7 research outputs found
"Could you sit down please?" A qualitative analysis of employees experiences of standing in normally seated workplace meetings
Office workers spend most of their working day sitting, and prolonged sitting has been associated
with increased risk of poor health. Standing in meetings has been proposed as a strategy
by which to reduce workplace sitting but little is known about the standing experience.
This study documented workersâ experiences of standing in normally seated meetings.
Twenty-five participants (18+ years), recruited from three UK universities, volunteered to
stand in 3 separate, seated meetings that they were already scheduled to attend. They
were instructed to stand when and for however long they deemed appropriate, and gave
semi-structured interviews after each meeting. Verbatim transcripts were analysed using
Framework Analysis. Four themes, central to the experience of standing in meetings, were
extracted: physical challenges to standing; implications of standing for meeting engagement;
standing as norm violation; and standing as appropriation of power. Participants typically
experienced some physical discomfort from prolonged standing, apparently due to
choosing to stand for as long as possible, and noted practical difficulties of fully engaging in
meetings while standing. Many participants experienced marked psychological discomfort
due to concern at being seen to be violating a strong perceived sitting norm. While standing
when leading the meeting was felt to confer a sense of power and control, when not leading
the meeting participants felt uncomfortable at being misperceived to be challenging the
authority of other attendees. These findings reveal important barriers to standing in normally-seated
meetings, and suggest strategies for acclimatising to standing during meetings.
Physical discomfort might be offset by building standing time slowly and incorporating
more sit-stand transitions. Psychological discomfort may be lessened by notifying other
attendees about intentions to stand. Organisational buy-in to promotional strategies for
standing may be required to dispel perceptions of sitting norms, and to progress a wider
workplace health and wellbeing agenda
The Standing Up in Meetings Study (SUMS)
74 anonymised interview transcripts (Word format), 1 anonymised table of participant characteristics (Excel). Size of dataset: 2.4 MB. Related publication: Mansfield, L. et al. (2018) "Could you sit down please?" A qualitative analysis of employees' experiences of standing in normally-seated workplace meetings. PLoS ONE 13(6): e0198483. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.019848