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Does Ergonomic Office Furniture Really Make Any Difference?

There are lots of products available everywhere from Ikea to top end office furniture retailers that promise to make your working day at your desk more comfortable, more relaxing, and less dangerous to your health. With many office workers now complaining of back pain, leg problems, and issues like repetitive strain injury and carpal tunnel syndrome, it is easy to see why special office seats, desks and devices that promise to prevent these things are such big business, but do they actually make any difference? Here we look at the ways that office furniture can work for or against your posture, your muscles and your body, and whether splashing out on fancy 'ergonomic' gear is worth it.

It Only Helps When You Use It Right

One of the key things to remember about any kind of office furniture, whether it is billed as 'ergonomic' or not, is that it will only keep you comfortable and protect your body from muscle and joint strains if you know how to set it up properly for your height and body position. All office chairs have to have five wheels, so they can be easily mobile, but they are also supposed to be adjustable in a number of other places.  The reason for this is so that you can set the height to be right for your legs to spend the day in a comfortable position, you lumbar region to have the right kind of support, and your upper body not to need to be hunched over when you are using your computer. This is all well and good, but a lot of people have no idea what the correct positions feel like, and therefore don't set their chairs up properly. Equally, in some offices where hotdesk style arrangements are in place, people end up using different chairs every day and very rarely take the time to adjust the new chair to where they need it for each session of work. This is problematic because no matter how well designed a chair or any other piece of office gear is, if it isn't configured right for its user, it can still cause health problems.

What About All Those Posh Keyboards and Mouse Pads?

As well as furniture designed to help you get through your working life without messing up your body, there are also all of those office accessories that you see, like those mouse mats with the gel pads to rest your wrist on or those keyboards that are an unusual shape and are, we are told, more comfortable to use. In actual fact, it is offer a matter of preference whether these make you more comfortable or whether you find them unwieldy and difficult to get along with. It is therefore better to test out anything out of the ordinary for a while before you order one for yourself. After all, if your new mouse pad or keyboard doesn't feel good to work with, this can actually cut your productivity quite severely, so it is best to know whether you enjoy these ergonomic products or prefer the plain ones!

 

Today’s feature writer, Rose Jones, is a sales executive at GrandCanyon, a company selling office products online. She takes great pride in helping people and assists many social service groups in her vicinity during her leisure time.