Workplace interventions (methods) for reducing sitting time at work

 

Why is the amount of time you sit at work important?

Sedentary time at work and time spent in physical inactivity have both increased in recent decades. Prolonged sitting may increase the risk of obesity, heart disease and premature death. It is unclear whether interventions aimed at reducing sitting in the workplace are effective.
Purpose of this review
We wanted to find the effects of interventions aimed at reducing sitting time at work. We searched various databases up to 9 August 2017.
Which trials were found by this review?
We found 34 studies with 3397 employees from high-income countries. Sixteen studies evaluated physical changes in workplace design and environment, four studies evaluated changes in workplace policy, 10 studies evaluated information and counseling interventions, and four studies evaluated multicategory interventions.
The Effects of standing desk
Using sit stand desk appears to reduce workplace sitting by an average of 84 to 116 minutes per day. The use of adjustable height desk, when combined with the provision of information and counseling, appears to have a similar effect of reducing sitting at work. electric standing desk also appear to reduce total sitting time (including sitting inside and outside work) and workplace sitting lasting 30 minutes and longer. One study compared standing and L shaped standing desk, but because of the small number of employees it included, it did not provide enough evidence to determine which desk was more effective in reducing sitting time.

Adjustable desk with drawers, standing gaming desk;and standing computer desk also have this feature. Best used with the best ergonomic office chair.
Effects of Active Workstations
Treadmill desking combined with counseling appears to reduce work sitting time, but the available evidence is insufficient to conclude whether bike desking combined with information provision reduces work sitting time more than information provision alone.
Effect of walking or rest duration while resting
The available evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of walking while resting in reducing sitting time. Short breaks (1 to 2 minutes every half hour) appeared to reduce sitting time at work by an additional 15 to 66 minutes per day compared with longer breaks (two 15-minute breaks per workday).

Effectiveness of information and counseling
Providing information, feedback, counseling, or all of these, medium-term follow-up (3 to 12 months post-intervention) saw an average reduction in sitting time of 5 to 51 minutes per day. Available evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions about the effect of short-term follow-up (post-intervention to 3 months). Using a combination of computerized prompting and information provision, mean reductions in sitting time of 14 to 96 minutes per day were seen at mid-term follow-up. The available evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions about short-term effects.
One study found that prompting to stand compared with prompting to walk reduced sitting time by an average of 10 to 19 minutes per day.
The available evidence is insufficient to conclude whether providing highly personalized or contextualized information has a greater or lesser impact on reducing sitting time at work than providing less personalized or contextualized information. The available evidence is also insufficient to draw conclusions about the effects of mindfulness training and activity tracker use on time spent sitting at work.
The effect of combining multiple interventions
A combination of interventions appears to be effective in reducing both sitting time and prolonged sitting in the short to medium term. However, this evidence comes from only a few studies, and effects vary widely across studies.
in conclusion
The quality of evidence for most interventions was low to very low, mainly due to study protocol limitations and small sample sizes. Currently, there is low-quality evidence that small standing desk may reduce work sitting time in the first year of use. However, the effect may decrease over time. In general, there is insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about the effects of other types of interventions and their effects on workplace sitting after 1 year. More research is therefore needed to assess the effectiveness of different types of interventions in reducing sitting at work, especially in the long-term.