Many questions come up when it comes to scheduling an at-home ergonomic assessment. How is it different from an office assessment, and how do you even conduct one without seeing the client working at their desk?
First off, I’d like to run through the top 5 frequently asked questions about getting an at-home ergonomic assessment and peel back the layers of confusion.
#1 – What are the most common symptoms of a work-related injury?
Catching work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) early before it rapidly escalates into an ergonomic injury and requires medical attention can save a company from lost revenue due to Workers’ Compensation fees and other indirect costs.
Companies must be observant and take swift action as soon as they identify the numerous symptoms and signs of MSD, such as muscle and joint stiffness, fatigue, inflammation, swelling, and in some cases radiating numbness and tingling down an affected hand or leg.
MSDs can happen just the same while working from home. Everything mentioned hereon can also be related to working remotely at home; it’s just the individual or family member who has to keep a watchful eye.
During the early stages of an MSD, an employee’s performance isn’t typically affected. It’s common for them to feel waves of muscle achiness and exhaustion throughout their work shift but disappear later that night or after time off from work.
In the intermediate stage, muscle fatigue is constant and doesn’t let up after the workday. The employee’s performance is dramatically affected, and their capacity for doing repetitive work needs to be scaled back.
When the MSD is in the late stage, the discomfort and fatigue persevere even while at rest, negatively impacting sleep and performing minor tasks.
That said, the three stages can vary and blur, making the transition from one to another hard to pinpoint. That said, it’s essential to be vigilant and nip the MSD in the bud and identify symptoms before they become a long-term and chronic problem.
Interventions that occur during the early stages of MSD symptoms have a faster recovery rate.
2. Does Workers’ Compensation Cover Work from Home?
The number of Workers’ compensation is just waiting to explode. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, “Courts have found that an employer’s lack of control over the conditions of an employee’s home-based work premises is irrelevant.”
There are still many hazards that employees need to protect themselves while working remotely from home, and this is where a virtual ergonomic assessment can help.
Working from home makes your morning commute obsolete, and for some people, they might even skip showering and roll out of bed onto the couch to power up their laptop and start working.
Temporarily working from your couch or bed might work for an hour or so, but if it ends up as your designated workstation, the ergonomic safety hazard lights will start flashing.
3. What are the most common work-related injuries while working from home?
During the COVID pandemic, working from home has become the new standard. Some companies like Google, Twitter, and Shopify have offered their employees work-from-home stipends to purchase ergonomic equipment.
However, numerous companies with limited budgets cannot supply all their staff with the same workstation set-ups back at the office.
This leaves many remote workers to set up their makeshift workstations at their dining room table, kitchen counter, or even children’s playroom.
Despite the luxury and freedom of telecommuting to work in your pajamas, people are still getting injured at home.
Besides the typical workplace injuries that can happen from slips, trips, falls, and lifting heavy objects, let’s take a detour and check out some common injuries that can occur while working from home.
Low Back Strains
More often than not, a person’s work from home “office” chair ends up being their dining room chair or kitchen stool. There’s usually a mismatch between the chair height and work surface height, making it challenging to sit with a neutral posture.
When you sit in a neutral posture, your body is more aligned- your neck is relaxed, ears are directly above your shoulders, your elbows are close to your sides, your forearms are bent 90-degrees, and your feet are resting flat on the floor.
The problem lies with the abundance of people working from home with slouched low back postures and unsupported low backs. Over time, this can lead to a back strain and even a bulging or herniated lumbar disc.
Using the handy OSHA Safety Pays calculator, employers can assess occupational injuries and illnesses’ impact on their profitability. If an employee working from home sustains a back strain injury, it could cost the company over $67,000 in direct and indirect costs.
Combined with all the additional sales needed to cover those indirect costs, that one employee’s back strain would end up costing the company (hold onto your eyeballs) over $2 million to make up for that lost revenue.
Neck Strains
Awkward postures are all too common when using a laptop due to its several ergonomic design flaws like:
- The inability to position both the monitor and keyboard/mouse at the correct height.
- Overuse of Index finger from mousing.
- The smaller screen size can encourage forward head posture to view the monitor.
Maintaining forward head postures to look down at your laptop screen is hard to avoid. If done for prolonged periods, it can strain your neck muscles, cause headaches, and place unnecessary pressure on your cervical spinal discs.
Carpal Tunnel & Tennis Elbow
Another common mishap that can occur when working at a desk that’s too high is contact stress and overreaching.
What happens next is your forearms have to stretch forward to reach the keypad, and your elbows fall out of that neutral posture (being close to your sides).
Continuous pressure against (leaning on) the wrist rest, hard work surface edge, or armrest with the wrists, forearms, or elbows can lead to inflammatory and disabling repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel and lateral epicondylitis (aka tennis elbow).
In fact, according to the OSHA Safety Pays calculator, just one carpal tunnel syndrome injury can cost a company nearly $65,000 in direct and indirect costs, and the company would need to generate over $2 million in additional sales to cover those costs.
As reported by that same OSHA Safety Pays calculator, one tennis elbow claim, which falls under an “inflammation” injury type, would amount to a whopping $82,156 in direct and indirect costs. The company would need to come up with additional sales of $ 2,738,533 to cover those expenses.
Now you can see how hiring a professional ergonomic assessment specialist to evaluate the safety of employees’ work from home set-ups is comparable to preventative medicine as it can potentially save a company millions of dollars in lost revenue.
4. How much does a home office ergonomic assessment cost?
A typical in-person office ergonomic assessment involves a certified ergonomic assessment specialist coming to a company and evaluating employees at their workstations.
Typing for long periods with awkward posture or continuously reaching across your body while at your desk, are all red flag risk factors that go into the ergonomic assessment report.
The cost of office ergonomic assessments can vary from $250-$1000, which is a fraction of what a company would have to pay if an employee got injured at work or while working from home.
5. What happens in an at-home ergonomic assessment, and how long does it take?
Here’s the process in a nutshell:
The ergo client (that’s you) fills out a discomfort survey, helping us identify any red flags and potential ergonomic risks.
The next step is to answer some questions about your home office workstation and upload 4 candid photos of yourself sitting at your workstation.
That’s all we need from your end, and then we’ll look at all your answers and photos you provided to help us paint a picture of the source of your ergonomic concerns.
Within a week, you should receive a scheduler link via email to meet over Zoom to review our findings and recommendations.
During the 45-60 minute live zoom session, the ergonomic consultant highlights the client’s strengths and discusses opportunities for improvement and any safety concerns or red flags that could be a risk factor for an injury.
Lastly, the session shifts to strategies for addressing the fatigue points and improving the way you work, like inserting frequent micro-breaks into your day.
The finalized report’s turnaround time would roughly take one week, depending on the ergonomist’s queue of assessments.
Extracting all the necessary ergonomic data from observing photos of a person at their workstation can seem challenging; however, over time, one develops their “ergo eyes,” as the Back School Director, Ron Porter, likes to call it.
If you are working from home and experiencing muscle fatigue throughout your workday, consider scheduling a remote ergonomic assessment of your workstation set-up to improve your overall comfort, safety, and productivity.