There are several areas of ergonomics to consider when designing or redesigning an office space. Arguably the most important of these is the physical aspect.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor went to work at Bethlehem Steel. Upon observing the workers shoveling coal, Taylor had an idea. He assigned each worker a shovel that was of a size and weight ideally suited to the worker’s own body structure. With the new shovels, the workers became triply effective, Bethlehem Steel was able to reduce its cost by half, and get the same amount of work out of 140 employees that it once got out of 400.
Today, few businesses need concern themselves with optimizing their employees’ coal-shoveling potentialities, but workers are breaking their backs at a whole new kind of grind, spending up to fourteen hours a day at a desk in front of a computer. That is why ergonomics, the study and integration of human well-being principles into systems designs, has become an integral part of the creation of modern workspaces.
