Is Your Office Lighting Causing You Working Discomfort?

An area which is often overlooked is office lighting and if poorly set up can frequently create a lot of problems with screen glare.

If your work space is poorly lit you may find you suffer from eye strain, headaches or back and neck pain caused by putting your body in awkward positions because of inadequate lighting.

Where you work near to a window it’s important to have your office chair correctly positioned, you shouldn’t sit with your back to the window as bright sunlight on your VDU can make it unreadable.

Instead, make sure you are facing the window to avoid direct sunlight hitting your screen. Where it is unavoidable and you have to have a window behind you, look to fitting a window blind so you can control the amount of natural light entering your work area.

If your office has fluorescent lighting it’s important to fit a good quality diffuser to the fitting which has been designed to remove glare and spread light evenly over the work area. Where this isn’t possible you will often find adding task lighting can help to illuminate the desk area removing shadows and giving a more even light distribution.

Another way of tackling this problem is by fitting an anti-glare screen to your VDU screen, these simply clip over your display screen and have polarizing filters designed to cut out glare problems.

Steelcase has an interesting article on office lighting and you will also find further information on anti-glare screens here.