Got a back-up plan?

When 26-year-old Akhil Kapadia joined his firm as senior architect, he found his new colleagues amiable, the canteen food tolerable, and the journey from home to work, well, unavoidable.

But every morning, nursing an aching back, he would arrive at work to confront his worst nightmare: A chair hostile to his back. “It took me months of trying out various configurations of the seat height and the backrest angle before I finally chanced upon the most comfortable chair position.”

The whole ordeal has been enough for Kapadia to behave in a way many of us would find familiar. “Letting somebody else sit in my chair is out of the question and I would glare at anyone who would even suggest such a thing.”   

Kapadia’s oddly possessive relationship with his chair would strike one as funny if it weren’t for some facts. “Over 50% of employees get injured within a year of starting their first computer-dependent job,” informs Dr Deepak Sharan, orthopedic consultant and medical director of RECOUP, a centre which specialises in repetitive strain injury (RSI), the most common outcome of sitting long hours in a faulty chair, among other things.

In a survey conducted with over 35,000 Indian computer professionals last year, the centre found that over 75% reported musculoskeletal symptoms related to work and the average age of injury was 27.                                        

Mumbai-based Vector Projects, which designs complete interiors for corporate offices, partners with vendors in Dubai and Malaysia who manufacture only BIFMA-compliant chairs, an international standard for evaluating the safety, durability and structural adequacy of workplace furniture.

Umesh Rao, CEO, Vector Projects reveals, “In India, very few manufacturers abide by safety guidelines for chairs. It is mostly a disorganised industry, so one can’t be sure if processes are followed and quality is assured.” 

In smaller companies, where ergonomic ideals tend to be sacrificed for what can be sourced cheap and in bulk — with a slight exception made for executive and conference room seating — most employees find themselves in painful positions.

After nearly a year of filing repeated complaints with the office admin department about the uncomfortable seating in their office, the employees of an environmental protection agency in Mumbai recently managed to send a requisition to the company’s Delhi headquarters, asking for funds to replace their chairs. “The chair doesn’t have good lower back support,” grumbles Ramya Nair*, a 25-year-old consultant who works there.

Yet, experts also aver that employee complaints about office chairs can sometimes be unfounded. Corporate offices of MNCs that take pride in designing superior ergonomic workplaces don’t take too kindly to employees who attempt to blame their bad backs on their office chairs.

Dr Ashish Mishra, health director for Dow India says, “Often, when an employee suffers a backache, she demands that the chair be replaced. But a lot has to do with posture — not aligning the keyboard level with the chair’s hand rests, not taking appropriate breaks — all contribute to a bad back.”

To counter this, Dow India has put in place a comprehensive ergonomics programme whereby employees have to undertake periodic self-assessments to check their seating posture through pictorial charts.       

Then again, there can be unexpected positive effects of bad office seating on employee morale. Says Nair about the sense of victory in the air when the requisition was finally sent, “Having our demands heard turned out to be a great way for me and my teammates to bond.”

For others, like 28-year-old Hardik Desai, aspiring filmmaker and a self-described corporate lackey, a chair symbolises more than potential danger to one’s spinal health. “It just reminds me of my regimented life, making me feel chained to my job,” he rues. Unfortunately, there isn’t yet an ergonomic solution for that.    *Name changed on request