Most people working in an office will recognize that most of the working day is spent in front of a computer. Although, in many cases, it is necessary to sit down to perform your work correctly, prolonged static sedentary work can have health consequences.
All over the world, millions of people sit in front of their computers every day – in Denmark, an office worker has an average daily sitting time of 355 minutes (5.91 hours) – sometimes without even moving off their chairs for regular breaks. Therefore, people who work behind a desk tend to have several hours of inactivity most days of the week.
One of our partners at navigator, Pleaz, is trying to change this through their more than 200 video-guided exercises (Pleazers) for companies so you can be social and active together in the workplace.
Pleaz is a digital platform built to implement active and healthy breaks during your working day. The fun video-based well-being activities (Pleazers) encourage you to move your body and relax your mind at work. Pleazers can be done alone in your workspace whenever you need to unwind, or you can take part in social Pleazers with your colleagues during meetings or as a break.
Pleaz's solution can help create a fun, healthy, and social culture in your company and thus be used to build positive relationships with your colleagues. According to co-founder of Pleaz, Pernille Feld Snitkjær, various studies show that one Pleazer a week can help strengthen the relationship with your colleagues:
"Just the fact that you're physically active together will improve empathy with each other. It's also about laughing together… and when you're not doing everything perfectly, it loosens the atmosphere," she says.
In addition, Pleaz's video-guided exercises can also help boost employees' creativity, productivity, and motivation and can be used as an effective tool against stress.
"Two to four minutes of physical activity will benefit your brain an hour after these exercises. You'll have more concentration, you're more focused after these calisthenics," tells Pernille Feld Snitkjær and adds:
"We got some great correlations of healthy breaks decreasing the perceived stress level."
A Pleazer can, therefore, promote your mental well-being and act protectively against stress. To support these benefits, Pleaz, in collaboration with The University of Copenhagen, has studied what happens when you do physical activities in the office.
In 2021, researchers at the University of Copenhagen looked into how healthy breaks could affect the workplace environment.
More than 200 office workers from four European countries completed the study and participated in the Pleazers. The participants followed the video exercises once a day for the working week, and the study compared their stress levels and overall physical well-being to employees who did not take regular breaks over the same period.
The study found several encouraging results regarding taking part in Pleazers throughout the workday for office workers. Some of the key findings were:
Doing just one Pleazer every working day for four months decreased stress by five percent on average.
Nearly 30 percent of workers who did four or more Pleazers per week reported never feeling stressed or nervous at work, compared to just under 10 percent who did not regularly take healthy breaks.
Nearly 75 percent of workers who participated in at least four Pleazers weekly across four months reported that their work was always or a lot of the time enjoyable, exciting, and satisfying, compared to just 40 percent of those who did not do healthy breaks regularly.
18 percent of people who were regularly asked to perform Pleasers over the four months saw their relationships with their colleagues strengthened.
The study results show that the group that had taken active breaks has achieved significantly better mental, physical, and social well-being.
"The main thing it shows is the impact doing healthy breaks can have on your mental well-being. The research showed that healthy breaks explained 20 percent of the change in mental well-being, and 10 percent in change to overall well-being during the research project," says Simon Spenter Ifversen, a research assistant at the University of Copenhagen.
For Co-founder of Pleaz, Pernille Feld Snitkjær, the positive results of the survey did not come as a big surprise:
"We always expected to see a positive correlation between the physical, mental, and social well-being by doing healthy breaks, as numerous studies have previously validated the effect of physical activity on this."
Based on the study, Pleaz's more than 200 video-guided exercises can help support employee productivity, reduce sick leave, create better employee well-being, protect against stress, and contribute to employee retention in the long term.
Get help implementing active and healthy breaks in your company with Pleaz here.