ndoor air quality in working places is important because of its direct relationship with people’s health and productivity.
Occupational health and safety is important in every aspect of our business life. An office is the space where organisational activities are carried out to manage a business or a service. Occupational health and safety should be optimised in the office environment as well as in the field environment. The fact that employees in the office environment spend their work lives both efficiently and safely increases both the profitability and efficiency of the company. For this reason, occupational health and safety in office life is important in all respects. Ergonomics investigates the relationship of the worker with his job, work tools and work environment. With the right ergonomics work, we can prevent potential hazards that we can avoid with simple precautions in the office environment.
Simple adjustments to the work environment and habits will greatly increase one’s comfort and productivity. Occupational health and safety is provided in the offices by considering the risk factors of ergonomics. Goals of ergonomics; To increase the efficiency of the employees, to avoid unnecessary and excessive coercion, to organise the work in a methodical way, to prevent unnecessary activities, to ensure human-machine-environment harmony.
Office life should be handled in terms of occupational diseases and work accidents. Occupational health and safety in office life is very important. The fact that the occupational accidents in the offices are lower than the accidents in the construction, metal and mining sectors reduces the shift of interest in this direction. However, occupational health and safety measures should be examined in offices, since work accidents should not be small or big, but human health should be the basis. The increase in occupational diseases occurring in offices, especially in recent years, shows the importance of this issue.
Ergonomic risk factors
- environmental factors: It is an extra burden for employees. It is necessary to recognise these factors in order not to reduce work performance and not to harm health, and to know the physiological responses of the organism when these factors are at a normal or excessive level.
- noise: They are not large enough to cause physiological or psychological damage in office life, but care should be taken in industrial environments.
- thermal factors: Indoor air quality in working places is important because of its direct relationship with people’s health and productivity. In this respect, it is extremely important to provide thermal comfort in offices where employees spend at least eight hours a day. Indoor temperature is the most important parameter among the thermal comfort conditions. The indoor temperature should be at a level where people feel comfortable, depending on the winter and summer conditions.
- lighting
- chemicals
- plants
Physical Factors
- Buildings
- Display Tools
- Recurring Jobs
- Inappropriate Postures
- Static Postures
Psychological factors
- Employee factors
- Factors resulting from the structure of the job
- Factors originating from the structure of the business
Photo by Brittany Colette on Unsplash
Office diseases are also a threat in terms of occupational health and safety in the office. Office diseases are a group of multi-systemic diseases caused by constantly staying in the same position, repetitive movements, working with devices with screens and keyboards, overloading the wrist and fingers, unsuitability of the environment in terms of heat, humidity, light and comfort. Office diseases; musculoskeletal system diseases, circulatory system diseases, allergic diseases, psychological diseases.
Employees may not always realise that they are injured due to the non-ergonomic environments in which they work in the office. Because these injuries can happen to most people in daily life. It is often noticed when these injuries increase in size. Office workers also have the right to claim compensation for their injuries. We recommend that you contact personal injury lawyers in Sydney to complete the compensation claim.
