The standing desk is now the default
Five years ago a height-adjustable desk was a special request, an accommodation you filed paperwork for. Now it is what candidates expect to see on the tour and what your existing team asks for one at a time until you have a floor of mismatched desks.
Specifying sit-stand across the whole floor up front costs less per desk than buying them one off, looks consistent, and ends the steady drip of individual requests. The question is no longer whether to do it. It is how to spec it so the money lands on the parts that matter.
What height-adjustable actually has to include
The category runs from genuinely good to barely functional. Four things separate them.
Electric, not crank. A hand-crank base is cheaper and almost never used after week one. Nobody cranks a desk forty turns to stand for ten minutes. If the goal is for people to actually change posture, the base has to be electric.
Dual motor. A single-motor base lifts slower, wobbles more at standing height, and carries less weight. Dual-motor bases are steady with two monitors and a docking station on top, which is the real load.
Travel range. The base should go low enough for a shorter person to sit correctly and high enough for a taller person to stand. A range of about 25 to 50 inches covers most of the population. Cheaper bases cut the range at both ends.
Memory presets. A small keypad that remembers a sit height and a stand height. This sounds minor. It is the single feature that determines whether people keep using the desk, because it turns posture change into one button press.
Specify for a floor, not for one person
A single desk and sixty desks are different problems.
Bench and shared setups. If desks are shared or hot-desked, presets matter even more, and you want a quick controller people can set to their own height in seconds. Some bases store profiles by user.
Cable management. Sixty desks that move up and down will yank cords loose unless the cable path moves with the top. Spec a cable tray, a spine, or a basket on every base. This is the detail that gets skipped and then generates a year of help tickets.
Weight rating. Rate for the real load: two monitors, a laptop, a dock, and someone leaning on the edge. Most commercial bases handle this. The bargain ones do not, and the motor is the part that fails.
Worktop depth. Standing changes your viewing distance. A 30-inch deep top gives room to push the monitor back so people are not staring at a screen six inches from their face when they stand.
The rollout people actually use
Good desks that nobody raises are a wasted budget. Three things drive adoption.
Set the presets on install day. Have the installer or your team walk each person through setting their sit and stand height once. A desk with the presets already programmed gets used. A desk with a confusing keypad and no instruction stays at one height forever.
Mix the spec by role where it helps. Most of the floor gets the standard dual-motor base. Roles that sit all day deep in focus may not need the top tier, while a standing-heavy team might. An open-line dealer can spread the spec across price tiers instead of putting the same base everywhere.
Plan for the old desks. A floor-wide swap leaves a pile of fixed-height desks. Our RESEAT program helps you resell, donate, or recycle them so the rollout does not end in a dumpster. Bring your team to the Hooksett showroom to try the bases at sitting and standing height before you order sixty.
