Every day, millions of people head to their offices to sit for eight or more hours straight. Yes, they’re productive, but is that productivity at the expense of their health? According to experts, sitting for prolonged periods elicits highly negative systemic adaptations. If you want an office full of healthy employees, changing up your workspace is key. Curious about how you can make your office a healthier workplace? Take a look at these helpful tips.
At Seat Exercise
Did you know you can perform certain exercises from a desk chair? It’s true, seated movements like chair yoga are great for stretching and maintaining mobility, so encourage your employees to move around and stretch at their desks. DeskCycle recommends under-the-desk cycling as a way to keep people moving even when they’re working at a desk. These low-profile pedals sit beneath a desk where your feet would normally rest. Instead of remaining stationary throughout the day, pedaling can help increase blood flow and mitigate many of the health issues associated with prolonged periods of sitting.
Change Up the Desks
Researchers now believe that sitting for eight hours or more per day may be just as deadly as smoking. Essentially, we’re sitting ourselves to death. Prolonged sitting can lead to the development of common health concerns, including chronic pain, obesity, metabolic downregulation, and even blood clots. How can you combat this? Change up the desks and seating in your office! StandUpDesks.com points out that using stand up desks can help with some health problems by keeping employees on their feet throughout the day. And if your employees must sit, try using balance ball chairs to promote muscle engagement. Anything you can do to keep your employees moving around will help improve their health.
Have Walking Meetings
According to Neurocore, walking is proven to help improve memory. If you want employees to retain the information presented in meetings, it may benefit you to schedule short walking meetings. Of course, you can’t schedule a walking meeting with several people since it will be difficult for everyone to hear the important points. However, if you have a meeting with just one or two people, moving around is always better than sitting when it comes to maintaining health. The continuous movement has also demonstrated a unique ability to increase creativity, so if you need to get those creative juices flowing, take your meeting out for a stroll. You never know you or your employees may just have a stroke of brilliance around that difficult project you’ve been tackling.
Keeping your employees healthy isn’t hard; it just takes a bit of extra planning and sometimes creativity. When you encourage your employees to move around throughout the day, they’ll surely appreciate the changes, and you may even see a productivity boost, too!
