Simply put, ergonomics is the study of the interaction between people and the tools they use. More precisely, how employees and their tools interact. People who study ergonomics also look for ways to improve the design of the aforementioned tools to enhance their user experience. When looking at an office environment, there are countless areas where ergonomics could be relevant.
Everything from the chairs people sit on, the desks they use or their posture when typing is a component of ergonomics. The ultimate goal of studying ergonomics is to find improvements in the tools people use while working every single day.
Poor ergonomics can lead to chronic repetitive stress injuries RSIs such as carpal tunnel, back, neck or joint pain. In fact, improper ergonomics is one of the most significant workplace risks faced by office workers. A study by the Norwegian State Institute found that, after the common cold, muscular soreness was the second most common cause of absenteeism at work.
They also found that if improvements were made to workstation design and seating, back-related absenteeism was halved and rates of employees leaving the business or going on long-term leave plummeted. Separate studies conducted in the United States found that after ergonomic interventions at State Farm Insurance and Blue Cross-Blue Shield employee productivity increased by 15 percent and 4. For an SME with approximately 50 employees, that is an increase in productivity equivalent to hiring two to eight more full-time staff.
These are known as repetitive stress or overuse injuries. Workers often sit or stand for long periods of time. Poor posture caused by an ill-fitting workstation leads to pain and injury.
Chronic neck and shoulder pain are commonly associated with poor workstation ergonomics. People spend a huge portion of their life at work. By some estimates, we spend one-third of our life working. Repetitive stress and posture-related injuries take time to develop, so the poor movement pattern or posture that causes an injury could go overlooked for weeks or months before the injury sets in.
Similarly, people may get away with poor lifting technique many times without getting injured—until that one time when it all goes wrong. Muscle strains, sprains, and tears, as well as repetitive stress injuries, are one of the most common workplace injuries. These injuries are preventable.
This is why health and safety managers should emphasize the importance of ergonomics in the workplace in their program planning: this is low-hanging safety fruit. Educate your workforce about ergonomics and frequently reinforce ergonomic practices: this is an excellent topic for a safety moment.
Address each of the four scenarios where workers should apply ergonomic practices. Here we are concerned with how a person sits, stands, or moves at work. This includes: working postures manual handling repetitive movements musculoskeletal disorders workplace layout and environment Psychological ergonomics studies mental processes eg perception, cognition, memory, reasoning and emotion and how people interact with products, systems and environments.
This includes: mental workload decision-making human-computer interaction human reliability attitudes stress motivation pleasure cultural differences Organisational ergonomics is about optimising the organisational structures, policies and processes of socio-technical systems. This includes: communication work design staff resource management working time patterns co-operative work quality management organisational culture To ensure that you keep your end users' needs in focus at all times, you should make ergonomists an integral part of your design development team.
Printer-friendly version. Invest NI's design support for business. Also on this site. Choose and work with a designer. They are often overlooked or just accepted as a part of the job. But the repetitiveness of these pain-invoking activities can lead to more serious injuries, including chronic neck and shoulder pain, muscle sprains or tears, or even vision loss.
Designing a workspace ergonomically prevents work-related injuries and illnesses by taking into account how people naturally move. Ergonomics ensures workers have full range of motion to complete a task.
Ergonomic workspaces help to foster a company culture of wellbeing. Employees spend a huge amount of time at work, so it counts to be comfortable.
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