1. Press Release:
The freedom to move
We are all familiar with the adage, that happy and healthy employees positively affect
the bottom line of any business. While perks such as thirteenth cheques, access to the
company holiday home, medical aid benefits, weekly office lunches or flexi hours and
the option to work from home, all enhance an employee’s work-life, it’s at the
workstation where employee optimization and overall well-being begins.
With the current trend of work/office space design veering towards spaces that
encourage comfort - with the end goal being increased efficiency - so too comes new
approaches in best working practices and behaviours; changes and adaptations that
internationally acclaimed office furniture manufacturer Dauphin HumanDesign
Group, continually aim to be at the forefront of.
Best seating practices
There is ample research supporting the case that no two people sit the same and that
correct seating, positioning and ergonomics of an employee within their specific work
environment are of utmost importance to the health of said office worker and
ultimately their happiness. The most natural posture of the spine is when we stand i.e.
in the S-shape, but when we sit the tendency for most is to hunch forward creating a
C-shape, which if done day-in and day-out is a ticking time bomb for a whole host of
health concerns such as acute back and neck ache, not to mention digestive problems
and increased LDL-cholesterol levels, to name a few (the latter from the All 4 Women
article you sent me http://www.all4women.co.za/health/health-articles/why-you-need-
to-sit-less-in-2015?utm_source=Copy+of+Health+Tips+-
+7+January+2015&utm_campaign=09012015&utm_medium=email).
Correct seating is fundamental to Dauphin HumanDesign Group’s dynamic seating
solution philosophy, as Cherine Leischman, Dauphin HumanDesign Group’s seating
specialist, states: ‘Dauphin believes in the concept of good ergonomic seating where
the office chair has the ability to be adjusted from a static to a dynamic position,
enabling freedom of movement and good healthy work habits.’ This philosphy has
been technologically interpreted and developed into Dauphin’s innovative Syncro
Active Balance® Mechanism, which Leischman explains as having ‘an automatic
seat-tilt adjustment (up to -12°) that causes the pelvis to tip forward, thus raising the
thorax and stretching the cervical spine. This results in the straightening of the spinal
column into the desired S-shape like that of the standing position.’ The benefit of this
mechanism, and its resulting pelvis tilt, is that it encourages and active seated posture
so that the muscles work harder in supporting the spine as if one was standing.
Getting up and around
Another accepted maxim in the pursuit of healthy office behaviour, says Leischman,
is that employees should get up and move around regularly and not sit at a desk for an
extended period of time. ‘Sitting for long periods in a static position can be described
as “the new smoking”. Office workers should indeed break their hours into more
dynamic movement, whether it is within the seated position or breaking away from

2. their workstations all together. This allows for greater flow of blood circulation and
thus more oxygen-flow throughout the body, thereby reducing muscle strain and
lethargy and promoting energy and greater concentration,’ she says.
The best way to manage this is to segment the day with standing, walking or
stretching breaks, suggests Andrew Todd, Lecturer at Rhodes University Department
of Human Kinetics and Ergonomics and chairman of the Ergonomics Society of
South Africa (ESSA). ‘These breaks should be short and frequent and involve
movement, for example; alternating between sitting (60% of your day), standing
(30%) and walking (10%), two to four times an hour,’ he says.
Standing, the next frontier
It’s undeniable that most office related jobs require workers to be seated to perfom
their duties, but if mimmicking the stading position of the spine like with Dauphin’s
Syncro Active Balance® Mechanism is the ideal seating position then according to
the American Council on Exercise the new frontier in office design, standing
workstations, will be coming to an office near you. The council recently offered its
workers the option of standing work stations and according to the its Chief Science
Officer, Cedric X Bryant who works at a desk that includes a treadmill, ‘many people
report feeling more energetic,’ and ‘it certainly helps with mental processing.’
While standing workstations are yet to catch on a mass scale, trend forecaster and
analyst Dion Chang recently unveiled his top business and consumer trends to
BizCommunity earlier this year, where he says that ‘all should rise for the standing
boardroom.’ (http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/670/123119.html) What
he’s referring to is the idea of 30-minute standing meetings, which enables more
focus, alertness and productivity, the direct results of having no chairs. According to
Chang, this idea of standing meetings is part of a greater trend he calls ‘agile
working,’ which is closely aligned with Dauphin’s dynamic seating philosophy,
namely that office workers flourish in environments that allow them to move and
work freely. ‘By creating different working areas within an office, the staff has the
freedom to work wherever they want, whenever they want,’ says Chang.
The implications of this for office design, according to Leischman, however would
mean a different approach. ‘The work station footprint would remain the same, it is
simply the operating function of the workstation that would change. This means that
desking would no longer be static and cabling would have to accommodate height
adjustable desks,’ she says. This is something that Dauphin has already flagged and
developed, namely, the Bosse M3-Desk, an adjustable workstation that
accommodates sitting as well as standing. ‘Given that no one day is like the next, the
solution is to stay flexible. The M3-Desk has been developed with this understanding
and is therefore an expert in transformation. If you wish, the motorised table top can
be adjusted up to a height of 127cm by the push of a button. This helps to ensure the
ideal position when working while standing, protecting the back and preventing
fatigue in the process,’ says Leischmann.
So, with all this activity going on does this mean we’ll have to include designer
sneakers into our work attire? Not necessarily, according to Leischman, it’s rather
about staying mobile and customizing your work station to accommodate healthy

3. office behaviour and habits, whether that means sitting at a desk in a chair with a
forward tilt that mimmicks the spine into a standing for most part of the day, getting
up and stretching every hour or having an adjustable workstation that allows you to
stand. ‘The South Africa market is becoming more conscious of health and safety
issues – more than ever before. We now know how an office environment becomes
ergonomically sound in all aspects, such as lighting, desking, seating, and technology
and the integration of these to provide a holistically ergonomic, healthy and
productive environment is key,’ she says.
ENDS