It's 3pm on a Tuesday. You've been at your desk since 8am, you've got a deadline looming, and somewhere around lunchtime a dull ache crept into the base of your neck. You ignored it because you were busy and by 4pm it's spread across your shoulders, by 6pm your upper back is aching too. You get home and spend the evening in pain and discomfort which is added to the next day when you do it all over again. Does this sound familiar?
Most people will read that and nod but here's the thing almost nobody stops to ask: was that just a bad day, or was it your workstation actively doing that to you?
We've normalised discomfort
One of the strangest things about modern office life — whether that's a corporate open-plan or a kitchen table with a laptop balanced on last week's post — is how we've normalised physical discomfort as part of the job.
We talk about burnout. We talk about stress. We have entire HR strategies built around mental health but the chair that's slowly destroying your lower back? The monitor that sits three inches too low and pulls your head forward like a tortoise looking for food? The mouse that forces your wrist into a subtle, all-day twist? We don’t consider those might be an issue that needs to be sorted
The discomfort becomes background noise and background noise, over time, becomes the way things are.
Here's what we know, and what the data backs up consistently: poor workstation ergonomics doesn't just cause physical discomfort. It causes errors. It causes fatigue that accumulates across weeks and months. It causes sick days – sometimes lots of them. The Health and Safety Executive estimates that work-related musculoskeletal disorders account for around 7 million working days lost in the UK every single year - and that's only what gets reported.
The productivity myth
There's a deeply embedded belief in a lot of workplaces that if someone is present at their desk, they're being productive. We've built entire cultures around the optics of busyness - the person who stays latest, who never leaves before the boss, who responds to emails at 11pm.
If you sit someone in an uncomfortable chair, give them a screen they have to strain to read, and watch what happens to their output around hour four. Cognitive performance drops. Response times slow. Errors creep in. The work that should take 20 minutes takes 45 and nobody connects that to the chair. They connect it to the person.
There's research from Cornell University that found properly adjusting a workstation setup improved productivity by around 17%. That's not a rounding error. That's nearly a full extra day of useful work per week, per person, unlocked by — at its most basic — making sure the screen is at the right height and the chair supports the lumbar spine.
We spend thousands on software, on training, on management consultants, and then leave people hunched over laptops on dining room chairs wondering why they feel ground down by Wednesday.
The slow injury problem
Here's what makes this genuinely difficult to take seriously until it's too late: the damage from poor workstation setup is almost always cumulative. It's not dramatic. It doesn't happen on a Tuesday and announce itself.
Repetitive strain injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, cervicogenic headaches, chronic lower back pain - these are conditions that develop quietly, over months and years, built up from thousands of tiny micro-stresses on muscles, tendons, and joints that were never designed to hold the same position for eight hours a day.
By the time most people seek help, the problem has become structural. Physiotherapy. Injections. Surgery, in some cases. Time off work and often, a permanent change in what they can do comfortably - if at all.
The cost is personal, obviously but it's also enormous for organisations. Beyond the sick days, there's the reduced capacity of people who are in pain but present, the turnover of people who eventually leave because they never quite feel well, and the legal exposure when it becomes clear that the duty of care around Display Screen Equipment - a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have — was quietly filed under "we'll get round to it."
Homeworking made it worse
Remote work changed a lot of things. For many people it brought flexibility, autonomy, abetter work-life balance but it also quietly introduced a generation of makeshift workstations that nobody has ever assessed.
The kitchen table. The sofa with a laptop on a cushion. The spare bedroom with a chair borrowed from the dining set. A monitor that's whatever size the screen on the laptop happens to be, at whatever angle the kitchen worktop dictates.
In an office, there's at least the theoretical framework of a DSE assessment, a facilities team, adjustable chairs. At home, people set up whatever works in the short term - the first lockdown was supposed to be three weeks, remember -and then never revisited it.
That temporary setup is now, for many people, still their daily reality and it's costing them, quietly, every single day.
What good actually looks like
The frustrating truth is that good ergonomics isn't complicated or particularly expensive. It's not always about standing desks with motorised height adjustment and thousand-pound chairs (though those things don't hurt). It's about fundamentals.
Monitor at eye level, roughly an arm's length away. Chair height allowing feet flat on the floor and thighs roughly parallel to it. Keyboard and mouse positioned so your elbows are at roughly 90 degrees and your wrists aren't bent. Enough light that you're not straining, positioned so it's not creating glare on the screen. A back that's supported, not curved forward like a question mark.
That's it. That's the foundation and for most people, getting there costs less than a tank of petrol and an hour of attention.
The DSE assessment exists for exactly this reason - a structured way to look at someone's workstation and fix what's wrong before it becomes a problem. Not a box-ticking exercise. An actual conversation about how someone sits, what hurts, what could be better.
The question worth asking
If you're reading this from a desk - and statistically, there's a decent chance you are -try something for a moment. Notice where your head is right now. Is it forward of your shoulders? Notice your lower back. Is it supported, or are you slumped? Notice your shoulders. Are they creeping up toward your ears?
Most people, doing that check, will find at least one thing that isn't right. Many will find several.
Now ask yourself: how long have you been sitting like that? and how much of how you feel at the end of a working day might be that, rather than the work itself?
The real cost of a poor workstation setup isn't just the physio bill or the sick days. It's the accumulated toll of feeling worse than you should, performing below where you could, and accepting that as normal.
It isn't normal. And it's more fixable than most people think.
If you'd like to discuss DSE assessments, workstation reviews, or ergonomics training for your team, get in touch with us today – we can provide with you a full service including recommendations for your employees
https://www.jigsawworkplacetraining.co.uk/courses/dse-workstation-assessments
#WorkplaceErgonomics#DSEAssessments #SupportingEmployees #BackPain
Photo by Minh Phuc: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-white-desk-with-a-computer-and-plants-28350932/
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