Artwork, judiciously placed, can motivate employees to get a bit more exercise just by using the staircase in your building.
That's what researchers Theadora Swenson and Dr. Michael Siegel, with the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health in Boston, found when they investigated ways to encourage office workers in three-story buildings to use the stairs rather than the elevators.
The researchers selected what they termed "an interactive environmental intervention on stair usage" to see if art could get folks to bypass the elevators.
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They selected two similar three-story office buildings in Boston, one (the intervention site) with 200 employees and a comparison site with 140 workers.
They turned the stairwell of the intervention site into an art gallery. "The stairwell was decorated with interactive paintings such as maps, storyboards, and wish lists to encourage employees to take the stairs rather than the elevator," they reported in the May/June issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion. "Daily stair and elevator usage were measured using electronic sensors or door-access card counters for two weeks prior to the intervention and six weeks after."
The results in this small-sample study were remarkable: Use of stairs more than doubled (from 31.5 percent to 66.2 percent) during the six-week monitoring period.
Conclusion? In other words, if you want more employees to use the stairs in your building, hire a starving artist or two to make them (the stairs, not the employees) come alive.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
