About thirty years ago, there was heightened awareness of an area of science that previously had not been a major focus for the office workplace. The issue arose often related to reports of an injury called Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, where office workers experienced sometimes debilitating wrist pain resulting from the strain of hours of keyboarding. It appears the new proliferation of computers in the office was contributing to skeletal injuries, both wrist and neck ailments, and sometimes this even required surgeries to remedy the condition. In this context, many people became acquainted with the term “ergonomics”.
Actually, ergonomics had existed as a scientific specialty long before the 1990s and the attention that was paid to office workers at keyboards. The term itself is a combination of the Greek word “ergon” meaning work and “nomos” meaning natural law, and its origins date to early in the 20th Century. The science of ergonomics gained greater prominence largely after World War II, led by Britain and the U.S. The Ergonomic Society was established in Britain in 1950, and the Human Factors Society in the U.S. formed in 1957. These organizations primarily focused on the human performance and ergonomics issues that arose within the factory conditions that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. Fast-forward to the 1990s, the expansive use of computers in the office workplace, and ergonomics became a more widely used term and a more thoroughly understood scientific discipline.
“The 90s saw a more intense focus on individual worker posture,” says Carla Jaspers MS, OTRL, MID, CPE founder and principal consultant at Workup Ergonomics, a New York City practice that serves the office workplace and healthcare markets. “There was a concentration on wrist position in relation to keyboards, the viewing angles in front of CRT monitors, and the lumbar support and adjustability functions of seating.” Jaspers brought her expertise as both an ergonomist and an industrial designer to help clients tackle those sorts of challenges for some years, but she is sensing a change.
Also sensing that change is Dr. Sara Pazell, an Australia-based managing director at VIVA Health At Work. “There was a lot of keen interest in understanding the user’s needs and in workstation tools of the trade — chair, desk, keyboard, mouse, monitor. The big trend was adjustable keyboards and chair adjustments and their backrest features. That’s still important, but the desire has expanded to determine user interface and intuitive design.”
Many manufacturers during that earlier period were aggressive and effective in designing and producing products to meet the workplace needs that ergonomists were advocating. From adjustable keyboards to flexible monitor arms to footrests, workplace accessories proliferated to complement the adjustability and support of rapidly improving seating options. The culmination of the manufacturer product responses to ergonomic needs was likely the introduction and popularization of the sit-to-stand desk, once a decided specialty product now a staple of the modern workplace. The popularity of height-adjustable desks emerged first in Europe and then became popular at trade shows like NeoCon about two years later. Workplace designers began to focus beyond just the correct seated posture and instead on the need for movement and postural rotation. Some desks even had visual or audio prompts to remind workers to shift their position.
Fast-forward again to today. Ergonomics as a discipline has not disappeared but it seems instead to have been subsumed by a wider focus on worker and workplace wellness. Dr. Pazell says, “Office ergonomics will need to focus on workplace wellness holistically.” And, of course, along comes the pandemic to further complicate the task of now creating multiple and healthful work settings for distributed workers.
Ergonomists like Jaspers believe that the focus of ergonomics has, in fact, moved beyond the confines of the individual worker and instead shifted more toward the overall health and wellness of the entire organization. “My clients are asking me to be more of an integrator, someone who can address a variety of human factors that impact the health and wellness of their company.”
And when the focus of ergonomics broadens, so does the array of organizational roles that can lay claim to the responsibility for health and wellness. For some companies, the human resources department owns wellness issues, for others the facilities group makes that claim. Some organizations look to their interior design firm to address workplace wellness, or they may engage an outside consultant. It can become a bit chaotic.
Where does this leave the traditional ergonomist? Kelly Colon, founder of Eledex Consulting, thinks there is a place for a workplace strategist, perhaps the integrator role that Jaspers mentioned. “There is no playbook or workbook, for example, for hybrid or remote work. And there is the issue of who sets the strategic direction and who implements that direction.” Some corporate organizations, the larger furniture manufacturers, and an array of design firms now have a role identified as “workplace strategist.”
Having a designated workplace strategist, however, does not ensure that the need for the technical and scientific knowledge of a certified ergonomist will be met. An ergonomist can help address the larger issues of health and wellness, but they also contribute technical knowledge about posture and physiology that self-anointed workplace strategists often lack. Like many factors and features in the evolving landscape of the office workplace, the future is not entirely clear, nor firmly established.
Add to this evolving landscape the changing processes and patterns and places of work, as well as the evolving and innovative technology tools on the horizon. For example, will augmented-reality devices create new challenges for human factors best-practices? Apple has yet to launch their new spatial computing Vision Pro device, and already they are getting feedback from beta users that the weight of the headset is raising concerns about neck fatigue. And so it goes.
The ergonomists who contributed their ideas above all agree on one thing: The most important issue in the Human Factors discipline is the human person. Ergonomics and wellness will remain relevant and valuable to the degree that the workplace is centered around and committed to accommodating its most important asset…the human person.