Ergonomics: Do You Need It?

Ergonomics: Do You Need It?

You might have heard the word a lot, and people do talk about it more commonly now than ever before. You boss seems to be interested in it too. Just what is ergonomics and do you even need it? Let’s take it one at time now.

The word ‘ergonomics’ was first used by the author Wojciech Jastrzebowski in his philosophy about it in 1857 by. The word is based on the combination of Greek words ‘ergon’ and ‘nomoi’, which mean ‘work’ and ‘natural law’ respectively.
 
As corporate culture and a new age of industrial revolution gained momentum in the last century, ergonomics steadily gained attention. But it wasn’t until Frederick W. Taylor came along that it came to life unlike any time before. Frederic W. Taylor developed the ergonomics theory into a practical realm by developing tools in factories that matched the work at hand. And like the idea of ergonomics dictated, he managed to not only bring safety levels up but also increased production for the company and helped workers make more money.

But if there was one point in time when interest in ergonomics grew exponentially since Wojciech Jastrzebowski coined the term and Frederick W. Taylor implemented it, it was during the Second World War. At this point, everyone from scholars to industrialists and government agencies started conducting extensive research on various aspects of human and work relationships. Some of these included the relationship between the force that is required from the body’s muscle or exerted on the body to do manual jobs; this means everything from the impact on one’s spine when lifting objects or one’s heart and blood pressure when doing physically intensive work, and just generally how much manual work a person can do.

So that takes care of the first question of what ‘ergonomics’ is. Now let’s move on to the second part; do you need to know about it, need it or want it? Read on and decide for yourself.

Let’s say your colleague at work starts complaining about back aches and tells you that he or she couldn’t get as much done because it was just too uncomfortable. Or perhaps you yourself are generally interested in knowing ways in which you can avoid incurring unwanted risk to your health at work but your work really isn’t dangerous in the traditional sense, you only have to sit in front of the computer all day long and type a lot and go home with a stinging pain on your wrist or fingers or even back. What do you do? Well, calling on an ergonomist would be a good start. In fact, a lot of companies do that as a default part of orientation for staff these days. Or just the kinds of sofas you want to keep in your living room and the distance between the sofa, a table and your TV would be dictated by ergonomics. It can even extend to something larger and more vague though. What if you want to improvise on a method or a product that already exists? A session of brainstorming to make that improvisation better than before itself is a form for ergonomics in a way.