Test driving fitness desks in the workplace
Writing emails, reading reports, taking phone calls ... it's all part of the daily office grind. Our question is: Can you be productive when cycling or walking on a treadmill?
Writing emails and reading reports are part of the daily office grind, but can you be productive doing them on a treadmill?
Big news. But first, a question: Are you sitting down?
I am. Well, kind of, if you count riding a hybrid stationary bike/desk as sitting down. I clocked 57.6 kilometers (about 35 miles) on this guy the other day in an effort to test out the feasibility of working at a “fit desk.”
I had seen contraptions like this before, and stared at them longingly as I wondered whether they really work. Could I really type on them? Are they rocky? Would I be able to focus? Sure, it looks awesome when Joanna Coles runs Cosmopolitan magazine from a treadmill desk, but what about us mere mortals?
I’m on a bike
Enter the FitDesk v. 3.0. I had it shipped to my apartment, where the manual said it would take only 30 minutes to assemble (it took me 67), and brought it into the Chronicle’s office to take it for a spin. I hoped a few days on the bike would answer my questions. But there’s one important question I’d forgotten to consider: Would I look silly? If you’re work in an open newsroom, there’s a simple answer for that: yes. People I’ve never interacted with before came over to check out what I was doing and asked questions of their own. Which is cool, and a great ice breaker — but if you ride a bike in an open office every day, you’ll become That Guy in record time. That said, if you have a private office,
or can convince your bosses to add a treadmill or bike desk to designated co-working spaces, you might enjoy spending 30 minutes or an hour a day mixing business and fitness.
That’s what folks at BMC Software decided to do when designing the company’s new offices just outside the Beltway a couple years ago. Each floor has a co-working space with a coffee bar, couches and other amenities. On the 15th floor, there are two treadmill desks and a FitDesk for cyclers. The hope was that the machines would help employees improve their health while also upping employee morale.
During the redesign, cubicle walls were lowered, and a more open office plan took shape.
“We knew we were taking away some things in terms of personal privacy with the low walls, but we wanted to give something back to the employees too,” says Scott Crowder, the company’s chief information officer. “We wanted it to be a fun place to work.”
Fast forward a couple years, and Crowder says he’s seen lines form at the treadmills.
BMC is part of a growing trend. Between 2010 and 2018, the average desk space in an American workplace shrank from 225 square feet to 150, according to CoreNet Global.
“What we’re seeing in workplaces is a reduction in the size of a worker’s own space, and a commensurate increase in the size of shared space,” says John Haba, principal at the Houston office of Gensler, the architecture firm that handled BMC’s redesign. Neat. But back to what I really wanted to know: Do fit desks work?
I’m on a treadmill now
The treadmills here at BMC are steadier than I’d expected. It’s more desk than treadmill, and I can adjust the height to suit my needs. Typing is easy. It’s as if I’m at my standing desk at the Chronicle, nice and evenkeeled. The only time I have issues is when I take out my notebook and try writing on the paper. It’s chicken-scratch soup.
Important tasks — reading emails, typing notes, talking to the woman on my left — are easy to do. I could take a phone call if I had to, too. With a max speed of only 2 miles per hour, I’m walking significantly slower than my normal rate, and the whirr of the treadmill belt is so hushhush it wouldn’t register
as noise in a call. But the hum does add a certain Zen-like element to the environment.
“How often do you walk this slow in life?” Gensler spokeswoman Nina Miller asks me from the treadmill beside me as she keeps pace. “It’s calming.”
She’s right. But when I check my FitBit to see how many steps I’ve been able to add to my daily total, I find it hasn’t registered a single one, since my hand has been resting on the desk. The same thing happened on the FitDesk, and I deduct mental points from both apparatuses for this. (If I’m going to be up and moving, I want it to count toward my Workweek Hustle.)
At the end of this experiment, I’d cycled more than 80 kilometers (about 50 miles), and walked more than two miles, all while completing tasks for work. And I finally had the answers I’d set out to find.
Yes, I could really type on both of these desks. And neither were rocky. I could focus on both of them, and after about 10 minutes I almost forgot I was moving at all — a real bonus. As for whether they’re feasible for mere mortals, the answer seemed like an easy yes for me. Sure, 80 kilometers is a lot of cycling. But the truth is, I had the resistance turned down almost as low as it would go, so it’s like I was cycling downhill the whole day.
My legs weren’t even tired later in the evening when I leashed my dog for a nice long walk. And, if you ask me, all day use isn’t really what these desks are meant for. But they’re the perfect pickme-up for an hour or so.