Worksite International Blog

Are You Living an Ergonomic Lifestyle?

Working from home can be hard on your mind and body. Prolonged, uninterrupted sitting for hours at the computer or laptop in all the wrong places takes its toll on you!

What the Experts Say

The pandemic is unfortunately here to stay for at least two more years says Toolie Garner, a remote leadership expert. Toolie and I spoke recently where she indicated it will literally take the entire world getting vaccinated before the pandemic slows. New variants will continue to emerge and air travel makes it easy for the virus variants to spread globally.

Working remotely has its pros and cons as we have all learned. There are some really great benefits of work from home, but the downside, can be problematic. One of the limitations is not having the best ergonomic set up at home leading to lost productivity, impaired performance, and injury.

Pre-Pandemic Workforce Trends 

The impact of the pandemic as a societal change agent has been powerful. In fact, nothing in the last few decades has had more influence on the impact of women at work. There are numerous studies implicating the differences in how the pandemic has affected men and women differently over the last 18 months. In reality, many of these societal/cultural changes started long before the pandemic.

Teachers at Risk for Injuries

While we have all been zooming from home, so were teachers. Primarily with only a laptop. If lucky, they had a separate monitor and an ergonomic chair. As a result, many teachers have been working for six or more hours on a laptop from the kitchen or dining room table, with awkward, static postures experiencing musculoskeletal stress and stains to their neck, back, arms, wrist and hands for months. 

The Era of the Remote Worker 

The era of the remote worker is here to stay. With it comes new responsibilities for all employers who are pivoting to remote work as a corporate strategy. In the last year, many have had to make the change from the office to working from home whether we had a home office or not.

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our working world upside down, changing what we know about how work can be done. Whether you are thinking about how to get by with remote working now or are rethinking how your company will operate going forward, here are five must-haves your company needs to successfully lead a remote workforce.

When the pandemic started and we had to shelter in place, I knew it was going to be important for people to have someone to answer questions about working at home with good ergonomics.

From that moment on, the Home Office Ergonomist was born! I'm the Home Office Ergonomist, aka Alison Heller-Ono PT, MSPT, CPE, and much more. 

Studies have shown time and again that good ergonomics in the workplace produces happy, healthy, and productive employees. Many business leaders have thus invested time and money to create an ergonomic office and reap its benefits. But now that the current health crisis has pushed a huge part of the workforce into remote working arrangements, what can managers do to make sure their teams will practice good ergonomics at home? In this post, we’ll take a look at why ergonomics matters and how remote workers can achieve it.

What will our lives be like when the virus is gone? Nothing like before, because that is not how it works. You've heard the expression, "Gone, but not forgotten!"  Our old way of living and working will be different for sure. We have no choice but to change. 

I was recently inspired to think about the future of work from an article I read by the BBC Visual and Data Journalism Team called, "This is what coronavirus will do to our offices and homes." Let's design the future of work together!