Choosing Ergonomic Office Furniture For Tech Offices
Are you able to decorate your own office? Is it a home office, or are you in charging with equipping an entire department or business? Comfort and productivity go hand-in-hand, and there are multiple ways to reduce joint and spinal injury. To cut down on injury and pain while keeping on task, consider a few ergonomic furniture features.
What Does Ergonomic Mean?
As a marketing term, ergonomics describes products that solve pain and discomfort problems for users. Keyboards that raise the wrist up comfortably to reduce wrist pain and office chairs with curved backs to guide into a comfortable posture are two basic examples.
Ergonomic comes from the Greek words ergon and nomoi, which means natural laws. The Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) defines ergonomics as "fitting a job to a person", which covers multiple areas of comfort and productivity changes. The idea is to make a person's work area fit them like a glove in order to reduce injuries caused by needless bending, contortion, and other forms of stress.
The key to a successful ergonomic product is being subtle in ergonomic support and not requiring a lot of modification to make the support work. Although many products imitate ergonomic design by simply looking rounded, contoured, or otherwise comfortable without providing actual support. There are also multiple levels of ergonomic support, which usually must to be tested in person.
Ergonomic Office Furniture Selection
The ergonomic office chair is probably the most recognized ergonomic product. If you've seen a chair that has an S-curved back or a concave (curving inwards) lower back, then you've seen an ergonomic chair designed to control posture.
Proper posture has been a human battle since chairs and back pain could be linked together. Your spine and supporting muscle groups experience different types of unexpected stress when you sit, and the way that you sit can changed the stress in different ways.
Nerves can be pinched, muscles can experience constant strain without relief to create proper training, and a bad enough curve can cause spinal discs to slip or deteriorate. If you or someone you know sits with their back hunched over in an arch, or has to move their head up, down, or anywhere from straight ahead to work on a regular basis, these chairs create a great improvement in natural posture without forcing people to pay attention to their posture.
Another benefit is the armrests. If your arms aren't level with your desk, keyboard, mouse, or other hand-level working area, you can experience elbow pain and joint damage. Adjustable armrests can help you reduce cramps.
Your desk needs ergonomic support as well, but not always in obvious shapes and design options. Desks and office chairs need to be sized with each other in order to put your hands in the right place and mount your monitor, drawing board, or other workstation in a place that is healthy for your neck and head.
Ergonomic support options for desks include an adjustable tray for keyboards, an inward-curved working area allowing parts of the desk to be at the sides of your body, and cushioned edges to reduce injury from resting on the desk.
Contact an office furniture professional to discuss office chairs, desks, cabinets, and other products for your office's comfort.
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