Blog

Today I want to share with you a guest blog that highlights an important ergonomic issue in schools–the desks.  Enjoy!

Productivity and efficiency—two buzz words that are talked about and heard continually from large to small businesses.  Why?  The productivity and efficiency of people and operations can make or break a business.  Unfortunately we can’t snap our fingers and make high productivity happen all by itself.  However, significant improvements are common when you apply the right principles, guidelines and tools to your business systems and processes.

In my last blog I stated that I attended the Ergonomics Applied to Retail and Distribution conference in Minneapolis.  One of the people I met there was the Steve Lippert from Hamilton Caster.  As an ergonomist working on material handling issues a question that frequently comes up whenever material is pushed or pulled is “what is the best equipment/wheel/caster combination for this situation?”  I learned from Steve that Hamilton Caster had published a white paper on Rolling Resistance and Industrial Wheels.  The paper provides an overview of rol

Last month I attended the Ergonomics Applied to Retail and Distribution conference in Minneapolis.  It was my first conference I attended that was strictly devoted to this sector.  While I was attending I was thinking that there could almost be an ergonomics and human factors conference devoted to each industry and/or sub-sectors because there are enough unique work tasks, needs and nuances that could support what occurred at this conference—that was speakers specific to the industry presenting their current challenges, attempted changes and full or partial solutions to their issues.

Although sit-stand workstations have been around for several years their popularity has only recently grown.  This has been primarily due to research on the negative effects of prolonged sitting which has been labeled “Sitting Disease”.   To combat sitting disease in an office/computer work environment employers and employees should modify the work environment and tasks to allow for a reduction in the amount of time spent sitting and increase the amount of time spent standing and/or walking—hence the upsurge in demand for and use of sit-stand computer workstations.