One of those new ideas that’s getting another look is the concept of “hot desking”. We’ve talked about hot desking before: the practice of having no assigned desks per worker, allocating them instead to the first worker who uses or reserves it for use.

Office space planning professionals use hot desking to reduce property costs without decrease the labor force in turn. In Edinburgh, Scotland, Telford College’s faculty and staff have joined the bandwagon, implementing hot desking in their Granton campus to allow the same number of people to work in a smaller space.

Technology has allowed hot desking to gain the critical mass it failed to reach in prior decades. When Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day ad agency tried it out in the Nineties, it was a famous failed experiment in space planning. Today, high speed Internet, cheap laptops, and Wi-Fi has allowed most firms to succeed where Chiat failed.

More on hot desking after the jump. Read more….

As general manager of Australian firm Link Recruitment Gemma Avon explains, “with laptops and BlackBerries and mobile phones you can do the work wherever you are,” noting that sales reps don’t even go back to the office to file sales figures anymore, when uploading can be done remotely. “It’s all about outcomes, who cares where the job is done? I can’t image any modern manager who isn’t more interested in outcomes than anything else,” comments Avon.

Will hot desking work out for your office as well as it seems to have for  Avon? It depends – there are two types of businesses that seem to adapt well to space planning for the hot desk:

Businesses with shift workers benefit from the creative space planning that hot desking offers. On average, office desks are occupied from 40 to 50 percent of each working day; that’s a lot of office real estate wasted, which can be put to good use when used alternately by different shifts.

Businesses with a high proportion of part-time employees benefit from the smaller overall footprint required by their staff, who can then be allocated desk use in a far more efficient manner than would be possible with a largely full-time crew.

Of course, businesses operationally need to adjust to a hot desking system once it’s implemented: cabling, telecommunications, furniture, and filing systems should facilitate hot desking, not hinder it. Office furniture and wiring must be adjusted to permit switching between users, applications, and equipment.

Even with such standards in place, it’s the people involved who may need to make the biggest adjustment. Employees may feel attached to their own spaces; managing expectations may help ease the adjustment period. “In a customer service centre where people are coming and going, if people know that is how it is going to be they don’t get attached to a little piece of real estate,” reminds Gemma Avon – “there is no status attached with what little piece of the world they have.”

Designing office chairs for the whole range of body sizes may sound simple, but it’s not.  The variation in sizes and dimensions between the opposite ends of the mean suggests that office chairs designed for the “average” human body type causes discomfort to a large subset of the population. Designing office chairs only to the average means that the long tails of the body-fit bell curve – the tall, wide, or diminutive – have to work in less than optimal conditions.

For shorter folk, their feet may dangle from their office chairs, when the OSHA specifies that feet must be able to lay flat on the floor for optimal comfort. For more generously-sized individuals, regular-issue office chairs may be too cramped or permit too little movement.

Over time, the bad fit can become a quality of life problem that affects productivity and increases operating costs needlessly.

Office Chairs That Solve the Problem

To solve the conundrum, facility managers and employees need to exert a little more ingenuity to get the office chairs and system furniture that fit their unique size needs. (Read more)

In their landmark monograph The Anthropometrics of Fit (PDF), Herman Miller followed an “ends-to-the-middle” approach – manufacturing the Aeron in three different sizes “like a bicycle or a pair of shoes” -

- designing the smallest chair for the smallest user, the largest chair for the largest user, and, finally, a midsized chair to cover the range not accommodated by these two. By designing first for the extremes, we developed a chair that gives virtually every person a reasonably good fit, even if it’s never adjusted. The range of fine-tuning adjustment required for each chair becomes both easily manageable and mechanically feasible.

The Aeron office chairs are also designed to automatically accommodate differences in body shape, thanks to self-adjusting material in the seat and backrest. This way, Herman Miller makes a series of office chairs that accommodates 99% of the population, easy.

Other accessories can be included to improve the fit even more – shorter folk, for instance, may need a backrest on their office chairs so their knees can comfortably hang from the edge of the seat pan while providing perfect support for the lumbar area. They may also find a footrest helpful, allowing feet to rest flat on a surface instead of dangle from the edge of office chairs.

Sourcing the Right Office Chairs

A survey of Global Total Office’s stock turns up several office chairs that, like the Aeron, come in three sizes to accommodate the vast majority of the workforce. The “Scale” (PDF) and the “Tritek Ergo” (PDF). For more generous-sized individuals, Global also offers seats that are rated for 350 and 500 pounds, over standard office chairs’ average weight rating of 275 pounds.

Office Star, on the other hand, offers a “Big and Tall” variant on its Pro-Line II product (PDF) – a deluxe leather executive office chair with adjustable arms, mid-pivot knee tilt, gunmetal finish, all rated for 400 pounds.

The investment involved in buying office chairs that accommodate more than 99% of workers’ body types actually pays off for facility managers – providing a comfortable working environment for extra-large and extra-diminutive workers increases productivity and provides a return on the investment in the long run.

Consider what happens when comfort is taken entirely out of the picture. We’ve talked about musculo-skeletal disorders (MSDs) before – these injuries are the cumulative effects of repetitive actions done in the workplace. Over time, if such actions aren’t mediated by a more comfortable workplace, an MSD may be in the worker’s future – leaving the employer vulnerable to workers’ compensation claims.

Dollars and Cents of MSD

Charles Jeffress, the former assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health in the U.S. Department of Labor, breaks the cost of MSDs down: “Nearly two million workers suffer work-related musculoskeletal disorders every year, and about 600,000 lose time from work as a result,” Jeffress said in 2000. (read more)

In dollar terms, says Jeffress, ” $1 of every $3 spent on workers’ compensation stems from insufficient ergonomic protection. The direct costs attributable to MSDs are $15 to $20 billion per year, with total annual costs reaching $45 to $54 billion.”

Comfort Saves Money

Inversely, paying attention to comfort and ergonomics in office seating can save you money in the long run. Insurance company Travelers Property Casualty set up an internal ergonomics program, which reduced the average cost of an MSD claim from $20,000 to $4,600.

Travelers also surveyed 85 Travelers-insured workers who had filed claims at small companies for MSD. After suggesting simple improvements, ranging from footrests to new office seating, Travelers checked back 60 days later. They found that, in 53 out of 61 cases where employers took action, workers had become symptom-free. In 24 cases where companies had taken no action, 23 injured workers still had the same old problems.

Speaking of saving money, increasing comfort need not cost a lot of cash. You don’t need to buy entirely new office seating, for instance, if you can make adjustments on your present chairs.

Little Adjustments, Big Difference

Seat adjustments should be made to permit feet to be planted firmly on the floor. Absent brand new office seating, a footrest can be placed to make sure feet are planted on a firm foundation. Chair back angles and lower back support should also be adjusted to support the back.

Apart from office seating adjustments, attention should be paid to keyboard height and slope – keyboard should be placed near elbow height, and wrists should be in a neutral position when typing. (Read more on How to Choose the Best Ergonomic Keyboard for Your Office.)

These changes demonstrate what you can do in the context of your existing office seating. Tim Shew, an office ergonomics representative from the University of British Columbia, says it best. “Whether it’s your backrest angle, monitor height or just remembering to get out of your seat every hour, ergonomics doesn’t need to be a complete office overhaul,” advises Shew. “Small changes really can make a difference.”

Ergonomic office chairs have an undeserved reputation of being expensive. This has prevented many office managers from investing in office chairs that may help prevent the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries.

With the introduction of Ergohuman ergonomic office chairs, office managers now have a mid-price contender: a less pricey alternative to expensive ergonomic office chairs that delivers the goods nonetheless.

When compared with our list of criteria for the best ergonomic office chairs, the Ergohuman acquits itself quite nicely. (read more)

Adjustability – Ergohuman office chairs are very adjustable, allowing the user to create the most perfect fit possible. Each Ergohuman may be adjusted in eight different ways.

You get armrests that pivot the arms in and out to provide essential support for your forearms; a headrest that adjusts up and down to cradle your neck when reclining; and adjustable lumbar support that buttress your lower back. In short, you get a level of adjustability from Ergohuman ergonomic office chairs’ that’s remarkably high given their mid-level price.

Not all Ergohuman office chairs sport a headrest, though – only the ME7ERG Ergohuman Mesh, LE9ERG Ergohuman Leather and custom upholstered CU9ERG Ergohuman Fabric have it, and Ergohuman chairs that don’t have a headrest cannot be retrofitted to use one.

Comfort – Ergohuman’s basic model sports a mesh bottom and back, while later models feature headrests and leather seats. Ergohuman office chairs come in low or high-back models, with a choice of mesh, leather, or a combination of both. While the basic mesh model accommodates smaller budgets (starting at $600), the leather models have padded, lovingly-stitched quality leather for the user’s seat, lumbar area, back, and headrest.

Which is not to pooh-pooh Ergohuman’s mesh office chairs – the mesh variant is highly breathable, offering greater cooling power than padded cushion seating. Mesh chairs are also very adaptable to each user’s unique body form.

Just a caveat – Ergohuman office chairs are designed for people between 5’2” and 6’2” in height, and less than 250 pounds. The manufacturer cannot guarantee optimal functionality and comfort for users who don’t fit these specifications.

Perks – the manufacturer offers a Raynor Fabrix program that allows users to customize Ergohuman office chairs with over 70 different fabrics, with weaves that include Brazil and lattice, and patterns that include leaves, shells, and curves. Despite all that, Raynor promises to still ship in less than 7 business days!

Finally, Ergohuman buyers get a lifetime warranty, with an added 5-year optional warranty on fabrics.

Professional ergonomist and mechanical engineer Jon Paulsen reviewed the Ergohuman himself… and gave it two thumbs up. “For many of my clients, the Ergohuman chair is one of the most comfortable mid-priced chairs on the market and it fits them properly,” Paulsen reports -

The Ergohuman chair competes well with high end chairs (compare to Herman Miller Aeron and Steelcase Leap Chair). The manufacturer offers a limited lifetime warranty that covers all but normal fabric wear and tear. A broken chair is never very ergonomic so purchasing a well made chair that has good warranty support is obviously important.

But enough words – here’s Paulsen reviewing – and approving – of Ergohuman ergonomic office chairs in living color.

The flat, clumped-together keyboards that come standard with most PCs don’t offer any sort of ergonomic relief whatsoever – you’ll have to turn to those odd, split and tented keyboards if the carpal tunnel is starting to get in the way of work.

Doing the Split

The split keyboard design, when it hit offices in the 1990s, looked odd to traditionalists – a gap was introduced down the center of the key array, and both key sets arranged around the gap in a V.

While this takes up more space and attracts odd looks from officemates, the arrangement is actually more natural – arms aren’t placed in an awkward position while typing, and wrists are less stressed in the process.

If you’re choosing an ergonomic keyboard, choose one whose “V” angle feels most natural to you. Or if you can’t decide, spend the extra dosh and choose an adjustable ergonomic keyboard to get the flexibility you need from your input device.

If the price bothers you, tell yourself that an expensive keyboard now saves you the expense of surgery to heal stress injuries further down the road.

Test It Before You Buy It

Finding the best ergonomic keyboard for your office takes time, and continuous testing.

Throughout the testing process, make sure the environment is as close as possible to the one in your own workplace. Use the keyboard at a chair and desk with similar angles and height to your own. Use the keyboard with wrists straight and in line with your arms, elbows close to your body, and relaxed shoulders.

Ask yourself the following questions when you test your new keyboard:

Can I adjust the keyboard easily? An easily-adjustable keyboard helps users find their optimum settings in the smallest possible time. Inferior keyboards are harder to adjust, and as a result will not provide the optimum settings needed for the user’s ergonomic comfort.

Does the keyboard “tent” to an angle I prefer? You don’t have to set the tenting angle to the highest possible setting – just to one that your wrists can live with. The ideal tenting range seems to fit within ten to twenty degrees for a majority of users.

Does it come with palm supports? The best ergonomic keyboard models come with padded and removable palm support add-ons.

Can I live with the key rearrangements? Some ergonomic keyboards move some keys around to optimize ergonomic comfort. Users have to be aware of these switches beforehand, or else they risk reducing productivity while they’re getting used to their new keyboard.

Office work is hard on the eyes, brain… and especially the hands, as symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome emerge after years of abuse. Carpal tunnel syndrome should never be ignored, nor should treatment be postponed. As soon as these symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome emerge, you should see your doctor immediately.

Numbness in fingers and hand. You find that your hand “falls asleep” often when working. Or you have less sensation in the fingers and thumb. If this is how you feel after a few hours of work, congratulations – you now have the very first symptoms of carpal tunnel right in your hands.

Carpal tunnel syndrome begins very slowly – sufferers report feeling tingling or numbness in the fingers and palm. This usually happens when the sufferer grips something between thumb and forefinger – holding a cellphone, for example, or steering a car.

Decreased Grip Strength. Whoops! becomes a constant refrain in your life, as you begin to drop pens, coffee mugs, and utensils. As pain makes work impossible, your hand muscles may atrophy, decreasing your ability to hang on to small objects.

You’ll find it difficult to grasp small objects, clench your fists, or perform manual tasks around the office. You’ll have difficulty supporting yourself on stairs or climbing into a truck.

Pain Radiating up the Forearm. Carpal tunnel sufferers report feeling a shooting or burning pain moving up from the center of their forearm to their shoulder and neck. This occurs after repetitive or stressful use of one’s hands. Sometimes the pain is constant – an ache felt around the upper shoulder and neck.

Cold Hands with warm forearms. As the nerve in your carpal tunnel gets pinched, blood circulation around the area gets constricted as well, contributing to the odd sensation of having two different temperature gradients on the forearm and hand.

Loss of fine motor skills. This progresses from the swollen and numb feeling in your fingers and hand, as motor skills begin to give way to the numbness. Everyday fine motor skills like writing, moving a mouse around, buttoning a shirt, or tying a shoe become almost impossible to do.

If any of these symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome appear, you must consult your doctor immediately. Carpal tunnel syndrome, if left untreated, interferes with work, interrupts sleep, and leads to more severe nerve and muscle damage.

Turns out that to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, you’ll probably need to change some deeply-ingrained habits.

Work posture, for one thing. Getting carpal tunnel syndrome may force you to change the way you type, for example, or wear a splint on your wrist while you work, on doctor’s orders.

There’s good reason for this advice: the doctor wants to keep your hand from assuming the posture it normally does. Which eases the pressure on the median nerve, the source of all your carpal tunnel troubles. The same posture day after day, on the other hand, can stress the tendons in your carpal tunnel to the point of affecting the median nerve – leading to carpal tunnel syndrome.

When someone has carpal tunnel syndrome, the median nerve is pressured by ligaments and tendons in the carpal tunnel in your wrist, which sometimes get swollen from abuse to the hands. Pressure on the median nerve can make your hand hurt, or numb the sensation in the affected hand.

So, to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, you need to prevent your affected hand from assuming a posture that increases the pressure.

That means wearing the aforementioned splints to prevent carpal tunnel. But you don’t have to go that far. It may be a simple as avoiding a downward bent position for your wrists. Or not resting your wrists on hard surfaces – soft wrist rests for both keyboards and mice are now de rigueur for keyboard jockeys in the office.

Regular typists may also benefit from a seating posture that keeps forearms level with the keyboard; this minimizes the flexing your wrists need to do while typing.

Resting the wrist may also be necessary: this means regular breaks for your wrists, or switching the dominant hand used for a certain task.

These simple fixes can prevent carpal tunnel syndrome from ever taking hold of your wrists. Nobody said carpal tunnel syndrome was hard to overcome!

Image © Quinn Dombrowski / Creative Commons.

I’ve got the world’s best ergonomic chair in my home office, and it suits me just fine. It was my old boss’s ergonomic chair, but I got it cheap when the business folded and I’ve been using it for the past 12 years.

How is it the best? Because over time, it’s adjusted to me - the depressions made by my back and backside have molded this chair, over the years, into one that fits my curves perfectly.

But not everyone has 12 years to make the world’s best ergonomic chair out of any garage-sale purchase. Certainly not facility managers who have to contend with quick employee turnover – no employee really has that much time!

The only real lesson you can derive from my example is this: the best ergonomic chair in the world is one that is perfectly adjusted to suit the individual.

The best ergonomic chairs provide adjustment mechanisms that conform to individual body shapes. No single body is unique, and each chair must be adjusted to match specific body shapes. In some cases, you might be better off hiring an ergonomics professional to do the adjustments.

Also, really good ergonomic chairs allow for constant movement. The back, armrest, and seat should be able to let you shift your body into other positions, while keeping your body in the proper posture.

Ideally, you should also get the best ergonomic chair that suits your profession. Doctors, software engineers, and art directors have totally different working habits – their ergonomic chair needs are different, too.

Nothing can substitute actually testing the chair out for yourself. Finding the best ergonomic chair for your needs can be a matter of just sitting in it, making a few adjustments, and asking yourself a few simple questions:

• How much hip room do I have?

• How much can I adjust the seat’s height?
• How comfortable is my lumbar, or lower back?
• How comfortable is my butt in the seat pan?
• How comfortable is the chair when reclining?
• How comfortable is the chair after an hour or so of use?

You don’t have to wait ten years to get the best ergonomic chair, as in my case – you just need a little patience, some hands-on experience, and the courage to ask the right questions.

(By the way, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the best ergonomic chair for you doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg – check out our partner SeatingWarehouse.com’s selection of affordable ergonomic office chairs.)

Image © Rakesh Vaghela

Office life may thrive or die based on the ambient noise level in the workplace. And we’re not talking about the occasional irritating one-way conversation from Doris in Accounting.

“The single most powerful determinant of individual performance, team performance, and job satisfaction is the ability to do, for all job types, large amounts of distraction-free work… with noise being the greatest bulk of distractions,” says Michael Brill, president of Bosti Associates.

So we can’t blame you if you’re constantly searching for office noise reduction techniques to turn the volume down at work. Keep your office life productive with one or more of these methods guaranteed to cut down on your office noise problem, without cutting too deeply into your budget either:

Office plants. Indoor foliage does more than make your desk look pretty – office plants can reduce office noise by breaking up or diverting sound waves. A study conducted at South Bank University showed that office plants can help to reduce noise levels by as much as 5 decibels.

For the best effect, arrange the plants along walls and corners to catch the sound waves before they bounce from the walls and back into the room! Pro tip: the best plants to deploy as office noise-busters are the Madagascar Dragon Tree (Dracaena marginata) and the Benjamin’s Fig (Ficus benjamina).

Two more noise-reducing techniques for the office, after the jump.

Headphones, and the right music. Aggravating sounds can be blocked out by piped-in music from a headphone. Not only does music cut down on noise, it can help stimulate your mind while you perform monotonous tasks, helping reduce stress even further.

Sealed-can headphones like the Sennheiser HD-280 are ideal at both blocking out noise and delivering soothing sounds. Just remember that these headphones can block out the noise of a fire alarm, too. But the risk of missing a fire is quite low compared to the benefit of increasing productivity.

“You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms,” says Julian Treasure (previously mentioned in this blog entry). “I have a tip for you – if you have to work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, with a soothing sound like birdsong, put it on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be.”

Custom-made earplugs. This tip can get you exquisitely customized silence in your workplace: go to the neighborhood otolaryngology clinic and ask the resident ear doctor about custom molded earplugs. This involves getting a mold made of your inner ear, and using the mold to create a custom-fit earplug.

No two ear canals are alike, having a personalized mold of your ear’s innards ensure you get the best silence money and foam can buy.

For example, the control desk at the CERN control room is the end product of intense study. That’s reasonable when you’re dealing with billions of dollars worth of sensitive scientific equipment. “It’s a huge scientific instrument, so it has to be right,” says the ergonomics show’s curator Gemma Curtin.

“They studied everyone’s jobs, how they needed to be connected, how items had to be arranged on the desk.”

Today, ergonomics is changing to accommodate shifting work habits and evolving technology, as well. The Design Museum of the future might take a look at how we’re using today’s laptops, along with their irritating tendency to be un-ergonomic at the worst possible times. Here’s a Duke University ergonomics expert with advice on how to effectively use your laptop at work.

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