Institute for the Study of Pointless Metrics

culture·Published 2025-04

Adoption of Standing Desks and Frequency of Ecosystem Language in Internal Communications: A Positive Association

Principal investigator: Orrin Bletchley, Founder & Director of the Institute.

519.333.547.8621.23.96.69.312Standing desks as percentage of total workstations (%)Instances of 'ecosystem' per 1,000 words of internal communication (count per 1,000 words)r = 0.87p < 0.001n = 1,247
Figure 1. Standing desks as percentage of total workstations versus Instances of 'ecosystem' per 1,000 words of internal communication. n = 1,247.
Organizations with higher standing-desk adoption rates produce significantly more internal prose containing the word 'ecosystem.'

Methodology

One thousand two hundred and forty-seven organizations participated in a twelve-month longitudinal study in which the Institute's research staff catalogued standing-desk prevalence via on-site facility audits and analyzed internal Slack and email corpora for ecosystem-vocabulary density using the Institute's proprietary Jargon Extraction Framework (JEF v2.1). Organizations with fewer than fifty employees were excluded after the second audit on grounds the Institute declines to specify.

Funding disclosure: Funded by the Institute's Publication Reserve Fund and an unrestricted gift from a standing-desk manufacturer whose products appeared in 38% of the study's facilities.

Instruments cited in this study

Full citation

Bletchley, O. (2025). Adoption of Standing Desks and Frequency of Ecosystem Language in Internal Communications: A Positive Association. Institute for the Study of Pointless Metrics. r = 0.87, p < 0.001, n = 1,247.

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