Insurance and Financial Information


Noisy Places Are Bad Work Places

by Kristin Michelle

You have to remember that people who work in a loud place are easily distracted, easily prone to error, and easily prone to being lazy thus exerting less effort in problem solving and or ergonomic adjustments. The result is a harried, achey worker who dreads coming to work the next day...and, in fact, doesn't. And whether if it's an actual excuse or not, just the replacement of ONE worker factors in the $600 billion a year that the company loses due to the unnecessary distractions.

This being said, have you ever checked on the more practical side to things, such as an ergonomic survey of the office, its productivity along with the company's goals? Sure, it's easy to tell someone to try and sell a product harder or think up of a better idea, but have you considered doing something to improve their working environment first especially if you know that it might be one of the reasons why the performance drops?

Ergonomic Fixes for Improved Productivity & Health

Be sure to have all laptops and monitors at eye level. This will keep your workers from experiencing a number of problems such as headaches, eye strains and neck pains.

Ergonomic chairs that can be adjusted would be good for back support as they are comfortable especially to those workers who have back problems. Keeping their feet on the ground as well as having good back support is essential for every worker, thus adjustable chairs are widely loved.

Wrist rests are great when you know how to use them; they can prevent something called Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The name is misleading because wrist rests are actually meant to provide a resting spot in between periods of typing and for the palms of your hands, not your actual wrists!

Ergonomic based keyboards. Even if your employees are using laptops or PC's, having an ergonomic keyboard around still makes a difference especially when it comes to the efficiency of typing their work. We all know that people can get quite attached to their laptops, but when working, it needs to be elevated in order to avoid eye strains; so you'll be needing a replacement keyboard to do it. Since you're going to get a replacement keyboard anyway, be sure to get the ergonomic one. A little bit of preference is all that's needed to find the perfect one. You can easily order some for testing, then if you find something you don't like, you can send it back.

It's also important to keep whatever keyboard you have centered and right next to your mouse. Wrist cocking is bad, so in order to avoid this, make sure that your have limited wrist movement when working on a computer or on your laptop. Mini keyboards and left-handed keyboards usually solve this problem according to most.

Lastly, take a look at sound masking for fewer distractions and even speech privacy. It is estimated that companies lose hundreds of billions of dollars to distraction and that the average worker is distracted more than 2 hours every day. With the help of a simple sound masking unit, this big problem can be solved.

Just by improving speech privacy and making a few ergonomic adjustments, you could save your business thousands of dollars in terms of distractions and health problems.

Published March 11th, 2011

Filed in Business