Office Ergonomics in Plain English: A Small Business Guide

Ergonomics means setting up the work to suit the person doing it, rather than expecting the person to adapt to whatever furniture happened to be in the room.

That's the whole idea. Everything else is detail.

It matters because of how the injuries happen, which is slowly and quietly, with nothing to report along the way.

The injury with no incident

There was no incident. No date, no first aid entry, nothing in the register. Just someone who started mentioning their shoulder. Then took a day here and there. Then a fortnight. Then lodged a claim for something that had been building for three years at a desk nobody ever looked at.

Musculoskeletal injuries don't happen, they accumulate. A screen sitting 100mm too low. A chair still set for someone who left in 2023. A laptop used all day on a desk with no separate keyboard, which forces either a bent neck or bent wrists and usually gets you both.

This is not a small or unusual category of injury. Body stressing accounts for more than a third of all serious workers compensation claims in Australia, around 50,300 in 2023 to 2024, and Safe Work Australia notes it's the most common cause of injury across every major occupation group. Not just the physical trades. Every one of them.

Yes, the rules cover desk work

Office based businesses often assume the manual handling rules are about lifting heavy things on a building site. They aren't.

A hazardous manual task is one requiring a person to lift, lower, push, pull, carry, move, hold or restrain something, where the task involves any of: repetitive or sustained force, high or sudden force, repetitive movement, sustained or awkward posture, or exposure to vibration.

Read the middle of that list again. Repetitive movement. Sustained or awkward posture. That's a description of a day at a keyboard.

The code of practice doesn't leave it to inference either. It names keyboard work as repetitive movement, sets out how high a keyboard should sit, and gives guidance on workstation adjustability and the need for workers to change posture rather than hold one all day.

Victoria runs a separate framework under its own OHS laws, but lands in the same place. WorkSafe Victoria's guidance uses "sitting at a cramped desk and typing for long periods at a time" as an example of hazardous manual handling. Different legislation, same conclusion.

So the honest position is this: if your business has people at desks, you have a hazard to manage, and it happens to be the most common source of serious claims in the country.

Why almost nobody deals with it

Every other hazard in your business has a trigger.

A worker trips on a cable, someone reports it, you tape the cable down. A tool fails, you take it out of service. The hazard announces itself, and the announcement is what starts the process.

Musculoskeletal risk has no announcement. No bang, no date, no near miss to write up. So it never enters your system, never gets reviewed, and the first formal record of the entire thing is a claim form arriving years later.

That's also why it's difficult to defend. When a claim lands and someone asks what you did about workstation setup, "nothing had happened, so we hadn't looked at it" is not a good answer. It's an accurate description of most small businesses, but it isn't a defence.

"People can adjust their own chair"

This is the most common objection, and there's something to it. Adults can operate a lever.

Two problems though.

Most people don't know what they're adjusting towards. They know the chair is uncomfortable. They don't know that the seat is too high, which is why they're perching forward, which is why their lower back has been complaining since March. Knowing something is wrong and knowing what right looks like are different things.

And people put up with it. Nobody wants to be the person making a fuss about furniture. So they adapt, quietly, for years, and adaptation in this context means holding an awkward posture until it stops feeling awkward. That's the exact mechanism that produces the injury.

Asking once, with a checklist in hand, cuts through both problems in about fifteen minutes.

What good actually looks like

You don't need a specialist for a basic check. You need a checklist and fifteen minutes per person.

• Screen. Top of the screen at or slightly below eye height, roughly an arm's length away, directly in front rather than off to one side.
  

• Chair. Back supported, particularly the lower back. Seat height set so the person's elbows sit at around 90 degrees at the keyboard.
  

• Feet. Flat on the floor, or on a footrest if the chair had to go up to get the elbows right.
  

• Keyboard and mouse. Directly in front, close enough that the elbows stay near the body rather than reaching forward or out to the side.
  

• Wrists. Straight and relaxed while typing, not bent up, down or sideways.
  

• Movement. Nobody should be holding one position all day. Standing up, changing tasks and moving around regularly matters as much as the setup does.

Write down what you found and what you changed. The record is half the point, because it's the only evidence that any of this was ever considered.

The laptop problem

If you check five desks, you'll almost certainly find at least one person running a laptop all day with no separate screen or keyboard.

A laptop puts the screen and the keyboard in a fixed relationship to each other. Get the screen to a sensible height and the keyboard is now too high. Get the keyboard right and the person is looking down at a bad angle for hours.

There's no setup that solves it, because the geometry doesn't allow one. The fix is a separate keyboard and mouse, or a laptop stand plus a separate keyboard. It's the cheapest problem on this list to solve and the most commonly ignored.

Working from home counts

If someone works from home two days a week, that's still your worker doing your work. Safe Work Australia is clear that WHS duties apply to work carried out at home.

You can't control someone's spare room the way you control your office, and the law doesn't ask you to. The duty is limited to what's reasonably practicable. But "we don't control their house" isn't an answer either, and what's reasonable starts with asking what their setup actually looks like. Plenty of people are working from a kitchen bench on a dining chair and have never mentioned it because nobody asked.

Ask, don't wait

Discomfort is the early warning system for this hazard, and it only surfaces if someone asks about it.

You want a sore wrist mentioned at six weeks rather than a shoulder problem at three years. That means making it normal to raise it, which means asking, regularly, and doing something visible when someone answers honestly.

Consulting workers on health and safety matters is a legal duty in its own right. This is one of the places where it stops being a compliance step and starts being the actual control.

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