Five Cheap Hacks To Boost Ergonomics And Improve Posture In The Workplace
Corporate wellness programs aim to improve the health of employees across the board. One major component of this revolves around creating the healthiest possible work environment.
If your office space is like most others, workers are often hunched over their desks and computers for many hours a day. The poor posture associated with desk work leads to long-term problems with pain, flexibility and overall wellness.
Luckily, taking steps to help employees avoid these outcomes is cheap and easy. As experts in the field of workstation ergonomics, we’ve put together a short list to give you some ideas about how to improve the posture of employees for little to no cost.
Institute stretching programs
Trends in corporate wellness are moving towards offices offering yoga, jogging and kick-boxing classes to their employees as perks aimed to get people moving. While these are great, encouraging daily breaks for stretching is a fantastic way to alleviate symptoms associated with sedentary desk work.
There are a million great resources online to help you come up with a program of stretches specifically designed to work against the negative effects of sitting at a desk all day. It’s especially important to focus on the neck, back and shoulders— we’ve noticed that so many of our patients develop pain in this area due to poor posture at their workstation.
Encourage people to take five minute stretching breaks at least once a day! If you can make it social, people are more likely to get involved.
Host a posture clinic
Sometimes you need an expert to help get everyone on the same page. Madison Square Wellness can offer your workplace a posture clinic to your office, so you can root out bad habits, and replace them with good ones.
Our succinct and accessible clinics can transform the way your office works in no time at all. Our expert practitioners educate employees on the most common problems with posture, as well as the finer points of how to instate habits that will last. With chiropractors and physical therapists on staff, our techniques for better working habits are rooted in a deep and diverse knowledge of body mechanics.
To learn more about how we can bring this service into your office, take a look at our On-Site Wellness page for more information.
Encourage Microbreaks
Many of the most common problems associated with office work are posture related, but so many of them are also related to being sedentary. Periodically getting up and moving throughout the course of a work day is extremely important when it comes to preventing pain and flexibility issues.
Microbreaks can help combat this. Encourage your employees to get out of their seats and walk around for 5 minutes every hour or so. Sometimes people need to sit and focus for longer than this, but as a rule of thumb they should aim to move around for about 5 minutes per hour, when they can. For bonus points, you can encourage employees to walk outside if possible, where studies have shown that small interactions with natural environments can reduce stress, and restore attention.
Pass out “posture cards”
One mantra we like says, “posture is intention.” Often times people engage in poor posture habits without thinking about it— or more precisely because they aren’t thinking about it. You can help raise awareness of good habits with this very simple, very cheap solution.
Print out pictorial examples of what good posture at the desk should look like. You can find a million examples of this online, or get them directly from experts if you decide you want to host a posture clinic. Put these small reminders of good habits up in areas where people will see them often enough to remind them to be intentional about how they hold themselves while working.
Trust us— your employees will get more out of these posters than the traditional inspirational posters adorned with cats and whales.
Get expert help with a technology-assisted ergonomic assessment
The way your computer sits on your desk, the position of your keyboard and the angle of your seat rest can all change how you hold your body at work. For workers that want to ensure their ergonomic set up is maximizing healthy habits, MSQW has you covered!
Our posture experts use an app-based software to analyze workstations on the basis of posture and ergonomic wellness. The technology will tell us what the major problems exist with any current set-up, as well as suggest small adjustments that will instantly improve the posture of workers.
This service is easy and quick to use, providing lasting improvements to wellness with an incredible ROI. To learn more about this service, check out our page on Posture Screening and Ergonomic Assessments here.
