Times are changing. Health is becoming substantially more of a consideration in the modern workplace. With sitting down for too long being linked with heart disease, office chairs being linked with back pain and staring at a computer for too long being linked with poor eyesight, employers are now more aware of employee health and safety. Health experts recommend that getting up from your seat and screen once every half an hour, for two minutes, can help prevent many of these negative health effects.
This means that organisations are investing a lot more money into good quality furniture, to reduce the number of staff that fall ill and resultantly decrease the number of sick days that employees are taking. Office chairs, in particular, have seen big changes due to this focus on health and safety, and we predict that they will continue to see changes in the coming years.
In the fourth and final part of our ‘The future of office furniture’ blog series, we take a look at some of the trends in office chairs that you can expect to see in the future.
Less sitting down
We keep on hearing the phrase ‘sitting is the new smoking’. Surely it can’t be that bad? Actually, research has found that prolonged sitting increases the risk of developing serious illnesses, including various types of cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. When sitting down, your brain starts to shut down, you become less alert, and you can’t complete tasks as efficiently as when standing. With the average Brit now spending 8.9 hours a day sitting down, this is becoming a serious problem.
The best solution to this is regularly standing up – height adjustable desks are becoming increasingly popular. Standing up instead of sitting down not only reduces these health risks, but also tones muscles, burns significantly more calories, improves productivity, and increases your metabolism. More employees are opting for adjustable standing desks, and other desks such as treadmill desks, in order to reap these benefits. In fact, some people are even building their own height adjustable desks.
You can download computer software that tells you when you need to move the height of your desk, and it even tells you how many calories you’ve burned! Standing desks were hugely popular at Orgatec 2016, due to the many proven benefits, and we expect this trend to spread to even more offices around the world in coming years.
If this isn't possible for you, then getting up every so often for a bit of fresh air or to make a cup of tea can help too!
Chair and desk combination
Over the years, desks have been gradually decreasing in size. Could the office chair of the future include its very own desk? This kind of chair-desk seems ideal for businesses in the digital and tech industries, as well as plenty of others, and could become the popular choice of office chair in the future.
This amazing office chair, from Altwork, shows exactly what we expect to see more of in the future. Although, with a price tag of $5,900 per chair, we expect employers to hold off until other manufacturers start offering similar models for a lower price!
Soft but supportive
As we mentioned earlier, the quality of chairs that employers are investing in is much higher than it was 20 years ago. We’re seeing more office chairs being designed with the purpose of providing comfort. Companies are investing in more office chairs that are soft, to improve employee comfort, and that also have a supportive back, to reduce the likeliness of health problems, such as back pain.
This method has worked particularly well in improving employee productivity, and reducing the number of sick days that employees have been taking. Back in 2008, UK employees were taking an average of 5 sick days a year, but by 2015, this figure had reduced to just 1.85 days a year. Of course this has not been directly linked to office chairs, but there is a correlation between the improvement in quality of office chairs and the number of sick days being taken.
As you can see, there's a lot to look forward to in the future of office chairs. With more supportive and comfortable chairs, height-adjustable desks and even chair-desks, we can't wait to see what the future of office furniture holds! Have you got any predictions for the future of office furniture? Let us know in the comments!
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