifies: "The first day, my legs were
genuinely ruined. Now I can stand up all day. I was quite worried about my
posture beforehand, but when I'm standing it's completely different. It has
improved how I am on the phone. I'm more than happy."
The standing desks are part of Bhose's personal
workplace revolution. An experienced telesales manager, he says: "I
would always stand up and walk around when I was on the phone; it's much
more dynamic and makes you sound more fresh. I didn't want the team to be
trapped by the mentality of a call centre, so my vision was that we should
be more like a trading floor on the stock exchange."
The commercial justification for standing is sound.
The best telesales people, it seems, stand up to sell, for the same reasons
that Radio 1 DJs these days all stand up to present their programmes. It
just makes you sound more alive. But Bhose, at 44 a self-confessed
non-exercising workaholic, was also influenced by recent media reports of
the health benefits of standing more and sitting less.
Dr John Buckley, exercise physiologist at Chester
University, says: "Most people are awake for 16 hours a day and will
spend probably 15 of those hours on their backsides. In fact you're
spending almost 23 out of 24 hours a day in a sitting or lying position."
Buckley is leading a research study into the health
effects of standing-based office work. He recently revealed some of their
findings on the BBC2 show Trust Me I'm A Doctor, after monitoring 10 staff
at a local estate agency who were asked to stand up every afternoon for a
week.
Two clear health benefits emerge: you burn more
calories standing, and your body processes its glucose more efficiently.
The first is crucial to tackling excess weight and its knock-on risks of
high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease; the second is the key to
avoiding diabetes — a complex and nasty longterm condition that is also
very costly to the NHS.
The perils of prolonged sitting had started to
really worry Paul Matthews after 25 years of screen-based office roles. So
much so that in 2011 he abandoned his consultancy work with blue-chip
companies to set up his own business, Office Fitness Ltd. Matthews supplied
the standing desks for Bhose.
He has just dispatched another desk to Rachel
Greenham. Employed by an IT firm, she works from home in Devon, where, a
year ago, she rigged up her first standing desk from a wardrobe shelf
perched on a couple of boxes. Greenham says that in 10 years of desk work
she'd expanded five dress sizes. "That and other health issues mean I
now feel I've used up my lifetime quota of sitting-down time," she
says.
Jane
Taylor THE INDEPENDENT TOI131208
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