Why Good Ergonomics Is the Heartbeat of Remote Work

Why Good Ergonomics Is the Heartbeat of Remote Work

Some of you will be reading this from your home office, which also happens to be where I'm writing it. I've just looked up from my screen and caught myself hunched forward, shoulders shrugged, looking down at my laptop. Maybe you're the same right now. We can straighten up, but we'll both manage it for about ten seconds before we're back where we started.

That moment of recognition is exactly what this piece is about. Because most of us who work from home have stopped noticing what our bodies are doing during the day. The slight discomfort has become the baseline. Somewhere between the first lockdown and now, a temporary improvisation became a permanent way of working, without anyone really stopping to ask whether our bodies were keeping up. 

They aren't, as it turns out. But the good news is that the fix is less complicated than you might think.

When a Fortnight Became Six Years 

Hard to believe it’s been six years since the first global lockdown. When the pandemic nudged us out of our usual workplaces, we improvised. Kitchen tables became desks, dining chairs got press-ganged into full-time office duty, and sofas got promoted to a new role. It was fine for a fortnight. For many people, that fortnight has now stretched into years.

The numbers that have emerged from this grand remote-working experiment are hard to ignore. A UK-wide survey found that four in five desk workers who shifted to home-based work reported back, neck or shoulder pain. Nearly a quarter said the discomfort was almost constant. In Ireland, you don't need a survey to know it - you can hear it in passing conversation, colleagues rolling their shoulders after a long day, the physio waiting lists that keep growing.

And here's the part that should give HR leaders pause. For years, work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) - the clinical term for the aches, strains and injuries that come from how we work - were actually declining. Better office design, improved awareness, progress being made. Then the WFH era arrived, sent millions of us home to improvised workstations, and reversed that trend almost overnight. Around one in five people who developed a musculoskeletal disorder during the pandemic said their condition was directly caused or made worse by it, according to HSE data. New cases are now rising again. A problem we were slowly resolving has come back with a vengeance, and the makeshift home office is at the heart of it.

What the Discomfort is Actually Costing

Unsurprisingly, an aching back is also a concentration problem. Persistent discomfort is a low-level drain on energy that makes everything - focus, creativity, patience - a little harder. For businesses, this shows up as lost productivity, higher absence rates, and a creeping erosion of the kind of engagement that no amount of team socials can fully repair. Work-related musculoskeletal disorders cost UK employers around £12 billion a year. That's not a rounding error.

But think about it on a human scale too. Eight hours a day, five days a week, roughly 48 working weeks a year. That's around 2,000 hours annually spent at a desk. If your setup isn't right, if your neck is carrying the weight of your head tilting forward, with your shoulders creeping up, your lower back is doing the work your chair should be doing. That's 2,000 hours a year of repetitive strain on your body. Over a decade, that's 20,000 hours.

Ergonomic furniture isn't cheap, but when you frame it that way, the investment looks rather different when you’re sparing your body 20,000 hours of slowly being worn down. 

Our Heads Are Heavier Than We Think

Here's something most people don't know. Your head weighs around five kilograms, roughly the same as a bag of potatoes. When it sits directly over your spine, that weight is evenly distributed and your neck muscles barely notice. But tilt it forward by just a few centimetres to look down at a laptop, and the effective load on your neck can increase to four or five times that. By 30 degrees of forward tilt, which is about where most of us land when we're reading a screen on a table, your neck is managing the equivalent of around 18 kilograms. All day. Every day.

And that strain doesn't stay in the neck. It travels. The upper back compensates, then the lower back compensates for that, and the wrists follow because the whole chain has shifted forward. What feels like a lower back problem, or tight wrists, is often a screen height problem in disguise.

The goal, when you strip it back, is what ergonomists call a neutral position: the body at rest, nothing straining to reach or crane or compensate. For your screen, that means roughly arm's length away, with the top of the monitor sitting at horizontal eye level so your gaze travels straight ahead rather than angling down. It sounds simple, and it is. But when you're working from a laptop flat on a table, you're probably looking down at an angle for most of the day, which is why the neck and upper back take such a chronic, persistent strain.

So what does a good setup actually look like?

A few fundamentals that are worth understanding before anyone tries to sell you anything.

The chair is the starting point, but height adjustment is the thing most people get wrong. Too low and your knees rise above your hips, which rotates the pelvis and puts pressure straight onto the lumbar discs, which is where a lot of lower back pain originates. Too high and you end up perching on the front of the seat, losing back support entirely and often compensating by leaning forward to reach the desk. The right height is simply: feet flat on the floor, knees at or just below hip level, weight evenly distributed. Everything else builds from there.

Sit-stand desks often get filed under "nice to have", the kind of thing you associate with tech campuses and people who are very serious about their wellness. That slightly misses the point. The real value of a sit-stand desk isn't that it lets you stand, though standing periodically does help with circulation and lower back fatigue. It's that it lets you properly adjust the desk height to your body, rather than adjusting your body to the desk.

The desire to find a better way of working at a screen is nothing new. Back in 2007, Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr, famously solved the problem with a plank of wood and a lot of Diet Coke. He used it for over a year. It looks ridiculous. It is also, ergonomically speaking, better than the setup most of us are still working from nearly two decades later.

A fixed desk at the wrong height means your chair adjustment, however perfect, is working against a fundamental mismatch. An adjustable desk closes that gap. You shouldn't need a recycling bin's worth of fizzy drinks to get there. 

Add a monitor arm to bring the screen to arm's length and horizontal eye level, and suddenly the whole chain - neck, shoulders, upper back - is no longer compensating. That's when people tend to say, usually with some surprise, that they didn't realise how much tension they'd been carrying until it wasn't there anymore.

A good ergonomic setup is less about any single piece of furniture and more about how everything works together. Small adjustments, compounding over a working day, compounding over a career.

For the HR leaders reading this

There's been a growing buzz recently about the return-to-office movement, with productivity cited as one of the main reasons for bringing people back. And there's something in that. Many offices do have decent chairs, quality desks, monitors at the right height. The environment has been thought through.

So here’s a question for leaders who prefer their employees in the office because they’re perceived as more productive: if someone is less productive at home, is that really about where they are, or about how they're set up? A good office chair didn't get less comfortable just because it's now in a spare bedroom. And a kitchen chair didn't suddenly become supportive just because the company called it flexible working.

If a company is willing to invest in ergonomic equipment for the office, it's worth asking why the same standard isn't expected, or provided, for the home. Expecting office-level output from home-office-level equipment is like expecting a professional kitchen performance from someone working on a single electric hob. The person hasn't changed. The tools have.

It's not an argument against the office. It's an argument for consistency.

And beyond the productivity question, there's a broader strategic case that goes beyond welfare. A workforce that isn't in physical discomfort is a workforce that can actually show up fully, wherever they're showing up from. Remote and hybrid working has given people enormous flexibility and, in most cases, they value it deeply. Making sure that flexibility doesn't come at a physical cost is one of the more meaningful things an employer can do to show they're serious about it.

There's also an employer brand dimension that's easy to underestimate. The organisations that think carefully about the physical reality of remote work - not just the policy, but the actual chair someone is sitting in at home - tend to be the ones people talk about positively. That reputation compounds.

Your people may not be raising it with you because they don't want to seem difficult. A proactive conversation about remote working conditions, even a simple survey asking how people are actually managing at home, can surface a great deal, and it signals the kind of genuine care that people remember when they're deciding whether to stay.

Start where you are

Times are tight for a lot of people and a lot of organisations right now. A full ergonomic overhaul isn't always the right first step, and we'd never suggest spending money you don't have.

There are some quick workarounds that cost very little. A small cushion placed in the small of the back can make a surprising difference if your chair lacks lumbar support. A footrest, even a sturdy box, can relieve pressure on the lower back for people whose feet don't comfortably reach the floor. A laptop stand and a separate keyboard costs relatively little and immediately changes the angle of your screen, which as we've seen, changes quite a lot else besides.

These aren't permanent solutions, but they're better than nothing. Start there if that's where you are.

We're here when you're ready

When you'd like to go further, or if you're simply not sure where to start, that's what we're here for. Whatever your budget, we can help you find a setup that actually fits.

We're also always happy to talk through how to make the case internally for an ergonomic upgrade. If you're an employee who's been making do with a kitchen chair and a stack of books, it can feel awkward to raise, but the business case is genuinely strong, and most HR teams and managers, once they see the numbers around productivity, absence and staff retention, are more receptive than people expect. We can help you frame that conversation in a way that feels considered rather than demanding, and that speaks the language your employer is likely to respond to.

Even if you just want a conversation and some honest advice, feel free to reach out. 

You can find out more about how we work with HR teams here. Or just drop us a message directly.

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1. Hub Publishing — Back pain Britain: poor home working set-up is damaging health. 81% of UK desk workers reported musculoskeletal pain after moving to home working; 23% experienced it often or constantly. hubpublishing.co.uk
2. HSE — Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders Statistics, Great Britain 2024/25. New cases increased from 168,000 to 173,000; approximately one in five cases caused or worsened by pandemic conditions. hse.gov.uk
3. Future of the Office — Ergonomics is the most important workplace investment you'll make this year. futureoftheoffice.com
4. Future of the Office — How furniture shapes the modern workplace. futureoftheoffice.com
5. Hansraj, K.K. — Assessment of stresses in the cervical spine caused by posture and position of the head (2014). Surgical Technology International. The source for the head weight and forward tilt load figures.