Cheap office chairs costly mistake - 3

In the third part of this Blog post I’d like to take a look at the next couple of questions from my list.

Although it will probably have become obvious how important your chair is if you identified with working long hours at a computer, question three may help in convincing you that you need better office seating.

Do I or my staff suffer from aches and back pain as a result of sitting for extended periods of time?

If you or your staff get back ache and neck and shoulder pains it’s a sure sign that your existing chairs aren’t good enough and more of the same is only going to result in more of the same aches and pains that already exist.
Pain that comes on when working in an office chair is a sure sign that it’s either incorrectly adjusted or simply isn’t able to be correctly adjusted to suit working conditions.

Our bodies are a great early warning system that things aren’t right and pain is nature’s way of saying things aren’t as they should be. So, don’t ignore these signals they are there to warn you something’s not as it should be.

Begin by looking at the existing seating, does it have the required adjustments to cure the problem? Try varying how you sit, and if it doesn’t improve matters then it really is time to replace what you’ve got and more of the same is not the way to go.

So, on to question 4.

Is it likely that time will be spent working for long periods in an office chair for the foreseeable future?

The reason I include this question is that it may be that present working conditions are likely to change at some point in the future and this might result in different seating requirements.

So, don’t just look at the immediate situation when assessing needs, look to the longer term. For example, if it’s likely that a new computer set up is going to be installed in the next 12 months that will replace what is done manually you need to assess what effect this will have on working procedures.

If it’s going to be something radical, make sure you build this into your planning, you don’t want of find you’re faced with an embarrassing situation in 6 to 9 months time.

In my next post we’ll look at the remaining questions from my list of seven questions.