Does ergonomics matter. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes and no.
Let’s deal with the conflict first. You can have an amazing ergonomic setup costing thousands of dollars but still trash your body quickly. Pick out your common mistakes from below (and these are just a sample):
Weak posture habits Eating lunch at the desk Getting "locked in" on big projects Not using the right glasses Poor eating and drinking habits Not sticking with a regular exercise program Intense workloads and stress Not taking regular breaks throughout the day
If you look through the scrolling list above, you will notice that most are behaviour based factors. No matter how expensive your chair is, it’s not going to fix your dehydration or inconsistent exercise habits.
So the take-home message is that ergonomics is just one of many important factors in a healthy day at work.
Thankfully the body is forgiving and we don’t have to perfect at everything, all the time. Pretty good is generally good enough. Your physiotherapist can help you identify where your time is best spent. For many people, office ergonomics is not the smartest factor to be working on. But it certainly pays for you to know the general principles.
With that wider context in mind, let’s begin.
Take a look at your own posture now, and other people if you can spy them from here. There’s one of two things happening; you are being lazy within your environment, OR your environment is manipulating you into less than ideal positions. Note if it’s just you, see your physiotherapist to help build the good habits.
Ergonomics is about creating an efficient and safe environment for your body to achieve the tasks required.
Aligning your joints efficiently against gravity (and against the loads of your work) means that you can spread a gentle effort across the whole body, and avoid placing excessive load into specific joints and muscles; the usual causes of injury and degeneration. Every job has its own unique movement patterns (or lack thereof) that will promote a certain pattern of body load.
Urgh I can see you falling asleep already. Office ergonomics is certainly not sexy. So how about we think of it like a professional sport? You are a professional desk athlete.
You train 35 hours per week at your desk. Sneak in extra training most evenings at home. Game days are those intense urgent projects sometimes lasting weeks. And the season is a gruelling 11 months long. The body load starts to look a little more significant now doesn’t it?
Your workstation is the equivalent to your sporting field. So yes you can play on a field full of potholes, or in shoes that are three sizes too big for you, or without your mouthguard and shin pads. But one day sooner than later, these things are going to contribute to a significant injury.
So how do you improve your playing environment in the office?
Pro tip: put your body into the ideal alignment in space, then reverse engineer your environment to match.
- Feet flat on the ground
- Knees at 90 degrees
- Hips at 90 degrees
- Sitting yourself tall in your chair
- Shoulders relaxed
- Elbows hanging at 90 degrees by your side
- Wrists relaxed
- Eye gaze straight ahead
If you can achieve all these things comfortably within your workspace then you’re doing okay. If however like me you just found that achieving Number 8 (eye gaze straight ahead) means you are looking way over the top of the laptop screen, you’ve found a problem worth fixing.
Excuse me while I adjust myself.
So this may mean raising your screen to eye height, then plugging in a separate keyboard and mouse (to maintain 5, 6 & 7).
Or it may mean swapping to a different chair (1, 2 & 3).
Or moving the clutter on your desk so that you don’t have to reach for the keyboard (4, 5 , 6 & 8).
This is not rocket science and in most instances doesn’t require anything more than 15 minutes spent rearranging your existing workstation. But even after all of these simple changes, you may find that the desk or chair just doesn’t let you achieve your goal, and then it’s worth spending some money on the right piece of equipment for you.
There are some great online tools to help you assess further. My personal favourite is still http://www.habitatwork.co.nz/ which has quick assessment tools and quizzes, not to mention a lot of good common-sense information.
And like sports athletes, the best desk athletes also have a great relationship with their physio. Working on preventative care is always faster, cheaper and more enjoyable than rehabilitation once the injury has presented. Just saying.
