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WORKING OUT THE WORK FROM HOME
HOW EMPLOYERS REMOTELY IMPROVE PHYSICAL ERGONOMICS
FACTS AND FIGURES 9
EDUCATE
• Create a “culture of wellbeing,” and focus on healthy lifestyles.
• Organise group exercises and activities online.
• Standardise on the relationship between nutrition, wellness and productivity.
Actively engage the employee in maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
EMPOWER
• Promote wellness digital tools. • Provide ergonomic equipment
and/or expert consultation. • Offer discounted or free gym
memberships.
• Plan for an Employee Assistance Programme for wellbeing.
Help the employee achieve physical and productivity peaks.
EXAMINE
• Conduct health/wellness surveys.
• Schedule daily physical activities and push breaks between work sessions.
• Consider physical and cognitive ergonomics always together in remote policies (i.e. stress).
Reassure the employee and create new ergonomic strategies.
A subjective appraisal of wellbeing at work relies on models of analysis that identify and prioritise the factors that facilitate it9. Such models are invariably based on multi-dimensional frameworks which incorporate a wide range of factors that go above and beyond the basic of physical comfort, such as self-acceptance, autonomy, and environmental mastery. These are the things that help people manage their relationship to the world.
One of the most effective models focuses on three primary domains: the physical, the cognitive and the organisational10. These are the levels at which a company should operate in order to nurture the wellbeing of remote workers. Not by coincidence, these also are the domains which have the most significant ergonomic implications for the everyday life of workers.
The overall principle that “ergonomics is concerned with understanding the interactions between humans and the other elements of a system ... to optimise human wellbeing and the overall system performance”11. This means that ergonomics has both a social (wellbeing) and an economic goal, supporting a company’s business strategy to stay competitive.
At its heart, ergonomics for remote working remains about the creation of a better place to work, but it must overturn its traditional assumptions
Working Out the Work From Home
Source: based on “How to Keep Your Employees Healthy While They're Working From Home”, Sophie Downes, 2020.
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