10 Most Ergonomic Activities To Help Engage Your Team
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Engaging your team members in ergonomic activities can bring a lot of miracles as well as in your life.
Teamwork is always great!
Then boost your team and get more productive work?
If you are the head of an organization, expecting more productivity from your employee.
Then I want to tell you, this write up is just for you.
Dear employer, the mental and physical fitness of your team members will reflect on the productivity and quality of their work.
If you are expecting more, then simply follow the ‘give and take policy’.
Ergonomics can play a great role in shaping your organization’s power.
Now it’s clear about the give and takes the policy?
Then, what else?
Table of Contents
1. Mental Health To Physical Strength
If you’re trying to focus on the well-being of your team members/employees, then you have to focus from inside to outside.
At the very beginning, make sure they are mentally comfortable with the working place.
Hence we can say mental health can affect their physical strength and finally the overall productivity!
We can consider the following points to make your team cheer!
Take a deep breath and move on.
Yes! Deep breaths always help to release stress.
2. Care For Them
When you pay attention to ergonomic activities to engage your team, how it will increase your employee’s confidence level?
Is this possible?
At the point where they realize, they are valued, it would be a twist.
Because they realize, they are valued since their employer is giving more attention to them.
This would increase their mental affection towards the daily repeating routine of work.
Mental health and physical strength are always correlated.
A quick response from you, simple consideration to their opinion, listen to their ideas, may also make drastic changes within them.
3. Employee Engagement
It is easy to say “Employees are the backbone of our organization”.
But the matter of fact is how we treat them!
Treat them better and you will get better results as a reward.
Involve them in sharing their ideas and decision making.
Proper communication with them can enhance their confidence and productivity.
After all, they are colleagues and hence give a chance to them to know each other, help each other, and be good to each other.
This will help a lot when dealing with teamwork.
Encourage small personal projects for them to make them confident.
Extra Activities
Spend time for extra activities for them to escape them from the hectic schedule of work!
Engage your employees to spend time on charity activities.
They can refresh their soul.
Celebrate important dates within the organization.
Inspire your team and encourage them.
If your workplace is ergonomically fit, then the productivity of your team members will gradually rise.
He clearly says less engaged employees give minimum productivity!
Now it’s clear about the value of employee engagement?
So, let’s communicate to them properly and convey the ideas of ergonomic activities to them and make their office time worthy.
Good Posture Practices
Engage them in good posture practices like a better sitting position, better walk, better movement- ultimately lead to better work!
Let’s move on to an awfully important thing to consider.
Sitting posture is extremely crucial, as your team members are constantly sitting and working for a long time.
Lower back pain, musculoskeletal disorders, cumulative trauma disorders, repetitive motion injuries, etc.
are common among employees with poor workplace posture.
Workers are compelled to take leave just because of the musculoskeletal disorder and pain arises due to this.
Hence we can begin with posture correction awareness programs.
Is this posture correction important?
Neutral Postures
These are the postures in which your spines are not twisted and joints are not bending.
Following the neutral postures will be great.
Then let’s come back to the diseases associated with this.
The list of diseases includes musculoskeletal disease, cumulative trauma disorders, repetitive motion injuries, etc.
I would like to say these diseases are office born.
Because they are the output of our non-neutral posture practices in the workplace.
To avoid the beginning of this ‘office born Musculoskeletal diseases’,(MSD)s, we can follow some control measures in the work station itself.
Preventive Measures
Posture correction and your comfort zone, How they are linked?
Identify the comfort zone for your body while doing work!
Yes! It’s between your knees and shoulders.
Give extra care to your knees, feet, legs, and spines.
Do not allow your spine to make a ‘C’
Tell your spine to love ‘S’ rather than ‘C’
Always make sure that you are sitting properly with an S-shaped spine!
“If your body is unhappy, then your mind will be disappointed.” And vice versa
Have you ever thought about this?
Maybe No!
“Have you experienced that?”
Yes!
The body hates to do the same things for a long time. Make your body happy by engaging in different postures.
4. Redesign Your Workplace
Design my office again! No way.
This is not about the architecture and walls.
I am not telling you about the overall redesigning of your office.
We can just convert the workplace environment into a highly productive machine by redesigning it!
But, how?
Just arrange your office in such a way that your staff is comfortable.
Get those proper lights and a positive atmosphere for them.
These small changes can make them happier to give productive work.
These are the science of designing your workplace suitable for your employees
Just one thing keep in your mind
Each of your employees is unique and they too have limitations!
Job rotation can be also useful among employees to recover from the fatigue caused by continuous sitting.
They can sit and work for a particular time and then allow them to allot any other work in which they can stand and do
Keep it in your mind and be there for them, not only for their well-being but also for the success of your organization.
5. Design Comfortable Furniture For Your Team
Yes! The furniture you provide them to work can do a lot with them.
An average employee in office work is spending over 60% of his day in a chair.
Not only the chair but also the structure, length, and breadth of the table will also matter.
Yes, they are spending a lot of time with these gadgets.
So these are the ones who keep in touch with your staffs for a long time
So, they are the best means through you could care your team
The distance from the person to the monitor, mouse, and keyboard will matter.
The positioning of arms in the table during continuous work determines the body strain to a certain extent.
Adjustable Furniture
Yeah! It’s difficult to design furniture for everyone in your office. I know.
Here comes the value of adjustable furniture.
Adjustable furniture, which can adapt to height and size, can choose for your office.
Many people are unaware of the large range of adjustments in their furniture provided.
You may not believe it. But it’s true.
So before any work, make sure that your employees are aware of the capabilities of their chair and table!
Height adjustable tables and chairs allow them to maintain a comfortable posture.
They can adjust the furniture whenever they want to sit or stand.
Mouse and keyboard should be placed at a safe distance to avoid sudden fatigue and thus work more effectively.
Small consideration of these simple things will achieve excellent results.
Engage Your Team Members
What are the things that can you do in your office work without a computer?
The question is simple!
But the answer will be most complex!
Because we cannot avoid computers in our daily work.
So, we are spending a lot of time in front of the monitors.
It is very discomfort to place you in front of a single monitor for a long time
This is enough to make things hectic.
Dual monitors are attaining more popularity nowadays.
Dual monitors can increase the desktop space, avoid pain and distress.
Several studies revealed the usage of dual monitors has been increasing day by day
Checking from 2002, there is an increase of 70% in need of dual monitors.
Thus it is proof that dual monitors are capable of increasing the quality and productivity of individuals.
6. Organizing Orientation Programs
Training and awareness programs regarding ergonomic activities will be fruitful.
Before that, identification of your ergonomic problem, discussion about the solutions, and selection of an appropriate solution have to do.
Yes!
An expert can help you with that.
At first as the head of the organization, please take a survey of your team regarding the physical stress and health problems in your workplace.
Let’s go for a genuine investigation
You will be surprised!
Because more than 60% of employees are suffering from office born work-related issues.
If you observed that most of your employees are suffering from lower back pain, then you have to start from the very beginning posture correction strategies.
The training programs conducted by experts also start from these kinds of critical evaluations.
They will offer ergonomic and risk assessments
You can feel free to go for organizing a training program and make it worth it.
7. Ergonomic Training Programs
You can find out the innumerable training program for your employees
These programs make them aware of a lot of things at the workplace that matters their health.
Most of the programs tell us how to avoid health-related problems in the workplace and become more productive.
They would give training from the very beginning itself.
They give instructions on how to sit, how to stand, and all such movement-related things.
They will do your posture correction and make your team more productive and capable.
There are also individual consultants available to your employees.
You can get help from them also.
In that way, each employee can attend an ergonomic awareness program without skipping their work!
Ergonomic Awareness Program
They can individually attend a session of the program whenever they are free.
This would make sense, as the employees are already dealing with loads of work.
They don’t have to worry about deadlines and attend training whenever they want.
This will be a relief to the employer also!
As the employee is not making any delay in his/her work.
Every employee should attend at least one detailed practical session of training programs and should study more about the values of ergonomics.
Ergonomics in your working environment can bring a lot of wonders to your workplace.
8. Make Your Team Physically Ready To Work
What will you do just after you come from a busy tennis ball match?
What will be the first thing you need to perform after hours of your busy schedule at work?
Yes! You’ll stretch your body.
You have to loosen your fatigued muscles and just want to relax.
These are quite natural but could act as fuel to many beneficial things.
Make your team physically ready to work!
Sounds a little bit confusing?
Then move on to the point.
Stretching exercises along with warm-up can make your team physically ready for work.
9. Workplace Stretching Programs
Many companies are already following stretching programs in the workplace for their staff.
These programs consist of stretching and warm-up exercises to make the team ready to work.
Experts said that these stretching and warm-up exercise can reduce the risk of several musculoskeletal disorders,
Prevention is better than cure.
We all know how prevention is better than cure.
But what is the need to tell these things here?
Yes, we need to consider the prevention of all work-related injuries from the very beginning itself.
After work-related stress, pains, injuries, musculoskeletal diseases, how much are you going to spend to cure these things?
How much time are you going to waste to relieve pain?
When we start to think about those things, we will come back to the fact that “prevention is always better than cure”.
Involve Your Team
Make your team members involved in safety committees.
Just try out safety committee ergonomics?
To give proper care to safety and health at the workplace, a safety committee is the right decision.
Elected members from the workplace can guide the safety committee.
They should notice the stress and risk factors of their colleagues at the workplace and report properly.
They shall take proper actions immediately.
Safety committee meetings can be held during successive intervals.
This idea sounds practically more viable, just because, the employer can properly train the elected members regarding the ergonomics and related pieces of stuff.
They can technically evaluate the ergonomic hazards in the work station.
Hence, members will be aware of the health problems and risk factors associated with poor ergonomics.
10. Provide Relaxation Stations
Provide relaxation stations in the workplace for your team.
I mean it, stretches can help to relieve muscle fatigue.
Then what can we do for mental fatigue?
Get refreshed! This is the only solution to get away from mental fatigue.
You can provide a place for your team, where your employees can undergo simple ergonomic exercises and get refreshed.
Practice those simple exercises effectively and notice the changes!
A few simple exercises which can be done in workstation includes,
- Head and neck exercise
- Tilted neck
- Backward shoulder press exercise
- Simple Work out for Shoulder and arms
- Separate arm and shoulder exercises
- Wrist exercise
- Fingers and palm workout
Workplace Safety Ideas
Let’s introduce workplace safety ideas to your organization.
A quick awareness program and pieces of training can’t be effective, if the facts discussed are not followed by your team members.
Then what should we do here?
Here comes the idea!
Safety slogans and safety games!
How?
It is feasible if your employees can’t forget the nine points we already discussed above through slogans and games.
Yes, Through these kinds of things, they will remember and think about the points they heard during training programs.
How can we effectively implement those ideas?
Workplace Safety Slogans
A slogan can start with the idea of creating a visual or rhyme related to safety at the workplace.
The slogans must be catchy and must locate in different places which can be easily visible to everyone.
Your team members will see this frequently and recall those things discussed during orientation programs and will think about them.
There we can also apply games with safety slogans!
Scramble the words of safety slogans and distribute them to your team members.
They will arrange them in the correct order within the allotted time.
You can distribute prizes to the winners
Workplace Safety Games
Ergonomic demonstrations can be done among team members.
E.g. one person can ask another person for demonstrating good posture practices.
This would recollect the importance of workplace ergonomic principles which have been discussed earlier.
These are the top ten ergonomic activities to engage your team.
From the perspective of an employee, you can clearly understand what I mean through this.
And this is the voice of each one of you.
Here we discussed your pain, your stress, and your health issues!
To the employer, these are the tips I want to share with you and I’m sure this would be beneficial to you and your organization.
You can see the magic happens in your workplace after following some of the tips mentioned above
I know it is not possible to follow all the points mentioned here at a single stretch!
But you can implement some of them in your workplace and see the life changes around you.
Don’t sit and wait! Go ahead! Make changes.
Benefits Of Ergonomics
Now we are familiar with the importance of ergonomics in our daily life.
Let’s have a look back.
What are the benefits of an ergonomically sound workplace?
- It reduces workplace injuries
- It will improve your work productivity
- The quality of work will increase
- Exterminate the causes of several musculoskeletal disorders, cumulative trauma disorders, repetitive motion injuries, etc.
- Employee engagement
- Ergonomics will save you money and time
- Increase the confidence of your employees
Final Thoughts
Ergonomic activities can make your life a little easier and bring a successful career.
If you’ve properly gone through the above-mentioned points, I think you’ve understood the importance of ergonomics in our life.
To the employees, by following the above tips and facts, I assure you a soft good night’s sleep every day with no back pain and other discomforts.
Say goodbye to all work-related physical and mental stress, be productive, and yield quality work.
Go ahead!
And to the employer, prepare for new contracts and be excited to accept more quality work from your employees.
They are already prepared.