As it’s part of the first impression you make on your clients and visitors, your reception office furniture – if selected properly – can create a lasting positive impact of your enterprise, and can improve your business prospects too.

Flaunt Your Attitude. Choosing your reception office furniture – and the other elements that go with it – require that you make a decision about the character and attitude of your enterprise. Do you want to be seen as creative? Conservative? Energetic? Such attitudes spell the difference between Twitter’s reception office (think: birds in flight) and the Dental INN’s therapeutic reception lounge. Read more…

Choosing a Reception Desk. What items, at minimum, would your new reception area need? The reception desk is item number one, the most important bit of office reception furniture you’ll need to get. You’ll need to choose a reception desk to match your company’s personality and image. For instance, tech start-ups may want to have this reception desk, constructed from the wing of a Douglas DC-8 plane – but law firms may give that desk a pass.

Don’t forget that the reception desk you choose should be as functional as it is attractive – reception office furniture that looks good but is barely usable in reality defeats the purpose of having a reception area in the first place!

Choosing Reception Seating. Every reception office furniture setup should aim for a comfortable seating experience. Having your guests wait in discomfort is only marginally better than having them stand around a seat-less reception office.

Install enough seating that offers multiple seating choices; you can decide the minimum number of seats you need by counting the number of visitors you receive on a daily basis.

Be sure that all seats can be seen and reached by the receptionist on duty. (“Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones will see you now… Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith?”) If money or space is a bit short, you might settle for one of these bench seating units – they also offer the added advantage of being quite modern in appearance.

Choosing Everything Else. The reception desk and seats cover the basics – everything else is there to add dimension and warmth to the reception area. Reception office furniture like a coffee table and a magazine stand add to the comfort level of the reception area, lessening the ordeal of waiting for business to commence.

• Magazine Stand: Do think about the selection of newspapers and magazines that your guests can read in the reception area. If you can stock the magazine stand with magazines full of articles that cover your business in a positive light, that will increase the high regard that your visitors have for your business.
• Refreshments: A coffee machine, water dispenser, or bowl of sweets adds a touch of convenience for waiting guests, and makes the wait less of an ordeal.
• Access to communications: more visitors have their own WiFi-capable devices on hand, so it might be a good thing to provide WiFi access to visitors. In the same vein, you might want to have a phone in the reception area handy.

Do you find office desks boring? Try looking at them from a different perspective – you could be famous someday, and your most humdrum of office desks could be enshrined in a museum, with gawkers wondering how such a humble piece of furniture allowed you to come up with such glorious ideas.

Or you could find yourself in a powerful office where the desk is almost as famous and popular as its user. Office desks like the White House Resolute Desk fit in this category: few office desks have powerful stories behind them, or have served as a turning point in international diplomacy.

The Resolute office desk is one of the most famous symbols of the American Presidency, a desk gifted by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 and used almost continuously to the present day.

The name ought to tell you that this most famous of office desks was built from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, a British ship that had become ice-bound, abandoned, and re-discovered by American whalers. Returned by the U.S. to Britain, the Resolute served in the Royal Navy for over twenty years. At its decommissioning, Queen Victoria requested that some of the ship’s timbers be recycled into a desk, which she then sent as a gift to the United States.

While all the Presidents since Hayes have used the Resolute desk at one time or another, it played second fiddle to other office desks. The recipient of the Resolute desk, Rutherford Hayes, had other Oval Office desks at his disposal, and kept the generous gift in other parts of the White House. Hayes’ successors did much the same. (read more)

Other Oval office desks came and went while the Resolute desk stayed in McKinley’s private office (the treaty ending the Spanish-American War was signed upon it). William Howard Taft used the Resolute Desk in his private study, while Herbert Hoover installed the Resolute desk in the Lincoln Bedroom.

The front of the Resolute Desk was “open” until Franklin D. Roosevelt took charge – he was self-conscious of his leg braces so he had a modesty panel  installed in the front.

The Resolute Desk was never brought to the Oval Office until Jackie Kennedy restored the White House in the 1960s, making John F. Kennedy the first American President to use the Resolute Desk in its present position. After Kennedy’s death, incoming President Lyndon B. Johnson (who was a tall man) found the Resolute to be too small – he had the Senate cabinet shop make him a plainer but more roomy replacement.

Nixon didn’t bring the Resolute desk back to the Oval Office, either – upon succeeding Johnson, Nixon asked for the desk of Woodrow Wilson, but a snafu left him using the desk of Ulysses Grant’s Vice President Henry Wilson. For the rest of his term, nobody told Nixon he had been using the wrong desk!

The desk was brought back to the Oval Office by Jimmy Carter, and has stayed there ever since (with a brief break during George H. W. Bush’s term – he placed the desk in the Treaty Room). Replica Resolute office desks are also installed in a number of Presidential Libraries all over the country.

But why choose one material over the other? What advantages and disadvantages do mesh, leather, and vinyl have over each other? If you’re graduating from fabric office chairs, what material should you choose?

Mesh Office Chairs – Breathability and Comfort Go Together

Mesh Office Seating – Good. Mesh office chairs are designed with one purpose in mind – to allow air to circulate between areas “covered” by the user, the seat and the back. This provides a high level of comfort, and prevents sweat and odor build-up (as moisture is allowed to evaporate through the office seating).

Mesh office chairs are known to stay fresh, even after years of heavy use. If you work in a humid environment, or even a normal one, mesh office seating can be your most comfortable alternative.

Mesh Office Seating – Bad. The relative novelty of mesh office seating and the limitations of the material constrict the types of design available for mesh office chairs. Unfortunately, all other material types boast of more designs and colors than do mesh office chairs.

Mesh Office Seating – Ugly. Finding the perfect balance between comfort and durability is an even bigger challenge where mesh chairs are concerned. As we’ve explained in an earlier article, mesh chair users are stuck between the compromise that designers have to strike: soft mesh is more comfortable, but sags quicker; stiff mesh is less comfortable, but lasts longer.

More after the jump. (read more)

Leather Office Chairs – the Classy Seating Choice

Leather Office Seating – Good. Leather office seating grows to love your body over time – as you keep using a leather chair, the malleable leather adjusts to your specific curves, becoming even more comfortable through the passage of time. Emphasis on “passage of time”: leather office seating rendered in high quality hide will serve you well for years to come.

Last on the “good” ledger – leather upholstery is a cinch to clean, you simply need to wipe the seating with a clean, damp cloth, with some special hide cleaner every few months.

Leather Office Seating – Bad. The smooth surface offered by leather office chairs can be a bad thing – if your posterior cannot gain traction on the leather, you’ll move around in your chair like a bowling ball on a rocking boat. The smooth surface can also wear a shine in your clothing, if you’re not careful.

Leather Office Seating – Ugly. The bad news about leather chairs comes in case temperatures in your office rise above normal levels, as leather office seating can cause users to sweat excessively. Leather is simply not as breathable as fabric or mesh, and when the air conditioning breaks down, they may find their leather chairs to be more a curse than a blessing in the heat.

Vinyl Office Chairs – The Cheaper Leather Look-Alike

Vinyl Office Seating – Good. Often used as faux leather or leatherette on office chairs, vinyl is a cheap alternative to leather office seating – It’s just as easy-to-clean as leather, with the added advantage of bacteria resistance. These properties make vinyl chairs the office seating of choice in the biotech industry.

Vinyl Office Seating – Bad. Unlike leather, vinyl is unable to adjust to your body over time; it cannot stretch or wear the same way, so vinyl becomes far less comfortable over time compared to leather.

Vinyl Office Seating – Ugly. Boy, if you think leather doesn’t breathe well, try vinyl. Vinyl is essentially plastic – and plastic is not breathable at all. With a lack of ventilation for covered body areas, heat and odor problems will quickly arise, making an extended working session in a vinyl office chair feel like a vacation in Hell.

Executives in the top echelons of business love to spend on office desks – the type of office desks that telegraph accomplishment, prestige, and money to burn.

They’ve reached the pinnacle of accomplishment, or so the thinking goes – therefore these top-flight executives need office desks that show off their newfound rank and privileges to whomever might drop by their office.

Office Desks That Make a Strong Impression. Take the C-119 Flap Desk by MotoArt pictured above – one of a series of office desks crafted from wing flaps salvaged from the Fairchild C-119 “Flying Boxcar” airplane that saw action in the Korean  and the Vietnam Wars. Now what does that kind of office desk tell you about the guy who sits behind it for a living?

MotoArt goes to extreme lengths to give the Flap Desk an intimidating impression, spending thousands of man-hours of labor cutting, polishing, and burnishing these impressive office desks, and topping them off with a 3/8″ glass top that conforms to the flap’s shape–

Customized to match the contours of the flap, it exposes the rivet detail and handsome intricacies of its construction. The legs are made of 4” x 8” architectural aluminum I beams. The legs are lightened by cutting radial holes at the top and bottom and are then powder coated for a rugged black wrinkle finish.

The Flap Desk is a limited edition office desk – after all, how many C-119s are around to provide their wing flaps, anyway? – which makes these office desks a rare but attractive proposition for executives on the rise.

More office desks on steroids after the jump. (Read more)

Image courtesy of Inhabitat / Mathias Schnyder

Clean and Green Office Desks. If you want a desk that minimizes your ecological footprint while maximizing your green cred, look no further than Mathias Schnyder’s mobile workspace.

Schnyder’s created a solar powered desk with a solar cell at its apex, which in turn powers an electrical outlet in the middle of the table. This encourages executives to use the desk in the sun, with laptops and phones plugged in. If you’re so inclined, you can drag this out to the patio or the office roof deck to catch some rays, and do the Earth some good while you’re at it.

As of this writing, this desk  exists mainly as a concept, so there is no news yet on the availability of these green office desks.

Image courtesy of Zira

Endlessly Customizable Office Desks. Let’s say being green or being intimidating doesn’t really fit the kind of office desk you see in your future. You do want to have an office desk that you can endlessly reconfigure to suit whatever your enterprise has to throw at you.

Look no further than the Zira – a “contemporary desking solution”, the makers call it, that offers almost limitless options for personalization. Whatever your worksurface needs and storage requirements, the Zira can be customized to meet them. You can choose from hundreds of components for any size or shape of office, over a dozen laminate finishes, 9 handle options, and storage components up to 84″ high.

Zira can even be configured as freestanding for single workstation configurations, or joined together to form multiple work groups.

Yoga poses can be just the thing the doctor ordered. Certain yoga techniques can be performed even without getting up from your office chair; such office chair yoga techniques can relax sore muscles, release spine tension, and provide an overall restorative effect to your poor overworked body for the short term.

In the long run, your body will gain relaxed muscles, added flexibility and tone, added strength, and a greater sense of calm. All that with regular exercises done from your office chair – how cool is that? You don’t have to make time in your schedule, book a trainer, or find a secluded place in your office to do the exercises we’ve listed below. The office chair, as it turns out, makes a great gym if you know what exercises to do.

The exercises below are brought to you by video producer MAKE | MEDIA and yoga instructor Cassie Naumann, a veteran fitness instructor and an expert in the styles of Lyenger, Ashtanga, Viny, and Hatha Yoga. (read more)

Office Chair Wrist Stretch

Let’s start with a simple exercise for workers tired of typing all day. By the end of the work day, your wrists should be killing you, and carpal tunnel syndrome may be stalking you as we speak. This simple wrist stretch can ward carpal tunnel off indefinitely by increasing blood flow into your wrists, and can be done from the comfort of your office chair.

Office Chair Side Stretches

Feeling strain on your spine and arms as you type that millionth report the boss wanted yesterday? Do this side stretch from the comfort of your office chair; it promises to flex your spine, rib cage, and arms, leaching the fatigue away as you sway those arms to the side like a tree in the wind.

Office Chair Spinal Twist

The spinal twist helps unkink your lower back, and can be done right at your office chair. This exercise requires that you sit tall then twist until you’re looking directly behind you – either at the wall or at your astonished colleague in the workspace behind yours.

A few things to remember: this exercise is best performed on a chair without wheels, as the twisting motion can move a wheeled office chair around. Just remember to exhale as you turn; your hips should be squarely on your seat, as your spine twists to its maximum possible extent.

Office Chair Forward Bend

This forward bend releases built-up tension in your spine and stretches the hamstring and lower back. This can also ease any back pain you may have from being stuck in an office chair all day.

This is perfect for a quick pick-me-up in between strenuous mental tasks; you’ll find your brain a little more optimized for work after you perform this stretch from your office chair!

Office Chair Deltoid Stretch

Deltoids are the muscle on the top of your arms. These don’t do any heavy lifting if you’re a white-collar worker, but a deltoid stretch affects the shoulder and back as well, with the added side benefit of being a perfect office chair exercise. Each stretch should be held for up to ten seconds for you to feel the maximum benefit.

Our health insurance business bucked the downward trend and managed to grow a bit during the recession years. Now that the recession is “officially” over, we’re actually projecting some major growth in the next year, and we’ll be hiring to take care of the extra load.

But I feel totally unprepared to plan our office for the growth spurt ahead; we have some long-time employees who will leave their offices only when they’re dead, and we only have spare cubicle space for about three or four new hires. How do I navigate the interior design and space planning landmine ahead?

Signed,

A Good Problem to Have?

Congratulations – your work in healthcare puts you in an industry that reported continued growth during the recession years. But growth comes with its own problems: while you add people to the workforce, you want to retain an environment that keeps both long-timers and newcomers motivated. And that’s tough when you have to juggle questions like keeping team-mates together, or rustling up cubicle space for new hires.

About.com’s Human Resources guide Susan Heathfield believes it’s absolutely critical to have multiple levels sign off on any interior design and space planning decisions. Done properly, Heathfield says, proper accounting for future growth “will enable you to have employee workstations when you need them. Yet, smart planning will keep you from spending large amounts of money at an unnecessary time.”

Smart interior design and space planning takes doing. Here are the steps Heathfield advises office planners should take when in your shoes:

Make a reasonable projected headcount for this year and next. Focus on “reasonable” – don’t project growth higher than the last verifiable rate unless optimism in this regard is warranted.

Ask the following hard questions – and ask around to back the answers up. How many new employees will need offices and/or cubicles? How much appropriate housing do you have for current and future employees? (By appropriate, we mean work areas appropriate to each job function, i.e. clerical cubicles, customer service call center cubicles or offices for managers.) Will you need to change current access to conference rooms, storage or lunch areas, and restrooms as your office grows?

Dear Cubicles.com,

Settle this question for me, please: what’s better for IT professionals, cubicles, or private offices? We’re taking on a valuable new hire and I’d like to put him in a space where he can perform to his utmost – but I’m not sure if he’ll do better in a private office (where he can have some space to think) or a cubicle (where he can better collaborate with his team). Any thoughts?

Signed,

Space Cadet

Don’t count on this debate to be resolved anytime soon – both offices and open space have their proponents within the interior design and space planning community. It boils down to privacy vs. collaboration, explains Robert J. Grossman in his article Offices vs Open Space.

Offices are becoming less common as companies squeeze funds from their facilities budgets. But Brill believes that private offices– even small ones–pay dividends for all workers by creating a more productive work environment.

The IT field in particular has plenty of private-office proponents – Computerworld hears from John Miano, founder of The Programmers Guild in Summit, N.J., who advocates prioritizing the productivity of IT professionals involved in software development operations. This could happen by “getting rid of cubicles and replacing them with enclosed offices” which can boost productivity by eliminating distractions, Miano says.

The downside to private offices, of course, is reduced communications between team-mates.

According to Cornell University’s William Sims, his research in workplace environments and software development proves that open environments are better for collaborative projects.

“Developers in private offices may be more productive individually but may not be in sync with a team,” the article paraphrases Sims.

In the end, the private office vs. open spaces issue is something that can be resolved by individual companies , in accordance with their corporate culture and the demands of their workforce.

Got questions? We have answers! Send an email to askcubicles@cubicles.com.

So desks for office workers are getting a closer look by greenies – their materials and manufacturing processes are being revamped to reflect our emerging awareness of the environment.

A few promising areas of study stand out from the rest:

Low-VOC Manufacturing Processes. In the course of manufacture, desks for office use may be put together using volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are mostly present in solvents like glues, paints, and stains. VOCs are bad news for the human organism: they can irritate eyes and throats, cause headaches, and damage the nervous system.

VOCs have harmful effects that persist long after the end of the manufacturing process: offices with VOC-positive furniture have indoor concentrations of VOCs that are up to five times higher than outdoor levels. When VOCs make their way into the wild, their cumulative effect can be devastating: they contribute to air pollution and leach into the water supply.

So it’s of extreme importance that facility managers purchase low-VOC emissions products, to reduce health risks to its employees in the short term, and mitigate the impact of their furniture on the environment in the long term.

Buyers of desks for office use should look for products with the Green Seal (pictured at left); their manufacturers have stringent standards that control the levels of VOCs in their furniture, achieved primarily by using water- or powder-based finishes on their office furniture.

FSC-Certified Wood. Ensure that the wood in your new office furniture comes from sustainable sources. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) oversees forests that are managed in accordance to FSC’s stringent standards, and certifies companies that source their raw materials from such forests. So furniture that bears the FSC logo do not come from forests that have been logged irresponsibly – just the opposite!

The FSC certification is not lightly granted – independent certification organizations perform the assessments that result in FSC accreditation, which include tracing a furniture manufacturer’s supplies back to FSC-certified sources themselves.

For an example of companies that are fully compliant with FSC certification, a group of charities – the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation – have redone their office with green building principles in mind, using FSC-certified wood for their offices’ construction and interior design.

Remanufactured Desks for Office Use. Supply managers turn to remanufactured office furniture as a source of desks for office workers – furniture that has already made its impact on the environment in the distant past.

Remanufactured furniture has been intensively recycled from used stock: a process involving disassembly to component parts, cleaning, repair, refinishing, and replacement of parts are performed to bring used furniture back to “better than new” condition.

Many remanufacturers use low-VOC paints and finishes to lower their impact on the environment, with the same result: furniture whose quality is within a whisker of brand-new.

Are your office facilities – from the desks for office workers to executive chairs – compliant with the best environment-friendly practices? Look at your office furniture now, using the standards listed above – and get ready to make a green change for the better.

“Office Desks” in the Medieval Era

In the beginning, desks were the sole province of scribes, writers and record-keepers in the days before the printing press. Scribes were essential worker ants in government, who copied texts and updated records for authorities. A medieval image of St. Jerome paints a picture of the scribe’s “office desk” in the old days -

The chair and writing desk might be overly architectural, but the desk is on a slope. He holds his quill pen in the right hand and his special knife in the left. Arranged along the top of his writing desk are his ink horn and an assortment of other tools, which could be scrapers, buffers or spare pens. He appears to be writing on unbound sheets.

Scribes were the forerunners of our present-day accountants, typists, and civil service officials. Most of the desks in those days were plain and rough-hewn, but higher-status officials had more ornately-carved desks created by master woodworkers.

Class Distinctions Between Desks

These desks evolved into the “bureau”, which was the name that was attached to writing furniture from 1700 onward.  Bureaux were sloping desks with space for drawers below – their association with civil servants and scribes made a different design necessary for the nobility and upper class who were increasingly doing figures and writing letters on their own.

For the nobility, their need for a more refined desk was answered by the secretary desk – a tall item of furniture with a hutch whose cover could be lowered into a writing desk when needed. The hutch stored books, inkpots, stationery, and other essential items.

Evolving professions needed their own desks, too. Architects called for larger, angled surfaces for their work, a need which generated the modern drafting table. Office desks also became more ornate, with pigeonholes and drawers for essential items like inkpots and blotting sand.

Office Desks Enter the Modern Age

The design of office desks began to move into its modern era by the 1800s. The pedestal desk, which was introduced in the 18^th century but gained currency in the 19^th, became de rigueur in the burgeoning British empire, and passed onto the U.S. as well.

These were the preferred office desks of worker drones and Presidents alike. The most famous example is the Resolute desk, which was carved from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and gifted by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford Hayes in 1880.

These desks were initially hand-crafted and hand-tooled by master craftsmen, but new production techniques by the early 20^th Century allowed desks to be mass-produced for the first time, as demand for office desks climbed after the Industrial Age.

New technology also forced designers of office desks to innovate: typewriters, telephones, and the late advent of computers and the Internet have guided the design of office desks. The introduction of the office cubicle has changed office desks like nothing before, as desks have become solidly integrated into the office cubicle design.

Whither office desks? Unless a new technology or new profession comes over the horizon, it’s difficult to say – but it’s safe to assume that office desks will be with us for a long, long time yet.

Not only should call center office seating survive these multiple shifts, they ought to stay comfortable through long hours of usage. That’s a tall order for an intensive-use chair.

Finally, the call center office seating must be economical enough so that buying them in bulk remains an attractive proposition.

Let’s look at each of these properties in turn – durability, comfort, cost, and a few other items – and examine how these should affect your choice of call center office seating.

Durability is essential in call center office seating, for good reason: few other office chairs undergo the kind of punishment that call center seats endure.

Call center office seating must be specially reinforced, or otherwise constructed to stronger specifications, to comfortably seat a succession of users who will use them for longer than the usual 40 hours a week.

The U.S. government is a major buyer of intensive use chairs, and the Fed’s General Services Administration has set standards for selecting such office seating. Buyers refer to Federal Standard 834A to decide how to test chairs that are acceptable for government-issue intensive use environments (DOCX file) which, like call center office seating, requires constant use over 24 hours a day.

Any chair that survives Federal Standard 834A (or its old name, FNEW 83-269E) ought to be all right by any call center’s book.

Comfort is a key requirement for call center office seating. After all, call center workers are expected to rest their posteriors in them, for hours on end, dealing with numerous demands like generating sales and consulting with customers.

These chairs must also be easy to adjust for multiple users on different shifts, and may need to be specially reinforced to accommodate users weighing more than 250 pounds.

Therefore, ergonomics are a big issue for call center office seating experts. Because call center telemarketers must sit for long hours at their chairs, they need to be comfortable with their seating positions, to avoid productivity-draining comfort breaks and long-term possibility of injury, and reduce attrition in the medium term.

As Dr. Leonard B. Kruk of Office Visions Consulting puts it, “Call centers are often characterized as ‘high stress.’ This type of environment often leads to high employee turnover when ergonomics are ignored.” Workplace stress and its expensive ramifications, concludes Kruk, can be addressed by attending “to those conditions that have a negative impact on a worker’s well-being.”

Cost is a matter of some debate -for some supply managers, no price is too small for happy telemarketers, while others may balk at high prices for call center office seating.

Luckily, the market has that concern well in hand – supply managers may choose from a wide variety of intensive-use chairs rated for continuous use, with prices that suit most reasonable budgets (the Concorde Executive chair, for example, falls in the lower middle of the cost range).

In conclusion, the “challenge” of finding good call center office seating is not much of a challenge after all – if you know the right things to look for, plenty of office seating suppliers out there will have what your supply manager needs.

But this swelling growth industry has also created plenty of noise: bad advice about health and office chairs has mixed in with the few good nuggets, and many conscientious consumers are endangering their own health in the process.

Much of the hype has to do with unconventionally-designed office chairs – using kneeling chairs in the office, for instance, or repurposing exercise balls for use as desk chairs. This site, among others, claims that exercise balls improve spine alignment, provide room for stretching, and “burns 350 calories a day”.

Exercise Ball Reality Check

Here’s your reality check: exercise balls do not offer a significant improvement in posture when used as office chairs. As the New York Times’ Anahad O’Connor reports, “As far as posture is concerned, there is not exactly a compelling body of evidence.”

O’Connor cites a 2009 British study that found prolonged sitting on an exercise ball caused the same level of slouching and “poor sitting position” compared to regular office chairs. The study concludes: “No benefits were found through sitting on [an exercise] ball over that of [office chairs] in prolonged sitting as both seating types.”

A second study conducted by the Research Institute Move in the Netherlands “concluded that the advantages with respect to physical loading of sitting on an exercise ball may not outweigh the disadvantages.”

Kneeling Chairs: No Better?

The same thing might be said of kneeling chairs, the substitute-for-office-chairs-du-jour for a growing number of lumbar-conscious office workers.

In a study conducted for the International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, Mats Ericson and Ian Goldie found that spinal shrinkage levels were greatest for workers using kneeling office chairs. A study for Applied Ergonomics journal concluded that as far as posture was concerned, kneeling chairs were “no better than conventional chairs and could be worse than well-designed conventional office chairs.”

The Ergonomics Report’s Jeanie Croasmun has the final word:

Just like a hammer might be a valuable tool for some tasks (hanging a picture), in others (washing dishes) it’s useless or may do more harm than good. The exercise ball might be great for strengthening and toning in the gym or at home, but it can’t compete with a truly ergonomic chair for long-term sitting in an office environment.

Workers using kneeling chairs and exercise balls as office chairs have one thing in common, says John Triano: “both of these alternatives require more active use of one’s muscles (e.g. for balance and to sit upright) than a traditional office chair.” While Triano does not discount these alternative office chairs outright, he recommends that you get a doctor’s approval before use.

Customizable ergonomic office chairs, the type recommended by the National Institutes of Health, remain your best healthy-back bet. The NIH offers six properties to look for in an ergonomic chair – while these may be pricier than exercise balls or regular office chairs, the savings you’ll get from not seeing your back doctor on an ongoing basis definitely offsets the cost.