Your Ergonomic Workstation

To my mind, this is because if you're like most of us, you strive to maintain a relationship with your work throughout the day. You need to see what's on your monitor, manipulate the mouse and keyboard, have a place to rest your wrists and arms, and so many other things. If the basic parts -- your desk, monitor, and chair -- are not tailored to you, most likely you'll be straining to meet and interact with them. This is why most manufacturers provide controls with their products.

But it's up to you to use them.

Try playing around with the feature adjustments on your monitor and the height adjustment of your desk. The goal is to support neutral posture for your upper body, shoulders, and arms. A neutral posture may help you work with only minimal muscle tension, which may, in turn, help you avoid neck strain.

Related:

• What Should Your Worker to Desk Distance Be?
• What is the Best Desk Height For You?
• Place Your Monitor at the Correct Distance For You
• All About Ergonomics of Using A VDT Screen

Regardless of how you break from your work, experts generally recommend you do so for between 10 to 15 minutes every one to two hours (depending on how intense your work is). You need that downtime to enable your muscles to relax. Without it, muscles may be continually active, particularly if your job involves a lot of repetition. (A data entry or order taker position is an example.) Constant muscle contraction in your hands, arms, shoulders, and/or neck may lead to muscle fatigue and neck pain.

It seems to me that doing desk exercises has grown in popularity in the last decade or so. That's a good thing!

As you've hopefully seen from reading this article and thinking about it, the way your workstation is set up can affect your posture. So why not specifically target posture during your desk exercise sessions? With a little concentration on technique, it is possible.

For example, if you feel like you're collapsed after a few hours of sitting at your desk, you can address trunk control and posture awareness by lifting your ribs up and away from your pelvis.

MSD stands for musculoskeletal disorder. This term is often used in the context of conditions or injuries sustained on the job (called work-related musculoskeletal disorders). In the spine, a work-related MSD may be a herniated disc, muscle strain, or ligament sprain, to name a few.

To get your employer to take responsibility for your work-related MSD, you have to show how the MSD was caused or made worse by one or more of the five risk factors identified by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The risk factors that most commonly affect office workers are awkward or non-neutral postures, repetition, and contact stress. The other two risk factors are vibration (think about a jack hammer operator) and force (industrial workers who lift or transport heavy items).

If you experience symptoms, such as neck or back pain, and your job includes one or more of the risk factors, you should bring this to the attention of your employer.

Your workstation is not only your concern. Your employer has a vested interest in your comfort level. This is true whether she realizes it or not.

If your workstation is too high, too low, or shaped in such a way that you have to maintain awkward positioning for most of your day, decreased productivity may result. Not only that, but should you injure yourself on the job, your employer may be on the line for treatment costs, which can quickly get expensive.

When you look at it that way, hopefully you'll find the courage you need to approach your employer with your reasonable requests for workstation improvement.