How Can Using Different Postures Help In The Workplace?

When making physical changes to our office environments, we can furnish settings that help people think differently. We can create settings that be­come a source of stimulation, that supercharge innovation, and help to stim­ulate our creativity. One of the key triggers to foster this is posture.

We can use posture to influence behaviour, to help bring different activities directly into the workspace. For example when you stand, you have more en­ergy, you can move around, you can draw attention to yourself, you find peo­ple are much, much more engaged. Interestingly if everyone is standing, they are much more likely to engage, this is especially true in younger age groups.

When we perch on a piece of furniture, we still use our back, and our legs, to support ourselves, it requires an input from our body, it takes energy, it takes thought and in turn means we tend to do adopt this posture for shorter peri­ods of time. Typically for short ad-hoc meetings.

When we sit in an office chair, the chair takes all of our weight, this frees up all of our cognitive skills to enable greater concentrate and to focus.

This is why we tend to do the majority of focused work, or more task related work, in this posture. Sitting in a chair that fully supports your body means subconsciously your body isn’t having to having to think or input into hold­ing that posture.

However, the minute you start to relax into a posture similar to a lounge environment, a sofa, soft seating, where your arms fall away and your body opens up, this takes the pressure off your internal organs enabling you to rest at more of an angle. This helps to reduce your heart rate and blood rate.

The core benefit to this relaxed posture means you’re much more likely to be more thoughtful, engaging, and listen better to other people’s point of views.

By using all these different postures, this can influence our mood, energy, and creativity to ultimately help us work better, for the individual tasks at hand.

As we transition between home working and the office, hybrid workers will start to expect these environments that they’ve subtly become accustomed to, whilst working from home.

Written by Adrian Campbell

Workplace Consultant of The Senator Group

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