Goldilocks on a train: Key learnings for reducing sedentary behaviour in complex work environments

Strenuous physical activity at work has traditionally been considered the predominant cause for fatigue, poor performance, impairments such as musculoskeletal pain, and concurrent premature withdrawal from the workforce. Despite large decreases in physical activity demands for many workers in recent years, similar reductions in health impairment have not occurred. Rather, metabolic and cardiovascular disorders, reduced physical capacity, as well as increased risk of musculoskeletal pain are more prevalent than ever. The main explanation given to unravel this paradox is that people are spending too much time sitting. To tackle the drift towards insufficient physical activity, many preventive occupational health and ergonomics programs try to introduce some physical activity around productive work, via active commuting, walking and exercising during breaks. Such paradigms are limited through their reliance on individual motivation, but diverts time from productive work, making sustainability difficult. A new preventive occupational ergonomics paradigm called the Goldilocks Principle has emerged and like the fairy-tale character, envisages that workplace physical activity can be too little or too much, but ‘just right’ when the posture, intensity, duration, and reoccurrence of exposure, not only allow different body systems to recover, but also to improve function. This paper presents findings from a benchtop simulation study, held as part of a Workshop at an international physiotherapy research conference in 2019. The workshop tested the efficacy of job redesign in train driving using the Goldilocks Principle. Participants were given a paper time scale for a 12-hour day, with each page representing 2hrs. The time spanned 0700-to-1900 in order to also capture some non-occupational activity. Participants then created task descriptions on post-it notes colour-coded to posture and movements involved in each task. Following this, a presentation on the Goldilocks Principle was given, and participants were asked to rearrange tasks and bring in new ones to obtain a better pattern of physical demands. The results showed a dramatic decrease in sedentary behaviour. In most cases, participants elected to introduce health promoting work and task modifications by engineering out sitting time and substituting it with safety checks, train inspections, and platform reviews requiring movement. As future work in train driving—as well as many other occupations—could become even more sedentary, with humans required to undertake more passive monitory roles (e.g., from increased automation/Artificial Intelligence), the findings suggest that redesigning work in line with the Goldilocks Principle has value in early phases of conceptual task and job (re)design.