With an estimated 75 million Americans working at least part of the day at a computer keyboard-everything from a fast-food restaurant’s cash register to an accountant’s spreadsheet-ergonomics has become a modern-day watchword.
Ergonomics, a combination of the Greek words for work and management, focuses on how to design furniture, machinery and workplaces for maximum human comfort-and, therefore, maximum human productivity.
In the modern workplace, ergonomics increasingly takes the form of computer keyboards that look more like airplane control panels than typewriters and chairs that sometimes look like something you might sit in during an Air Force bombing run.
Neal Taslitz, president of Chicago-based BackCare Corp., which supplies such high-technology gear, said the human-friendly office furniture and equipment looks so strange because the more familiar equipment in most offices is exceedingly unergonomic.
Strange-looking products like flexible keyboards are designed to spare a worker the troubles encountered using standard flat computer keyboards.
The flat keyboards-which sit on nearly every office desk-encourage users to rest their hands below the keys, a practice that can lead to major problems over time, Taslitz said.
Flexible keyboards allow the user to set the angle of the keyboard from 0 to 90 degrees, and each side can be set separately.
Thus you can put the left side of the traditional QWERTY keyboard at one angle and the right side at another. This elevation forces a user to assume the proper ergonomic typing stance to prevent such repetitive stress injury problems as swollen hands and inflamed tendons, and cuts down on fatigue because the settings can be changed during the day, Taslitz said.
As important as the keyboard, if not more important, is the chair, he said. So ergonomic furniture-makers have come up with numerous designs geared to keeping the user from slouching and otherwise putting improper pressures on the neck and spine.
“When you have a pain in your wrist or your elbow, it may be due to an injury of your wrist or elbow, but it also could be caused by a pinched nerve somewhere in your neck or back,” Taslitz noted.
The chairs typically are built with the seat sloping downward, which forces a user’s feet to the floor, helping support the neck and spine and making slouching difficult.
Various chairs are designed to do things like support the lumbar region of the back. Some go so far as to cause the user to assume a kneeling position, forcing the thighs and buttocks to carry the body’s weight more evenly.
Many are used in concert with “computer arms,” armrests that are bolted to the desktop or attached to the chair. These are padded brackets into which a user places the forearms and wrists to maintain proper typing angles.
For those who need to operate a mouse, one variant of computer arms that Taslitz’s company offers moves on a series of gears, allowing hands to float over the keyboard and reach the mouse without bending a wrist.
Another major ergonomic issue involves computer monitors, which frequently are placed above eye level, causing neck strain as the eyes move from the desktop to the monitor and back.
Worse, the screens often give off glares that lead to headaches, pinched nerves and other woes that often can be prevented by installing anti-glare screens.
“The business of office ergonomics is booming,” said Victor Cilli, Chicago sales manager of New York-based Optech Corp., which produces anti-glare/anti-radiation monitor sceens.
Employers, he noted, often are quick to spend a few dollars, or a few hundred dollars, to head off federal complaints, to avoid lawsuits and to eke out more productivity from shrinking pools of workers.
A court case frequently cited by those selling corporate executives on ergonomics is that of Janice Goodman, a microfilm technician at Boeing Co. who developed carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful injury to the wrist attributed to poor typing posture.
She charged in 1992 that her superiors refused to grant her request for a transfer when the problem began and that it worsened as she kept working at her keyboard.
A state court last year awarded Goodman $1,088,510 after finding that Boeing failed to obey Washington state laws requiring employers to accommodate handicapped workers and for inflicting emotional stress on Goodman.
Optech’s sales brochure notes that buying and installing screen shields “provides sound defense for cause of action against (a) company for equipment which is potentially harmful.” Installing the screens, the brochure adds, “demonstrates that (a) company has taken preventative measures to protect employees.”
Cilli said the screens also increase productivity because they dramatically cut the glare that comes when background lights are reflected in the screen.
The screens also shield against electrons, believed by some scientists to cause eyestrain and perhaps even make people irritable.
Cilli emphasized that it doesn’t matter whether the theorists are right or wrong; what matters is that workers know their employers are going out of their way to ensure the comfort of the work force.
“The most important thing about putting our screens out for your work force is the psychological benefits,” he said. “Ergonomics is a sophisticated field, and psychology is part of it just as engineering and medicine are parts of it.”
The ergonomic study behind today’s strange-looking new machines and furniture dates to the invention of the telegraph, when the people who spent their workdays banging out the Morse code on a single key began to display crippling symptoms.
Dr. Fred Hochberg, director of the musical medicine clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, notes that the repetitive stress injury problems that long have vexed musicians (and once plagued telegraph operators) now loom over what amounts to “the largest single occupational group ever-computer users.”
“Studies performed by industry and occupational-health physicians reveal that one-fifth to one-quarter of computerkeyboard users (vocational and recreational) have symptoms referable to their activity,” he wrote recently.
The problem is that only now are experts becoming aware of the scope of the medical dark side to the revolutionary changes that the desktop computer brought to the workplace, according to experts such as Hochberg and his colleague, Dr. Emil Pascarelli of the Miller Institute for Performing Artists in New York City and author of the newly published book, “Repetitive Strain Injury: A Computer User’s Guide.”
Until the personal computer made its debut as a full-fledged office tool in the mid-1980s, people worked with text and numbers by keying it into typewriters and adding machines.
Ergonomics experts note that the typewriter was a very ergonomic tool.
Because keys tended to jam when the user typed too fast, keyboards were laid out in the strange QWERTY style to make them harder to find and thus slow the user.
When a typist made a mistake, it was corrected by taking the paper out of the machine and tossing it away or by breaking out a bottle of white-out, providing continual breaks from hitting keys. And the output was black ink on white paper and easy to read under reasonable lighting conditions as long as the ribbon was suitably fresh.
Furthermore, the keys were set on three rows, which meant that a typist’s hands naturally assumed the proper positioning that puts the minimum strain on the user: arms raised, hands extended and wrists above the keyboard.
By contrast, a computer keyboard simply requires typing. You don’t have to stop at the end of a page and feed in more paper, so you can hit thousands more keys every day than did workers just a decade ago.
Corrections are made with more keystrokes. Instead of black ink on white paper, users must look at screens that reflect room lights or sunlight.
And the keyboards tend to be flat, making it easy to type by resting the hands on the table surface and dangerously placing the wrists below the keys.
As Pascarelli puts it in his book: A modern-day office workstation can be “a cunning mugger. It sneaks up on you without your being aware of it. . . . Unless this cycle is interrupted, it repeats itself over and over, and a long-term, chronic problem results.”
Meanwhile, a strong force is building to bring ergonomic hardware into the workplace. The federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration plans to require that all workstations meet certain ergonomic standards.
The standards, which Labor Secretary Robert Reich said will be issued in September, are expected to be similar to those in place in California since 1991. (California is the only state to have enacted such a law, according to BackCare’s Taslitz.)
Like the California standards, the federal rules, if and when adopted, will apply to jobs where people are at keyboards “a cumulative total of four or more hours, inclusive of breaks, during any 12-hour period.”
The California law requires that all workers have seats that are adjustable for height and forward and backward angle and that backrests provide lumbar support.
Monitor screens are required to be no higher than eye level when the user is seated, and the keyboard has to be placed so the user can operate with hands parallel to the floor.
The law also requires employers to provide, on the request of the employee, arm, wrist and food rests, and glare screens that “do not allow the buildup of static electricity.”
Making the workplace safe and comfortable is a badly needed morale-building tool for companies whose work forces are in turmoil over downsizing, said efficiency experts such as Carla Paonesa, a partner at Andersen Consulting Inc. whose specialty is “change management.”
The enormous tensions felt as managers continually seek ways to get more work out of fewer workers make supplying ergonomic conditions crucial to success, Paonesa noted.
“Good managers don’t view (ergonomic) things as being nice to workers so much as they view them as being important to productivity,” she said. “When people are unhappy, they are much less productive than when they are happy.
“Companies that try to save money by supplying poor equipment are going to lose money, not save it,” Paonesa added. “Ergonomics is always going to be cost effective for a business.”
