Why companies should encourage stand up meetings
Workspaces
While an eight-hour workday might seem long, it can still be difficult to complete everything on a particular day, especially if that day is bookended by a lot of long meetings. Besides taking a chunk of your productive time away, sit-down meetings can quickly get out of control. The solution is simple: have meetings standing up instead.
Stand up meetings serve as a way for colleagues to engage with each other in a different manner. It encourages a positive atmosphere for team building and can prove beneficial for the health of your employees as an interruption to the norm of a sedentary lifestyle at their desks. A sedentary lifestyle can lead to many health issues, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and colon cancer, however, researchers have pinpointed that people who stand for at least 2 hours a day can increase their life expectancy by around 10%.
Besides the health benefits, a stand-up meeting also increases the attention span of the participants and improves information retention. Employees who sit in their office chairs for most of their day, and also conduct their meetings seated, can find it difficult to concentrate through another seated meeting. Standing upright makes it difficult for your attention to go elsewhere, and keeps you alert and awake. Better still, it’s easier to see all the participants in a meeting as typically people form a circle when they are conducting a stand-up meeting.
Finally, standing meetings are shorter, and far more effective than a regular sit-down meeting. Standing meetings are comparatively uncomfortable, as they require you to stand upright for a period of time, and therefore only necessary business is discussed. On average, stand up meetings are 34% shorter than seated meetings, giving you that much time back in the day to do something else.