How a Texas A&M-led study priced 43 minutes at $9,000

Across more than 10,000 workers tracked for a year, the people at desks that move up and down spent about 43 more minutes a day actively working at their computers than colleagues at fixed desks. That's the core finding of a study co-led by Dr. Mark Benden, a professor at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, and Dr. Tricia Salzar, regional ergonomist for U.S. Army Public Health Command Region, West, published in Theoretical and Applied Ergonomics and announced by the university on Nov. 11.

The number that will travel is a different one: nearly $9,000 in potential annual productivity value per employee. For anyone who plans office space, that figure could be only as useful as an understanding of how it was built. It turns out to be built simply, and that's good news for anyone who wants to check it against their own organization.

From keystrokes to a dollar figure

The researchers paired employee comfort surveys with software records of computer activity: keystrokes, words typed, mouse clicks and typing errors, logged over a yearlong period. From those records they compared total computer use for the two groups. Sit-stand desk users averaged 3.66 hours of active computer time a day. Regular-desk users averaged 2.95.

Subtract one from the other and you get 0.71 hours, or roughly 43 minutes. On those two averages, the sit-stand group logged about 24% more active time, a ratio worked out here from the published figures rather than one the researchers state. Annualized, the researchers put the gap at roughly 171 additional hours, which they note is more than four 40-hour workweeks.

The dollar step is one multiplication. The team applied a standardized hourly wage of about $52 to those 171 hours. Run that arithmetic and it lands near $8,900, which the study rounds to nearly $9,000 per employee per year.

Texas A&M's $9,000 is 171 extra hours of software-measured computer activity priced at a standard $52 wage, which makes it a business-case input any workplace team can rescale to its own payroll. The relationship is linear. A workforce whose average hourly cost is half the study's wage would see half the dollar value from the same hours, and a higher-paid team would see more.

The baseline deserves a second look too. Even the sit-stand group averaged under four hours of software-measured active computer time a day. Whatever an organization assumes about how much of a workday is spent actively at the keyboard, this dataset suggests the measured figure can be well below a full shift, and any gain should be priced against that real baseline rather than an eight-hour assumption.

Active time is an input, output is the test

Gallup defines productivity as the ratio of output to input, usually measured as output per hour worked or per person, with revenue per person as a common example. By that definition, minutes of active computer use sit closer to the input side of the ledger. More time engaged at the keyboard is a reasonable precondition for more work done, but it is not the same thing as more claims processed or more drawings finished.

The Texas A&M team did look past time alone. Sit-stand desk users generally typed more words and logged more keystrokes than their fixed-desk counterparts. Benden reads that as evidence that people were producing output rather than simply sitting in front of a screen. Those are still activity counts, though, and their value depends on the job. Keystrokes are a decent proxy for a writer and a weak one for an analyst who spends an hour thinking before typing a formula.

Why would a desk move these numbers at all? Benden's explanation runs through the body. He said that switching among working positions leads to better health because it eases physical strain and gets people moving, especially workers who would otherwise sit for most of the day. The university frames the employee payoff as sustained energy and longer stretches of focused work. If that holds, comfort is the hinge between the furniture and the 43 minutes, which is why the study's comfort surveys matter as much as its activity logs.

Activity counts are a common lens in this field. A 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics Beyond the Numbers article on remote work notes that firm-level experiments have measured individual productivity with metrics such as emails written and calls made, and that whether people are more productive at home likely depends on their tasks, technology, home environment, motivation and management practices. The same list of factors applies to an office floor, and the physical setting is only one item on it.

The BLS review also shows how much the answer depends on where you look. Those randomized experiments found small positive effects on individual productivity, along with lower turnover as job satisfaction rose, while a couple of single-firm case studies from the pandemic found productivity declined in the short run. Across 43 private-sector industries, Fernald et al. (2024) found little relationship between labor productivity and the ability to work remotely. The same change in work setting produced different answers by proxy and by level of measurement, a reminder that an individual keystroke gain may not show up identically in a business-unit output figure.

Gallup's own research makes the multi-factor point with numbers. Its 2024 Q12 meta-analysis found business units in the top engagement quartile showed 14% higher productivity on production records and evaluations, and 18% higher on sales, than those in the bottom quartile, and Gallup attributes 70% of the variance in team engagement to managers. Gallup does list the physical work environment among the factors that influence productivity. Benden calls this the "workplace effect", the direct influence of the physical environment on behavior, health and performance. The desk study adds a measured piece of evidence to that factor; it does not replace the others.

Where the desk decision actually lands

Furniture choices tend to get made when an office is being renewed, relocated or reworked to bring people back. In St. Louis, Colliers senior vice president Tony Kennedy wrote in a market report carried by REBusinessOnline that employers pushing for three or more in-office days have produced a modest increase in demand, with tenants favoring "commute-worthy" buildings and Class A amenitized properties showing more positive absorption than other product types. Overall vacancy there held at 24.7% for a third straight quarter.

The quality split inside that average is sharp. Clayton's Class A vacancy rate is 14%, about half the region's average, while Class A vacancy downtown hovers around 36%. Tenants are paying up for space that earns the commute, and that is exactly the kind of fit-out budget where a desk specification gets decided.

That one market is not the whole country, but the pattern it describes is the moment this study becomes useful. When a company is already spending to make an office worth the commute, the desk line item is a place where a facilities team can now attach a measured productivity estimate instead of an ergonomics argument alone. The case is strongest for teams whose work is mostly at a screen, because that is the work the study measured. For roles spent on a plant floor, in the field or in meetings, the data says little.

Testing the $9,000 on your own floor

Because the estimate is built from a few transparent steps, a workplace or HR operations team can rebuild it with local inputs before committing to a full rollout. The study's own method suggests the shape of that check.

1. Replace the standardized $52 wage with the team's actual hourly cost and recompute the value of 171 hours.
2. Choose an output measure the business already tracks for the roles in question, in line with Gallup's output-to-input definition, rather than relying on activity time alone.
3. Pilot with a comparison group and pair comfort surveys with objective measures, mirroring the study's mix of subjective and software-recorded data.

The third step is the one the researchers themselves singled out. Benden said the team considered it important to gather two kinds of data: subjective measures, such as employees' survey answers about their comfort, and objective measures, in the form of software that tracked computer activity, so they could analyze how people engaged with their work. A pilot built the same way lets a team see whether comfort and activity move together on its own floor before a study average becomes a budget assumption.

Benden's group, which runs the Center for Worker Health at the Texas A&M School of Public Health and partners with industry nationwide, says its next interest is how AI tools could change the physical workspace and organizational outcomes. In Benden's view, the next breakthrough may come not from people putting in harder work, but from designing workspaces and systems that help them work smarter and more efficiently.

That question is arriving with data of its own. Gallup found in May 2026 that 65% of employees at organizations that had implemented AI said it had a positive effect on their productivity and efficiency, and in its 2026 U.S. survey 45% of those using AI for one or two work purposes reported a positive effect, against 90% of those using it for seven or more. Those are self-reports, the opposite end of the evidence spectrum from software logs. If the center brings the same method to AI, pairing activity records with surveys across thousands of workers, the result will be a second figure facilities and IT leaders can price the same way.