Ergonomics & Safety When Working Remotely Environmental Health and Safety
Get off the couch and set a dedicated work zone in your house tol help your mind enter and stay in work mode, whether you have the space for a home office, or can only convert a corner of your living room. Again, it’s best for your body to use a mouse that’s separate from the attached touchpad on your laptop. Moreover, you should place your mouse near the keyboard so it’s easy to reach without overstretching any part of your body. Once you have a workstation, you can now set up all your essential workplace accessories like a computer or laptop. Here are a few recommendations to keep your body ergonomically optimized.
What’s the best way to separate work and personal life when working from home?
Louise is an award-winning journalist and speaker who focuses on working from home, remote work and wellbeing. She is the founder of The Homeworker, which is dedicated to helping you thrive when you work from home. The Homeworker publishes articles that are designed to keep you healthy, happy, fulfilled, and more productive in work and life.
- Some adjustable-height desks let you save settings, so multiple users can quickly access their preferred desk height.
- For more than a quarter of a century, HSPI has supported workplaces in their design and implementation of Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems.
- For instance, Leitner 15 found that work-family conflict and family-work conflict were only relevant mediators of the relationship between WFH and well-being at the beginning of the pandemic.
- Stargaze at night, camp in your backyard, try birdwatching or a picnic in your local park, drive to a local farm for some seasonal produce, or keep an eye out for live music on the weekend.
As a best practice, document important decisions in shared spaces where teammates can easily reference them, which reduces misunderstandings and builds a valuable knowledge base. In remote settings, use platforms like Slack and Zoom with intention by establishing clear expectations around response times. Remember that not every message requires an immediate reply, and creating communication norms helps everyone focus better. For additional support, productivity tools like Google Calendar, Notion, or Trello can help visualize your day and keep you accountable to your schedule. For instance, adding work from home ergonomics plants improves air quality while creating a more welcoming space.
What should I do if I feel burned out or unmotivated working remotely?
Fortunately, you can address all these with the right workspace setup, daily structure, and wellness practices. As a result, many experience decreased productivity, physical strain, and eventually burnout if these issues aren’t addressed. It may be helpful to set an alarm to ring every hour to remind you to sit up properly while working. The slouch-overcorrect exercise is also a great maneuver to do to remind yourself to sit with proper posture.
Stretch Your Muscles and Do Light Exercises
If you can, use an external monitor or laptop stand (with an external keyboard and mouse) to prop up your screen. When looking at the screen, your eye line should be level with the address bar on your web browser. These surfaces do not provide adequate support or stability for your body and can make you adopt poor postures, leading to pain and injury. Use a flat, stable work surface large enough to fit all the items you require, such as a desk, table, or counter. I go in-depth on how to set up a complete workstation in my ultimate home office setup guide.
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Create both physical and temporal boundaries by designating a specific area solely for work. Then, establish start and end rituals, like taking a walk before and after work hours, to help your brain transition between modes. Finally, put away all work equipment at the end of the day to visually signal that work time is over. Additionally, place your monitor at eye level to prevent neck strain, with the top of the screen aligned with your forehead. Most experts agree that the ability to spend some time sitting and some time standing while working is optimum for musculoskeletal health. It’s easy to snack throughout the day instead of eating like you did in the office.
In addition to basic questions on demographics, employment status, earnings, industry, occupation, marital status and living arrangements, the survey asks about current, planned and desired WFH levels, and more. We screen out respondents who fail to answer an attention check at the beginning of the survey.3 We design the G-SWA instrument, adapting questions from the U.S. We enlist professionals to translate our original English-language questionnaire into the major languages of each country. To ensure high-quality translations, we also enlist an independent third party with knowledge of the survey to review the translations and revise as needed. The fourth wave of the G-SWA has been fielded in 40 countries from November 2024 to February 2025 (see Appendix Table 1). The first subsample consists of adults aged 20 to 64, while the second is restricted to full- time working adults aged 20 to 64 who have completed at least secondary education.
Even more, it can help you decrease the risk of developing repetitive strain injuries or any unwanted body pain. Flexibility is important in working from home because it can help you balance your personal and professional life, adapt to changing circumstances, and improve your productivity and well-being. Flexibility can mean choosing your work hours, location, and tasks, as well as adjusting your work style and pace according to your preferences and needs. Now that we understand the challenges of working from home let’s go over some intuitive ways to be productive while staying healthy. Remember, just because it’s home doesn’t mean it can’t be professional. Here’s what you should do to have an ergonomic, productive workspace.
Work From Home Ergonomics: The Do’s and Don’ts
- That way your keyboard and monitor can be separate from one another, allowing you greater flexibility.
- To prevent these problems, take short breaks every 25 minutes to stand up, walk around, stretch, or do light exercises.
- When you look at the middle of your screen, your eyes should look slightly down.
- These small practices significantly contribute to team cohesion and overall job satisfaction.
For those living alone, WFH in addition to other existing social distancing measures might have led to feelings of social isolation and loneliness 29. Thus, WFH might have affected well-being differently during compared to before and after the pandemic, which limits the informative value of cross-sectional studies typical of the literature so far. Ergonomics in a working environment refers to optimizing how we work. It focuses on physical anatomy and physiological needs and combines the elements of data and engineering to better support the body.
They can also lead to musculoskeletal injuries, such as low back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain, headaches, or fatigue. If using a laptop, raise it so that the top of the monitor is at eye level and use a separate keyboard and mouse. This prevents you from bending your neck or dipping your chin while looking at the screen, reducing the pressure on your wrists and fingers when operating the computer.
While some desks allow you to adjust their height, not all desks are adjustable. So if you intend to get a fixed desk for your work-from-home setup, ensure that you check the desk multiple times before you finally make a choice and get the most appropriate desk for your remote work setup. A one page summary on the perils of prolonged sitting and prolonged standing. It describes the current research on how long we should stay in each posture along with the importance of movement. This guide has been prepared by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA) to help you be comfortable, productive and safe while working from home. Human Factors and Ergonomics professionals can assist workers and employers confirm that home-based equipment and furniture is suitable for workers and how they work from home.
Women with children desire to WFH an average of 2.66 days a week, 0.13 days more than women without children. In contrast for men, those with and without children have very similar desires, and indeed men without children have a slightly higher WFH preference. It’s easy to neglect your health and well-being when there’s always work to be done, but a constant high level of productivity doesn’t necessarily correlate with high wellbeing. Find time in your day or week for “microadventures,” short, local, affordable activities that offer novelty, excitement, and fulfillment. If your job requires you to spend long hours at your home-based desk, get up and get moving.
Whether you’re a tutor, writer, engineer, coder, virtual assistant, social media manager, or other type of remote worker, here are 10 actionable productivity tips that can help you complete the day’s tasks with ease instead of effort. With the appropriate height and adjustment of the keyboard at a proper distance, you promote better hand and wrist position and health. If you want to set up an ergonomic workstation for your remote work, ensure that you choose a desk that fits your knees, feet, and thighs comfortably underneath. Your desk should be such that your knees don’t hit against any other surface, nor should you feel the need to press your legs together. However, given the events of the last few years, there has been a major shift in workplace dynamics. Today, millions of employees with office jobs are working from home, and even though the pandemic is over, there’s no going back to the conventional workplace.
Specifically, time-blocking (assigning specific tasks to dedicated time slots) helps prevent the endless drift that often happens when working from home. Whether your home setup is ideal or not, there are some steps you can take to avoid discomfort and ergonomic injury. Research comparing standing and sitting while working at a computer is varied. Some studies indicate that standing may be superior, while others show that sitting in the correct position is best.
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