The office is a popular place for forming friendships and even finding lovers. But these days, some people's deepest office attachment is to their chairs.
As employees put in longer hours at their desks, bad office chairs are a big problem, as I report in my Work & Family Column this week. Many employers provide the same chair for everyone, but employees fail to adjust them to fit. And at companies that are cutting costs, many people are stuck with cast-off chairs that don't fit, or chairs so old that they offer little support.
The result is a lot of aches and pains. Some 86% of office workers say their furniture causes discomfort, and more than half say that if they could make one change to their office furniture, it would be a better chair, according to a survey last December of 150 office workers by Staples Advantage, a unit of Staples, Framingham, Mass.
One Norwalk, Conn., social worker I interviewed had an office chair so old and lacking in support that she could hardly get up from her desk because of back pain. Her employer, a government agency, is too strapped to provide new chairs, so she secretly swapped her old chair for a better model from a co-worker who had just gotten a new chair from another office. "I don't think he even noticed" the switch, and her back has felt better ever since, she says.
Workers who find a good chair tend to get attached. One Arlington, Va., association executive loves his Herman Miller Aeron chair so much that he has taken it with him through three job changes in the past 16 years. After sitting on cheap, ill-fitting chairs in the past, "I've come to appreciate how sore you can be from sitting in the wrong thing," he says.
Another executive, for a Grand Rapids, Mich., food-service company, liked his employer's Steelcase Think chairs so much that when he changed jobs, he paid $500 for a new one out of his own pocket. He says the chair eases chronic soreness in his back and gives him more energy.
Improving the ergonomics of office chairs and other equipment increases productivity by an average 17%, based on a review of 40 studies of office workers published in 2008 in the Journal of Safety Research. Workers tended to have fewer muscular-skeletal disorders, and a lower rate of absences and errors, the studies found.
Readers, does your office chair cause you aches and pains? Have you ever secretly switched out your chair with a colleague's? Or complained to management and asked for a new chair? Have you ever become attached to a great office chair? What kind was it?
