Ergonomics: Find out what it is and how important it is for companies

Nowadays, it is difficult to think about well-being in the workplace without mentioning ergonomics, after all, it directly affects everyone. People's physical and mental health are equally important, the latter being crucial even in the workplace. However, even so, many companies still have doubts about what ergonomics is in practice.

Ensuring that employees have a healthy work environment has always been one of the biggest challenges for the Human Resources team. Aligning with this concern has become even more difficult for businesses with the need to transition to the home office model. Therefore, if you want to know more about what ergonomics is and its benefits, just keep reading this article.

What is ergonomics?

In reality, ergonomics can be understood as a set of rules and procedures that analyze how the workplace is organized and how people interact with the various tools and equipment.

Its objective is to reduce risk by working to organize corporate procedures and the physical conditions of the company's workspaces. In addition to providing comfort to the worker, it also aims to prevent occupational diseases, such as injuries, physical pain and preserving the employee's physical and psychological capacities.

Therefore, we can define ergonomics as the analysis of the relationship between a professional and the way he or she performs his or her work. This concept is based on regulatory standard no. 17 developed by the Ministry of Labor and Employment.

How important is ergonomics?

Ergonomics in the workplace is essential, as it serves as a tool to ensure the physical and mental health of employees. The implementation and application of ergonomics also brings positive effects to the company, as it helps to increase employee productivity.

In addition, some of its benefits also include: prevention of repetitive strain injuries (RSI), prevention of psychosocial illnesses, reduction of professional absences due to medical issues and absenteeism, improvement in quality of life, reduction of employee fatigue and much more.

Types of ergonomics

Ergonomics has a very broad approach that takes into account several factors. These include physical, mental, social, environmental, organizational, and other important factors. Therefore, it can be divided into types of specialization with more in-depth approaches.

In the first type we have physical ergonomics , which discusses the permanent relationship between daily activities that require physical effort to be carried out and the anatomical characteristics of the human being.

The main objective of physical ergonomics is to improve an individual's performance by applying analyses and studies of their anthropometry, biomechanics and physiology in their workstations.

Organizational ergonomics is related to the company's culture, processes and policies. This type of ergonomics aims to adapt the working conditions offered by the company to the employee's health and well-being.

In the case of cognitive ergonomics, it discusses mental processes such as reasoning and memory, which the employee uses to perform tasks, as well as how they interact with other factors. Therefore, in general, it is linked to reasoning, reaction and motor response, in relation to the scenario and memory of employees.

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