Office work and healthy habits

If you ask people around "How does your office support your health?", I bet the answers will include the "being active, move more" aspect, even more than mentioning healthy snacks, ergonomic chair or natural light and that's because we associate the office work with long periods spent sitting and the negative effects were proven by various studies (a reference being Daneshmandi, H., Choobineh, A., Ghaem, H., & Karimi, M. (2017). Adverse Effects of Prolonged Sitting Behavior on the General Health of Office Workers.?Journal of lifestyle medicine,?7(2), 69–75. https://doi.org/10.15280/jlm.2017.7.2.69). Since, in the recent period, a lot of people transitioned from complete WFH to a hybrid setup or even completely in the office, I was just wondering how much the office buildings designers took into consideration the "being more active" aspect into their choice architecture.

It all started from a short conversation about choice architecture I had with my wife over the weekend, mentioning the fact that creating the default option of using the stairs instead of taking the elevator is one of the nudges for encouraging the mindset of being more active mindset for office workers. It's not the only option to do that, and people spent time analysing the effect of floor design and spatial layout on people's activity level in the office. Surprisingly, the study "Fisher, A., Ucci, M., Smith, L., Sawyer, A., Spinney, R., Konstantatou, M., & Marmot, A. (2018). Associations between the Objectively Measured Office Environment and Workplace Step Count and Sitting Time: Cross-Sectional Analyses from the Active Buildings Study.?International journal of environmental research and public health,?15(6), 1135. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15061135" discovered that "Contrary to our hypothesis, the further participants were from office destinations the less they walked, suggesting that changing the relative distance between workstations and other destinations on the same floor may not be the most fruitful target for promoting walking and reducing sitting in the workplace" so the task is not easy or our intuitive conclusions are not always confirmed by reality - although having a larger sample set in the analysis may lead to different conclusions.

Coming back to the stairs vs elevator option, I was recapping the office buildings I've been in the last 7-8 years and my conclusion is that the currently (based on my experience at least) the design of the office buildings is promoting the use of elevator, whereas the stairs are hard to find and usually are a closed and not friendly environment [I mean, you can take the stairs, but after after several flights, the stale air count make your job more difficult and eventually deter your from using the stairs for navigating inside the building]. The current design is closer to creating a sludge, considering the fact that the directions and signals to lead to the stairs are non visible - usually, it's just a regular door you need to open to find out that it gives access to the stairs - sometimes I had to ask several persons to find out about the stairs in the building, it's not intuitive or frictionless.

In 2018, Iris van der Meiden published at Wageningen University and Research the study "Encouraging Stair Use Among Office Users: The Effect of Nudging Interventions in an Office Environment" trying to find out the influence of nudging for increasing the use of stairs - the conclusion was that footprints on the floor were more effective than the posters on the wall to stimulate the use of stairs in the office environments.

I was surprised to find out about Skanka's project to deliver a rooftop runway track (https://www.romania-insider.com/skanska-rooftop-runway-track-office-buildings ) - maybe my friends working at Microsoft in Bucharest can attest it's usefulness - to me it looks like a nice marketing stunt more than a real practical option - I wouldn't see myself running out during hot summer or cold winter on the roof of the office building - I do like to run all year regardless of the weather, but just not in circles on the rooftop of the building.

In the post COVID-19 pandemic context, there is an increased focus on office health aspects and one of the elements is being more active - the nudge for stair use could be a good solution, either built in the office building design (by placing the stairs front and central for people) or by using signs/messages. Other references for nudging in the healthy direction in the article here . I'd love to see the trend being embraced by more companies and institutions, helping people to be more healthy.

You can find our more about nudge vs sludge by reading Richard Thaler's seminal book "Nudge - Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness " [or the updated "Nudge - The Final Edition "]