*Warning, this post will improve your life.
It’s 3PM, and you’re tired. Those 5-hour ENERGY commercials creep you out, so you don’t have any. You took a 10 minute nap in the bathroom stall, but it didn’t work. You should walk some stairs.
‘The smallest act is greater than the greatest intention’?-Kahlil Gibran
AMP’s Stair Walks derived from a group of coworkers that were tired from a long day, but still had a large end of the day pile of work to go. They needed a quick break, but also a boost to finish the day strong. Stair Walks seemed to be the perfect solution. Before I break it down for you, let me introduce myself.
My name is Chichi or Chi2 and I work on the Analytics team, so I take my statistics seriously. Some people talk the talk, but I talk the numbers. After realizing the benefits of adding stairs to a work day, it was easy to use numbers to convince my coworkers of what they were missing out on. The ROI is just something no one can ignore.
Here at AMP, we’re on the 8th floor.
- Going up and down is 16 flights of stairs with a total of 309 stair steps
- There are also some gaps in between each flight that total 128 steps, so now there is a total step count of 437
- It takes me about 2min and 29secs at a casual pace to do all 16 flights (9.3 seconds per flight, 0.3 seconds per step)
- In a typical work week, I spend 12 min and 25 seconds walking 80 flights of stairs and taking 2,185 steps doing them
- Men’s Health says if you walk 2 flights of stairs a day, you can lose up to 6 lbs a year.
Assuming I don’t take the stairs on weekends, and taking into account holidays and vacations, I can lose up to 32 lbs a year for a 3 minute break every day. How’s that for ROI?
‘An escalator can never break; it can only become stairs’?¬¶ Sorry for the convenience’?-Mitch Hedberg
Some people see the glass as half empty and can’t open their eyes to all the positives. Here are a couple responses I get from time to time.
Q: Hey Chichi, won’t I sweat doing it? The stair walk is going to ruin my fabulous-ness.
A: First of all, this isn’t a decathlon, you’re walking up some stairs. Secondly, so what? Sweat is the new black; wear it with pride.
Q: Yo Chi, I do Wii Fit. So, aren’t these stairs going to be a waste of my time?
A: I know you’re lying because no one’s used a Wii since ’09. But regardless, stairs give more than health benefits. It allows you to interact with coworkers, give the mind a mental break from work and get the blood flowing in the body.
Q: But, but’?¬¶ I’m so busyyy.
A: Don’t think I didn’t see you on Facebook 20min ago. And, even if I didn’t, a three minute break in the action has more benefits to work production than negatives. Research shows taking a step back from your work at 3pm improves work output.(Sample size is small)
The equation below summarizes the message of this post:
Walking Stairs = Being Awesome
Stair Walks are just one of the reasons why AMP’s culture is so awesome. So you should probably apply to one of the positions on the career page because we don’t just do awesome work, we also take steps to making ourselves more awesome.1
1You see what I did with the title and the last sentence of this post? Pretty clever huh? You only get that clever by walking the stairs.
