Background: Working in a standing posture is considered to improve musculoskeletal comfort and can help enhance office workers' performance in the long term. However, there is a lack of a quantitative, real-time measure that reflects on whether office workers can immediately become more concentrated and work more efficiently when they switch to a standing posture.
Methods: To tackle this problem, this study proposed that the number of effective computer interactions could be used as a real-time indicator to measure the productivity of office workers whose work is primarily computer-based. Using this metric, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate the correlation between posture and productivity changes at a 10-minute resolution for eight participants.
Results: The study found that when allowed to use sit-stand desks to adjust postures, participants chose to switch to standing posture for about 47 min on average once a day; standing work was most frequent between 2:30 - 4:00 pm, followed by 10:30 - 11:30 am, during which time the number of computer interactions also became higher, showing a significant positive correlation. In addition, participants were approximately 6.5% more productive than when they could only work in a sitting posture.
Conclusion: This study revealed that posture changes could have an immediate improvement in productivity.
Keywords: Computer interaction; Office workers; Postures; Quantitative approach; Sit-stand desk; Work productivity.
© 2023. The Author(s).