If Moving at Work Feels Weird, Your Workplace Culture Is the Problem

We’ve normalised sitting at a desk for eight hours.

We’ve normalised eating lunch in front of a screen.

We’ve normalised back-to-back meetings.

We’ve even normalised answering emails at 10pm.

But stand up in an open-plan office and march on the spot for 60 seconds?

Suddenly you’re the weird one.

I hear this all the time when I talk about Movement Snacks® in UK workplaces:

“I’d feel silly.”

“People would look at me.”

“I’m too busy.”

“I’d forget.”

And perhaps the most revealing:

“I’d feel guilty stopping when everyone else is working.”

That’s the problem.

We keep telling people to move more, take breaks and look after themselves while maintaining workplace cultures that make those behaviours feel uncomfortable, inconvenient or even lazy.

If we genuinely want to prevent burnout and help people perform better, we need to make movement part of work -not something people have to find time for despite it.

We aren’t designed to sit still all day

Movement at work doesn’t need to mean a workout.

A 60-second Movement Snack could be shoulder rolls between meetings, calf raises while waiting for the kettle, a walking phone call, chair squats, stretching or simply getting away from your screen.

And there’s growing evidence supporting short breaks.

A systematic review and meta-analysis involving 2,335 participants found microbreaks produced statistically significant improvements in vigour and reductions in fatigue. The researchers didn’t find a significant overall improvement in performance, and more demanding cognitive tasks may require longer recovery.

That’s an important distinction.

I’m not suggesting 60 seconds of movement magically fixes productivity.

And it certainly won’t fix an impossible workload or toxic culture.

But it can interrupt prolonged sitting, give your brain and body a reset and build recovery into a working day that might currently contain very little.

So why aren’t more of us doing it?

Because behaviour is contagious

Imagine you’re sitting in an open-plan office with 30 colleagues.

Nobody moves except to go to the toilet or make coffee.

Then your watch tells you to stand.

Are you really going to get up and start doing a wall sit?

Some people will.

Most won’t.

Now imagine your manager stands up and says:

“Right, we’ve been sitting for an hour. 60-second reset.”

Half the team gets up.

Suddenly it isn’t weird.

It’s what your team does.

The exercise hasn’t changed. The culture around it has.

And other countries give us some fascinating examples of this.

Japan has been making movement normal for almost 100 years

Japan’s Radio Taiso  – short group calisthenics – dates back to 1928.

The Japanese Government describes it as a sequence of simple exercises lasting only a few minutes and practised in workplaces, schools and communities.

It hasn’t disappeared into history either.

Japan Post Insurance says it encourages all employees to participate in Radio Taiso during working hours across its offices.

Think about the cultural difference that creates.

Nobody needs to be the first person to stand up.

Nobody has to worry that Brian from Accounts thinks they’ve lost the plot because they’re stretching beside their desk.

Movement has permission.

And that’s something I think UK workplaces could learn from.

Not necessarily by copying Radio Taiso.

But by copying the normalisation of movement.

Russia has an interesting history too

I’d heard the claim that Russian workers routinely spend ten minutes stretching before work.

I couldn’t find sufficiently credible evidence that this is standard practice across Russian workplaces today, so I wouldn’t make that claim.

But there is evidence of something interesting historically.

The former Soviet Union had organised workplace “production gymnastics”, with guidance recommending exercise pauses of around 5-10 minutes during working shifts. Shorter exercise breaks were also recommended for mentally demanding work requiring sustained concentration.

The principle is more interesting than the country.

Movement wasn’t something workers had to remember to squeeze into their spare time.

It was built into work.

Almost a century later, we’re buying smartwatches to remind us to stand up.

Perhaps we’ve gone backwards.

Leaders give permission without saying a word

This is where workplace movement programmes often fall apart.

An organisation launches an initiative.

HR sends an email.

Posters go up.

Employees are encouraged to move.

And the senior leadership team carries on sitting through back-to-back meetings, working through lunch and sending emails late into the evening.

People watch behaviour more than they read policies.

One recent Japanese workplace intervention provides an interesting example.

Before introducing active breaks, management worked to make taking them acceptable. The CEO encouraged participation, department leaders promoted the programme and teams adapted the activities around their working day.

After a year, occupational sedentary time in the intervention group had fallen by around 24 minutes per working day, although the study had limitations and didn’t show improvements across every wellbeing or work measure.

What interests me isn’t simply the 24 minutes.

It’s how they achieved it.

They didn’t tell employees:

“You really should remember to move more.”

They changed the environment around the behaviour.

Stop relying on willpower

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see.

“We encourage our employees to take regular breaks.”

Great.

When?

Because if someone’s diary looks like:

9:00 meeting
9:30 Teams call
10:00 client meeting
11:00 project meeting
12:00 catch-up
12:30 eat something while answering emails…

…telling them they have permission to take breaks isn’t enough.

You have to design them into the working day.

And if your employees tell you they feel guilty taking a break, pay attention.

That’s culture giving you feedback.

How do we make movement normal in UK workplaces?

Start ridiculously small.

Don’t announce a corporate fitness programme.

Don’t tell everyone they need 10,000 steps.

And please don’t make Dave from Finance change into Lycra.

Create tiny, repeatable triggers.

Finish meetings at 25 or 50 minutes instead of automatically filling the full slot.

Start or finish team meetings with a 60-second reset.

Make suitable one-to-ones walk-and-talks.

Put Movement Snack prompts near the kettle, printer or stairs.

Create a team wall-sit challenge.

Encourage people to stand during phone calls.

Let people choose movements they’re comfortable doing.

And crucially:

Get the leaders involved.

The moment the managing director joins the wall sit, something changes.

It stops being:

“Look at that person doing an exercise.”

And starts becoming:

“This is something we do here.”

That’s culture change.

What if people forget?

They will.

That’s another reason simply telling people to take more breaks doesn’t work particularly well.

When we’re concentrating, stressed or rushing towards a deadline, we’re unlikely to think:

“This would be an excellent opportunity for a Movement Snack.”

We need prompts.

That’s one of the problems I’ve designed my Performance Microbreak Platform™ to solve.

Rather than expecting employees to remember, the platform helps prompt short movement breaks and allows someone to choose what they need – perhaps focus, energy, calm, stress reduction, fewer aches and pains or a post-meeting reset.

It then delivers a targeted 60-second Movement Snack.

Employees can record how they feel before and afterwards, while organisations gain aggregated insights into areas such as energy, stress, focus and discomfort.

It makes the behaviour easy.

And more importantly, when organisations use it together, it helps make the behaviour normal.

The movement is the delivery mechanism. The product is how you work for the next hour.

Explore the Performance Microbreak Platform™

Maybe we don’t need to work harder

We’ve spent decades celebrating people for going above and beyond.

Staying late.

Skipping lunch.

Being permanently available.

Pushing through.

Then we’re surprised when people become exhausted.

Perhaps the next evolution of high performance isn’t squeezing more work out of every minute.

Perhaps it’s recognising that human beings need moments of recovery in order to keep performing well.

Japan doesn’t give us a blueprint that every British workplace needs to copy.

It gives us something more useful:

Proof that movement at work doesn’t have to feel strange.

When it’s normalised, supported and modelled, the social barrier starts to disappear.

So if your employees feel embarrassed standing up for 60 seconds…

If they’re too busy to move…

If they feel guilty taking a break…

Don’t just tell them to look after themselves.

Ask:

“What is it about the way we work that makes looking after ourselves feel wrong?”

That’s where I’d start.