Welcome to WELLCARE Blog

“We are basically an indoor species,” said Wayne Ott, a scholar of environmental engineering.

His statement is borne up by years of research, which have shown that most people spend around 90% of their time indoors. It’s not surprising, given that our indoor environments are designed to provide comfort, safety, and shelter.

More or less.

Despite a growing interest in architecture geared toward wellness and sustainability, several indoor spaces are ultimately harmful to our health. Offices are among the worst offenders—and the danger has only grown with the proliferation of open plan offices.

Cramming a lot of people into a small space is generally a quick way to cultivate health hazards. Offices are ultimately influenced more by cost-efficiency than worker wellness, so they often feature setups that compromise health.

Here are some of the often-overlooked ways that your office could be wrecking your health:

Ergonomic Risks

Ergonomics, the study of efficiency in working environments, includes the physical design and orientation of objects and spaces. Things like how chairs and desks are built and positioned relative to each other fall under its concern. And while this study should, theoretically, inform how offices are designed, it often ends up ignored.

Unfortunately, poorly designed workspaces force workers to adopt poor posture. This leads to muscle strain and skeletal damage, especially for repetitive manual tasks (e.g. typing, operating a mouse, etc.) and prolonged sitting.

It can also lead to more serious conditions, such as carpal tunnel syndrome—which involves not just muscles, but nerves—and cardiac or vascular problems.  

Air Quality

Air conditioning is effectively a foregone conclusion in the typical office. It’s useful for regulating temperature, which is especially important in offices with lots of critical equipment.

Unfortunately, air quality in offices is often quite poor. The air inside a commercial building can sometimes be up to 100 times more polluted than the air outside,according to a  Bloomberg report. Particulate matter from photocopiers and printers can be especially harmful. Having air conditioners cycle it through the building several times over means that employees are constantly exposed to this.

The enclosed, air conditioned spaces also allow sicknesses to spread faster. The more people there are and the closer they are packed, the harder it becomes to preserve health. A 2011 Danish study found that the average number of sick days taken by employees correlated positively with the number of employees in a space. Open plan offices fared worse in this regard than cellular offices.

Poor Lighting

Offices suffer from a combination of little natural light and an excess of artificial light, including the glare and blue light that come from computer monitors.

A lack of sunlight has been linked to insufficient vitamin absorption as well as sleep problems. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that employees who weren’t exposed to natural light got 46 minutes less sleep on average than those who were.

Meanwhile, looking at computer monitors for too long can lead to a variety of conditions known collectively as computer vision syndrome. The most common include discomfort or pain in the eye; some involve dryness or irritability of the eye, as well.

Bacteria Breeding Grounds

Offices are often dirtier than they initially appear and several pieces of office equipment and furniture tend to host large populations of bacteria.

Desks, keyboards and computer mice, door knobs and handles, and elevator buttons are among the worst offenders. It’s especially bad when people eat at their desks but don’t clean up afterwards.

In many cases, desks were found to have E.coli (often found in food or digestive systems) and coliforms (typically found in feces). These may be from rats or other animals that are drawn to food scraps.

Other Stressors

Finally, the overall stress of an office environment can have a range of negative effects on employee health. These vary from person to person, but they can include anxiety, poor eating habits, loss of sleep, and increased risk of heart problems.

But what causes this stress? Most of it has to do with human presence. Somee are obvious cases, like dealing with poor leadership or unreasonable clients. Others, however, are more subtle: the excess background noise and lack of privacy in open offices can be just as bad.

Solving the Problem

Given that the average worker spends nearly a quarter of their time each week (i.e. 40 hours out of 168) in an office, these problems quickly add up—making it important to find solutions.

The first step is to watch out for both symptoms and potential causes. There’s only so much you can do about an office’s setup, so it’s best to pick your battles and focus on the problems you’re most likely to solve.

In the short term, find more immediate solutions to the problems you face personally. You can get fresh air by taking regular breaks to stand up and walk. Eye strain can be mitigated with protective screen glasses. Muscle pain can be addressed through heat therapy and better posture.

Ultimately, though, you should strive for lasting solutions. These could be more ergonomic furniture and layouts, better access to natural light, or comprehensive cleaning routines that include improving air quality. Or, you know, swapping out the open plan for a setup with more private space per worker.

From heating pads and cushions to electric underblankets, Wellcare has high-quality products that can help you reduce muscle stress that might arise from work fatigue. To guarantee your safety when using our heating products, we use only the finest available materials in our manufacturing process.

However, the best aspect of our products is that they are equipped with our very own 4D Dynamic Warmth Flow (4D DWF) technology, an innovation in the world of electric heating. With 4D DWF, heat is evenly distributed throughout the product, thereby ensuring your maximum warmth and comfort.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab a Wellcare heating pad, cushion, or electric blanket today.