The other day, as I was IMing with a couple friends, filling out a forwarded “10-things-you-didn’t-know-about-me” survey and replying to a group email thread, I got to thinking, what did people do before all email, IM, and YouTube? Maybe they … Continue reading
Ergonomics Resources: macroergonomics
3 Hidden Costs of Office Ergonomics
“We did an independent survey with one firm and found that 60 per cent of the reasons that people gave for leaving that firm were to do with their core workplace environment,” recalls Nick Cook, managing director at consultancy Haywards. … Continue reading
Ergonomics and Labor Today
Richard W. Marklin Jr. lops branches, shovels clay, carves 30-pound cattle femurs, pulls 270-pound manhole covers and studies the workers who make their living performing these tasks. The 50-year-old professor in Marquette University’s mechanical engineering department examines the way we … Continue reading
The Industrial Revolution and Worker Satisfaction
Ergonomics is not just about how comfortable our chairs are…it’s about how we feel everyday at work and how our work affects our lives. The Industrial Age (followed by the Information Age) has brought us many things that would never … Continue reading
It’s Natural to Be Messy, Studies Show
A few days ago I asked the question, “what is better, a messy desk or a clean desk?” Well, that depends on who you ask. A new book called “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder” claims that mess … Continue reading
What Is Better, A Messy Desk or A Clean Desk?
The study of ergonomics in the HR field is often about trying to figure out how to achieve a balance between happy workers and productive workers. Ideally, a happy worker IS a productive worker. One contentious point of debate about … Continue reading
Desk Rage: A Macroergonomic Problem
Ergonomics is not just about how an individual interacts with an object. The field of organizational or macroergonomics looks at organizational structures and sociotechnical systems. In other words, how groups of people interact with each other in a work environment. … Continue reading