Breadcrumbs

Meet Emma - Commissioned by Fellowes as the 'work colleague of the future'

In Britain, we spend eight years of our entire lives sitting down - this is going to change our entire appearance. Emma is a life-sized representation of how we could look in 20 years’ time:

Emma has a permanently bent back because of the way she's been sitting at her workstation.
The muscles in her legs are much weaker.
Her eyes are redder because of the quality of the air.
She has more nose hair, more ear hair, she has a swollen nose.
She's much more stressed so therefore we'll see the stress related to eczema on her arms.
Emma has kind of sallow skin because she's been in artificial light for so many years.
Many of the problems she has are permanent.

It is too late for Emma...

What will happen if we continue working with poor posture and inadequately set-up workstations?

Workplace wellbeing and our sedentary lifestyles are having a major negative impact. If we're going to do anything about it, employers and employees both need to take some responsibility. We need to spend less time staring at a screen. We need to take more regular breaks, we need to get up.

Employers can do a lot more in the workplace. If they can design buildings so that there are actually more spaces for people to take breaks in, if there are different types of desks, different types of workstation. We need to encourage more walk and talk meetings but if we keep doing the same things, we could have problems as bad in the workplace as we thought we'd left behind in the last industrial revolution.