A safe and healthy work environment is indeed a productive work environment. It all starts with having an ergonomically safe and sound workplace.
With the coronavirus pandemic hitting the globe, millions of workers are working from home, converting their dining areas or common rooms into home offices. This is one of the poor practices that can potentially lead to several health and safety risks to the workers.
Most of the time, ergonomics is overlooked despite the potential hazards it may cause to an individual. The main reason for this is that the hazards from poor ergonomics are not instantly visible like a physical injury. They are the type of injuries to manifest and develop over time when a person continues to repeat those poor practices over a long period of time.
This is a serious health risk to keep an eye on and so, employers have to have effective strategies in place to control and manage the risk to improve the quality of work and well-being of their employees.
This blog post has some simple yet effective tips covered to maintain a healthy corporate environment in your workplace.
Workplace Ergonomics – Data & Statistics
Ergonomics play a significant role in our daily lives be they personal or professional. Some work operations require the same repetitive motions over and over again which may result in discomfort, injury, or disability.
These ergonomic injuries estimate 33% of all workplace injuries and illnesses, costing workplaces millions of dollars in workers’ compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
These injuries make up a total of:
- Stress builds up in a healthy body from being in the same position for 20 minutes
- 75% of individuals experience mild to severe neck pain at some point in their lives
- Doing repetitive motions of less than 30 seconds for half of the work time leads to high costs of ergonomic injuries
- Nearly 2 million workers suffer from musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs)
Tips for Improving Workplace Ergonomics
Below are some simple yet effective ways to improve ergonomics in the workplace:
1. Practice Good Posture
Having a good working posture is very important to practice good ergonomics. While sitting on a desk, a worker’s hand, wrist, and forearms should be approximately horizontal with each other and parallel to the floor.
It is very important to be aware of the right working posture to help prevent injuries or MSDs.
2. Get an Adjustable Chair & Desk
Adjustable chairs and desks are also of significant importance when it comes to ensuring good ergonomics and the right working posture. This will help adjust the appropriate height for the screen to work safely.
3. Lift Your Knees
If a job or daily tasks involve lifting or loading operations, employers need to make sure that their workforce is trained enough on manual handling and lifting materials. Always involve knees in the process to ensure the risk of injury is minimized.
4. Do Not Hunch Over the Laptop
Display screen equipment or DSE users need to be mindful of any hazard that could cause them serious harm over time. Working on display screens can easily result in shoulder, neck, or back pain.
Those working for longer periods need to ensure that when looking at the screen, the eye-line should be leveled so that it can not result in any health and safety risks.
5. Work at an Appropriate Height
Adjusting the appropriate working height helps elbows naturally fall flush with your table’s height. It helps prevent carpel tunnel stress or other severe injuries.
6. Keep Yourself Hydrated
Keeping yourself hydrated while working is super important that most workers do not pay much attention to. Dehydration leads to headaches or dizziness which may affect daily work activities.
Along with this, one should also keep track of having proper meals than snacking throughout the day. This will in turn affect an individual’s overall health.
7. Reduce Repetitive Movement
Most musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) arise due to repetitive motions even for smaller periods. The best way to do so is by changing the task so that the risk of injuries can be minimized.
8. Create a Low-stress Environment
A common cause of workplace stress is muscle tension and it could occur working in an uncomfortable office space. This can lead to various muscular aches and can make the work even more difficult in such unpleasant circumstances.
9. Arrange Proper Training
One thing that employers need to prioritize is providing proper health and safety training to the staff to make sure the risk is controlled and eliminated to its optimum. This involves providing manual handling training, workplace stress training, display screen work training, and home working training.
10. Provide Suitable Temperature for Work
The optimum temperature to work safely and efficiently is also one of the important steps in improving workplace ergonomics. Employees working in extremely hot or cold weather are unable to work properly, the risk management of various health risks may increase in addition to reduced productivity.
Bottom Line
Proper workplace setting with the right practices plays a vital role in minimizing health and safety risks. It all comes down to having proper ergonomics to that workers gain a good knowledge of MSDs and implement safe working practices.
