SAFETY SATURDAY: WORKSPACES

We’ve learned that people develop physical problems when they have to adapt to their work areas rather than the other way around.

 - R. P. Dolan, Hewlett-Packard Journal, 1985

There are many different kinds of work. Some forms of work are physical, like digging trenches, cutting and milling lumber, or harvesting crops. Some forms of work require specific tools, like the soldering irons of electronics, the welders’ torches of boilermakers, or the sewing machines of tailors. Some work can only be done in certain places, because of practicality, policy, or practice. For as many human needs as there are, as immediate as the need to be fed, clothed and housed, to as advanced a need as entertainment, enrichment, or education, work is done. Work is done to fulfil human needs, and as many human needs as there are, so too are there forms of work. Because of this diversity, work is done in many places, and these places of work are points of safety intervention. When people talk about workspaces, people invariably think of computer workstations - these are the ubiquitous arenas of technologised service work. Traders have their Bloomberg terminals, receptionists have their computers, and almost every working professional has a laptop. Workspaces are more than computers, though, they are dental chairs, welding setups, forging irons, carving benches, printing racks, and treatment tables. Where work is done, it must be done in a workspace, and controlling the workspace ensures the safety of the worker.

In Australia, 86% of households had access to the internet in 2016-17 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). Those households typically used desktop or laptop computers to connect to the internet. Desktops, datapads and laptops are ubiquitous everyday tools used to access the internet and process information, where the transformation in work from technology necessitates the development of digital literacy to navigate an increasingly complicated world (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2021). These tools require physical manipulation - a human participant needs to use a keyboard or microphone to give instructions, a mouse to make selections, needs to look at a screen, eyes to see, ears to hear, and a brain to think (Citation needed). Even where the work is skilled digital work like coding, reporting, or consulting, the human body is engaged as much as the mind. In surveyed Australian workers, participants were sitting for an average of nine hours throughout their day, and more than half of that time was spent in prolonged sitting (Bennie et. al, 2015). The time spent sitting was also found to increase with organisational tenure. This is no surprise when considering office work - technical and skilled work that involves processing information is typically done sitting down, and the more senior someone is in the organisation, the more thinking they will do (Hadgraft et. al., 2016). These findings make sense when considering people who work at desks. On the other side of the spectrum, there are workers who need to use their bodies, who typically engage in more physical activity during their work in comparison to their more technically engaged comrades (Steele & Mummery, 2003). In construction workers, physical activity at work has been found to contribute to two-thirds of a worker’s total amount of weekly minutes to moderate physical activity (Arias et. al., 2015). Trade workers need to bend, lift, carry, and hold tools which exert force on their bodies during their shifts (Gassett et. al., 1996). Even within trades, like welding, workers may assume a range of different postures and have different physical demands depending on the work that they are doing, if that work can be done at a station or if the worker must go to where the work must be done, and the type of work being done (Singh & Singhal, 2016). There are many different kinds of work that are done to support human wellbeing, to meet human needs, and to ensure human comfort, but in the middle of all of this the human doing the work must be protected in the space in which they do their work. In some cases like office work this is easily achieved. In other cases like in primary production, care, and construction, this is less easily done. It’s no wonder then that agriculture, care, and the trades routinely present with the highest proportion of serious work-related injuries (Safe Work Australia, 2024a).

Considering a worker’s workspace as a point of safety intervention is a necessary measure. In Australia, employers and businesses are obliged to protect workers by managing risks, assessing hazards, and providing a safe work environment (Safe Work Australia, 2024b). This requires assessment of the work environment to assess movement, adequate ventilation, lighting, as well as the actual work being done to ensure that the physical, mental, and emotional demands of the work are adequately balanced. This may seem like a simple thing to think about, but the fly in the ointment is that people are different, and bring different capacities, and resources to their jobs, and engage with their work in different ways (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). Where the demands of work exceed a worker’s abilities, they will draw on their own resources; their mental and physical energy, their emotional bandwidth, and their reserve, to meet them (Krishnan & Mary, 2019). A worker’s workspace, which includes their physical environment, the tools and instruments they need to do their work, their arrangement of tasks and the fluctuating demands of their shift and working careers are a core point of any safety intervention. This is even more important because while physical arrangements to a space may be made as definitive measures, such as the rearrangement of windows, changing ventilation or office temperature, or providing a worker with a new desk may be practical, concrete solutions, a worker’s job demands can fluctuate based on their actual work and their perceived stress. That the worker experiences stress from outside of work as well as from work is a necessary consideration (Klitzman et. al., 1990). The extent to which a worker’s extra-occupational stress or strain may bleed over into their working hours, or conversely, the effect to which a stressful job might cause stress to develop in a worker in their off-hours is partly due to a worker’s boundary management (Kinnunen et. al., 2016), to the extent that work does not cause traumatic stress (Bride, 2007), and job pressure (Schieman & Young, 2016).

Work engages a worker’s body, mind, and occurs within a societal context that itself informs perception of risk (Schweizer et. al., 2022), perception of wellness (Watson & Kendall, 2013), and of safety (Blazsin & Guldenmund, 2015). Disease is evaluated within a biopsychosocial context, where a patient’s experience of their illness is evaluated across these three axes of consideration (Bolton & Gillett, 2019). Where a worker meets their work, the meeting of labour with the mind and body imposes demands on a worker whose perceptions of these demands is evaluated within social and individual matrices. To use a workspace as a point of intervention means evaluating that workspace’s usability against a worker’s physical, mental, and emotional capabilities. Considering the physical dimension is most simple and the most visually obvious - the arrangement of keyboards, mice, and forearm rests at computer workstations is an understood contributing factor in the development of upper limb muscular discomfort (Shabbir et. al, 2016; Iram et. al., 2022). These factors are all adjustable, as are the arrangement of computer monitors to minimise neck strain (Burgess-Limerick et. al., 1999; Mekhora et. al., 2000) and eye strain (Coles-Brennan et. al., 2019; Kaur et. al., 2022). For tool and instrument users, the diameter of handles, control surfaces, and operating interfaces can be changed and adjusted as well. Many professional and civilian construction tools currently have different handle sizes available, adjustable motors and torque profiles, and low-impact or low-vibration bits and construction. To the extent that the physical interface between a worker and their work is adjustable to facilitate the needs of the worker, that interface can be adjusted through engineering, through design, and through arrangement of the space. The physical environment is largely assumed to be taken care of as a function of stereotypical workspace design, where generally appropriate computer and asset placement within a workstation is anticipated to meet the needs of the majority of workers using that workstation, within two standard-deviations of the mean. However, nonstandardisable work such as that where computer animation or touchscreens are used (Chiang & Liu, 2016) or where a worker hot-desks and so cannot ensure a regular working environment (Chandwani et. al., 2019) can introduce risks where stereotypical controls fail. The physical workspace also exists within a workplace environment, where temperature, ventilation, lighting, and noise all interact to produce different concentrations of stressors, all of which may be adjusted, controlled, or otherwise engineered to bring them in line with human tolerances. This internalised and contextualised topography of engagement exposes workers to differing profiles of strain, and a worker may work well in one context but poorly in another without entirely knowing why. The trouble is magnified again for workers whose job roles are physically engaging, such as construction, machining, or onsite engineering roles where the workspace cannot be controlled. In those cases, regular and ongoing assessment of exposure and risk is necessary in the absence of any standardisable engineering, though this can be a challenge. Office workers may like to have footrests but concreters often need to wade through and over wet pours without clear indication of where their feet will fall. Keyboards and mice may have stereotypical positioning but there’s very little that is regular about the construction of houses and the arrangement of electrical lines through different materials. Where possible, standardisation, and where standardisation is not possible, control of the workspace is necessary to minimise hazard exposure at the point of contact where worker meets work. 

Work of all kinds demands conscious effort and active mental engagement, despite the introduction of artificial intelligence services offering assistive computation. Just as mechanisation and the steam engine reduced the need for human muscle power, and the development of the word processor reduced the need for manual typesetting, assistive computation services may attend to the need to use analytical and reflective cognition. In spite of this, a work shift still has a beginning and end time, whose total times add up to about thirty-five hours worked on average for Australian workers (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022; 2025), and also noting that more than a third of Australian workers worked for hours longer than those of their rostered shifts, with no appropriate compensation (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024), and workers can sometimes do their work at home. The pitfall of considering the workspace as the only point at which a worker does their job means that little consideration is given to how much work is done at home, flexibly, or outside of working hours. Here is where a tradesman may have an advantage over a computer worker - a tradesman cannot build a house in Armadale while at home in Alphington. However, a computer worker may receive emails on their off time, need to coordinate their shifts for international calendars, or even just keep their phone on them if they’re on call. The physical workspace may be where the work is done in a practical sense, but cognitive engagement is the basis of productive labour output. Intensive job demands, where a worker’s regular workload is increased, over prolonged periods of time cause stress and illness (MacDonald, 2003). Extensive job demands, where a worker needs to do work adjacent to or outside of their regular register of tasks, also cause mental strain that may result in illness, absenteeism, or morale loss (Jinnett et. al., 2017). This also applies to those cases where workers may take work home with them (Tsukerman et. al., 2020), where the boundaries between work and personal time are poorly defined because of relocation of work to the home or of infiltration of work into nonshift time (Lazauskaite-Zabielske et. al., 2022). Where work enters the home outside of regular shift times, this too imposes stress. Cognitive demands of work can fluctuate within shifts, within working periods like the academic calendar for school teachers, within seasonal calendars where funding is tied to financial year rollover or where anticipated periods of work coincide with cultural and social events, and where work is with the worker when the worker is not at work. Smartphones, email, and digital connectivity have blurred the boundaries between home, work, private, and professional life to the extent that enforcing boundaries between personal and productive time is becoming a necessary skill. This discussion has not touched on the effect of stress and accumulated fatigue, which too may bleed over from work and exact a personal toll on the worker where the work is physically engaging (Zhang & Bowen, 2021), where the work is traumatic (Thompson et. al., 2005), or where the work is sustained. The human brain retains its impressions, its fatigue, its exertional profile from work and needs space and peace to recover, and where this is not given, fatigue and strain result - this applied even when the workspace isn’t bolted to the ground or physically limited. 

Beyond the mental dimension of work in the workplace, a worker is also a psychological entity. Workers experience emotions, perceive their work as being good or bad, and identify themselves through their work. People who are gainfully and regularly employed experience positive mental health benefits (Modini et. al., 2016) but those benefits are contingent on the quality of the work (Rönnblad et. al., 2019), the psychosocial quality of that work (Butterworth et. al., 2011), and the social factors within which that work is located. Beyond the strain that workers experience from cognitive engagement in their job roles, controlling workspace risk means considering the psycho-emotional milieu of the worker as a contributing factor in their performance at work and a contributing factor to their safety, as it is empirically and as it is perceived. Safe Work Australia’s Model Code of Practice for Managing Psychosocial Hazards at work (2022) notes that some common psychosocial hazards include increased job demands as noted before, low job control, lack of organisational support, and stress from adverse events like trauma, bullying, or violence. To some extent these problems can be addressed as part of good work design where the consideration of human factors and capabilities gives businesses and employers the means to proactively assess and control work organisation to protect workers (Safe Work Australia, 2015). However, the worker exists within social and cultural landscapes whose changes have the potential to cause stress that bleeds back into a worker’s onshift capacity. Workers are humans, and they bring human thoughts, feelings, ideas, attitudes, and preconceptions into the workplace on a daily basis. Statistically, work and work-adjacent tasks will dominate the hours of every person, but the world still exists beyond them. While employment and regular work may decrease social isolation (Evans & Repper, 2000), those who are in poor quality jobs characterised by insecurity, low marketability, and job strain have poorer and potentially pathogenic effects on mental health (Vezina et. al., 2004; Leach et. al., 2010). The psychological health of a worker is something that exists inside and outside of a workspace, but which has the potential to be a determining factor in performance at the coalface. A worker’s workspace is thus not merely physical, and to limit the discussion of safety interventions at the workspace to physical, practical, or ergonomic changes is to miss the forest for the trees. Workspaces are points at which workers engage with their duties of work where that work exists within a broader arrangement of occupational and organisational tasks. The worker thus facilitates the transformation of material, information, or other assets such that the outputs of their work are passed on down the chain of production to the next worker who runs the next process. The workspace is therefore not restricted to the space in which the work is done, the time taken to do work, or the cognitive engagement needed to do that task. The workspace engages all of these things as well as the totality of the worker, all of which must be balanced in productive output to facilitate the doing of the work without imposing an unsustainable cost upon the worker. 

There are as many different kinds of work as there are human needs to be fulfilled. Some of these needs are essential - the need for food, shelter, clothing, and safety. Other needs have evolved as a consequence of the complexity of our society, like the need to put fuel in our cars and renew our passports, the need to buy and maintain telecommunication devices like phones and computers, and the need to engage in training and self-development. Still more needs arise from the human desire for novelty - we crave entertainment, engagement, stimulation and catharsis from art, television, music, and film. All of those needs that a human experiences are fulfilled by an ecosystem of work that in turn requires people. Work is the thing that transforms human physical, cognitive, and emotional capacity into the needs-fulfilling goods, services, and experiences that allow receiving-end humans to live comfortable and fulfilled lives. However, just as those recipients of those goods require physical, mental, and emotional fulfilment to enrich their lives, so too do those who make those goods and commodities. Workers employ the same capacities that make us human in the doing of work that supports humanity. Work and labour are processes that transform human capacity into generalisable outputs that may be sold, inhabited, or enjoyed. Protecting workers at their workspaces and considering the effect of their demands of work on those workers is necessary to protect not only their participation at work, but their health, wellbeing, and dignity as individuals, because the worker is both giver and recipient in the social exchange.

None of this information constitutes medical, legal, occupational health and safety, best guidance, standard, or other guidance, instruction, or prescription. 

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