Standing Up to Back Pain and Low Productivity

29 Oct 2013

There seems to be a lot of talk at the minute about the benefits of employee focused office design, including partitioning areas for quiet reflection and even play, on top of ensuring that people have office equipment that will not only not injure people, but that may actually have health benefits. I’m thinking specifically of the rise of the standing desk (pun intended).

Standing desks seem to be the current hot ticket in the field of ergonomics. Twenty years ago, people were talking about chairs with lumbar support and ten years ago the focus was on keyboards that prevented carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, it’s all about standing desks.

Standing for at least three hours a day, according to a recent BBC programme and article, is meant to be good for your health. It apparently helps with lower back pain and can even improve your body’s glucose processing. Michael Mosley, tv-health-guru-extraordinaire, reports that a recent study found that standing for three hours every day provides the same calorie burning over the year as running 10 marathons!

People who have tested standing desks have reported that, once they had gotten used to it (and their feet stopped hurting), they quite enjoyed the experience. The goal, of course, of all of these types of ergonomic pieces of office equipment and people-focused office design is to ensure that workers are as happy and healthy as they can be, so that they are, in turn, as productive as they can be.

While a CRM system isn’t really a piece of ergonomic equipment, there are similarities in the reasons behind and the actual process of the adoption of such a system. When a company decides that they need a CRM system, the goal that we usually hear is, first to get organised, but a close second is that they feel that, if they were more organised, they could be more productive.

The actual implementation process, like that of a standing desk, comes with a period of adjustment. When you first adopt a standing desk, your back, legs, and feet need to get used to this new level of work. Similarly, when you first implement a new CRM system, you have to get used to a new kind of working process.

Where before you might have called up a Sales Order template from a specific folder on a server, typed in contact and order information, printed it, and posted it off, you can do this same process with a serious of clicks within your new system. But, until you get used it, you might feel lost or a bit out-of-depth because it isn’t what you’re used to.

The adjustment period can be difficult, but just like a standing desk, once you become accustomed to it, people generally find that they are more productive and don’t really miss the old way of doing things.