Before we get into office furniture and ergonomics, why don’t you take a seat?

How’s that chair working for you? Feel alright for a few minutes? What about if you were one to sit in that chair for three, four, six, eight hours in a day? Would it still feel comfortable? And if you do get uncomfortable in the chair, do you get distracted from your work? As you sit and ponder these questions, I’m going to take a ltitle time to discuss ergonomics of office chairs and what to look for if your goal is to make your workers safe, comfortable, healthy and efficient.

[Image courtesy of Darren Johnson from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]in some sedentary office environments, good ergonomics in office chairs can make a big difference in worker productivity and health. But as every body is different, proper ergonomics will often be different, so the choice of chair in an office setting is very important to get right. Here’s a hint: This would not be considered ergonomically sound.

The concept of ergonomics is relatively new, only reaching prominent  consideration in the last couple of decades, with focus on desks, chairs, computer keyboards and mice to make the human body work more efficiently and comfortably to cut down on various muscle and ligament stresses and injuries that can be traced to unnatural sitting or working positions or postures. In my last post I talked briefly about  the culture evolving to the point that safety officers like you or I may have to take some procurement responsibility to make sure the office has the best ergonomic furniture available for desk workers. While we may not know the first thing about ergonomics, we may be asked to order new office furniture to address  a perceived or real threat of muscular or ligament damage from workers who had to sit with the right posture or had to do too much stretching and straining to do their jobs comfortably.

Before, we talked about hiring an ergonomist to serve as a consultant for your office to make sure that investing in new furniture would be a wise investment for your particular company in terms of improving productivity and reducing absenteeism due to work-related stresses or injuries.

Now we’ll go a little bit into the chairs themselves. What makes a great ergonomic chair? The simplest way to describe it is that it is a chair that fits an individual worker perfectly in all the key areas – the back, the thighs and the arms. I don’t want to give you the impression that you can buy just one chair that fits everyone because it’s so adjustable; chances are you will have to “customize” to a point with your office staff. There are people on both sides of the height scale who will absolutely need custom-made chairs, but for the most part there are chairs out there that will fit 90 to 95 percent of your workers.

Your ergonomist, whom I referred to in the previous post to serve as a consultant for your company, can be vital in helping you procure the right chairs for your workers. Believe it or not, your workers will mostly have different tasks on the job, and they could be different enough that they might require different chairs that address different ergonomic needs. Your ergonomist can assess your individual workers for their sizes, the tasks they perform and their body composition (length of thighs and arms, curve of the back and other measures) to find the best chair.

There are companies who sell highly adjustable chairs that will be able to fit most of your workers, but it will be important for that ergonomist, who helped you pick out chairs for your workers, to come back and have either a staff meeting or brief one-on-one tutorials about how to use the adjustable chairs and how to properly adjust them so they fit each worker’s body to provide the most comfortable and efficient fit. Oftentimes, without guidance, workers who get an adjustable chair will usually not bother with making any adjustments, so it will be important for your ergonomist (and also you, the safety officer) to impress upon those workers the importance of knowing how a chair should feel, how important posture is and the benefits of having a well-adjusted chair.

And one other point – having a chair be ergonomically correct does not have to be uncomfortable. A chair that supports the key parts of your body will work with you and actually fight back a little, without being uncomfortable and without being too soft that you “sink into” it and risk losing whatever good posture you need.

And you will have to prepare to pay a bit for these kinds of chairs. You can get a decent mass-produced chair for $100 for each desk, but you may need to pay $500 or $1,000 for chairs that meet the ergonomic needs of your staff – and if you have workers who are particularly tall or short, thy will require custom-made chairs which may easily go more than $1,500.  Therefore, this is the kind of investment that should not be taken lightly. Evaluate how much worker time you have lost due to injuries that could be traced to poor sitting posture or poor chairs and make a determination if the investment could outweigh the costs of doing nothing over the next five or 10 years.

So now you know. There are economists and ergonomists. Both of them can be vitally important in the long-term physical and financial health of your company. Put the ergonomist on a level equal with your economist and your company will be in good shape.