Do standing desks make you work harder?

By Daniel Johnson-Kim

Stand up if you want to get more work done?

No, literally. You should stand up if you want to be more productive, according to research coming out of Texas A&M University.

Research recently published in the journal Theoretical and Applied Ergonomics found that office workers with sit-stand desks spend 43 more minutes a day using their computers than colleagues at traditional desks.

And A&M scientists say the gap adds up to up to 171 extra hours a year, which was valued at about $9,000 per employee, an estimate researchers based on a wage of about $52 an hour.

The team of researchers analyzed a year of records for 10,145 employees at a large California energy company, of whom about a third had height-adjustable desks they used for work.

Software installed on their computers tracked their mouse clicks, keystrokes, typos and words typed.

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The company’s workers with sit-stand desks averaged 3 hours, 40 minutes of “active” computer time daily, while those at regular desks only averaged 2 hours, 57 minutes of “active” computer time.

The workers with sit-stand desks also logged about 860 keystrokes a day and typed more words.

“The implications are hard to ignore,” Mark Benden, a professor at the Texas A&M School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, said in a news release.

Don’t buy and overnight ship that sit-stand desk just yet. The findings come with caveats.

The research shows a link, but it does not completely prove it was the sit-stand desks that made anyone work more.

The sit-stand group was younger on average, and the researchers did not account for job type. Also, the workers were not randomly assigned desks, they opted in to using the desks, and nobody measured how often those workers stood.

Benden, who has studied standing desks for years, also founded a standing desk company.

“We spend a lot of time at work,” Benden said in a release. “It’s my passion to make sure that workers feel supported in their workplace, built on informed and guided scientific evidence.”