Are You Sitting Comfortably?
The office is a popular place for forming friendships, meeting
new buddies - and even a blossoming romance now and then (per
company policy, of course). But these days, some people's deepest
office attachment is to their chair. And for good reason. As
employees put in longer hours at their desks, bad office chairs are
a big problem. Many employers provide the same chair for everyone,
but employees fail to adjust them to fit. And at companies that are
cutting costs, many people are stuck with cast-off chairs that
don't fit or chairs so old they offer little support.
The result is a lot of aches and pains. Some 86 percent of
office workers say their furniture causes discomfort, and more than
half say that if they could make one change to their office
furniture, it would be a better chair, according to a survey of 150
office workers by Staples Advantage.
One Connecticut social worker had an office chair so old and
lacking in support that she could hardly get up from her desk
because of back pain. Her employer was too strapped to provide new
chairs, so she secretly swapped her old chair for a better model
from a co-worker who had just gotten a new chair from another
office.
Workers who find a good chair tend to get attached. One Virginia
executive loves his chair so much that he has taken it with him
through three job changes in the past 16 years. After sitting on
cheap, ill-fitting chairs in the past, he's come to appreciate how
sore one can be from sitting in the wrong thing.
Another executive for a food-service company liked his
employer's chairs so much that when he changed jobs, he paid $500
for a new one out of his own pocket. He says the chair eases
chronic soreness in his back and gives him more energy to get a lot
more work done.
Here's the good part. Improving the ergonomics of office chairs
and other equipment increases productivity by an average of 17
percent, based on a review of 40 studies of office workers
published in the "Journal of Safety Research." Workers tended to
have fewer muscular-skeletal disorders and a lower rate of absences
and errors, which all contribute to the bottom line.
