This article was originally emailed as our monthly eBulletin at 11:30 on 13/11/2019. You can register here to receive them monthly.
TEN YEARS – 120 ISSUES – 62,481 WORDS
I am delighted to welcome you to our Tenth Anniversary issue. Throughout the last decade, this eBulletin has been our way of keeping you informed about industry events, research updates, new products, services and workplace trends. We have witnessed the introduction of new ways to communicate, including Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and webinars! We have seen the growth, first of Home Working and then of Agile Working, the recognition of the link between mental and physical health and the connection between workplace design and worker wellbeing. We have seen flat screens replace CRT monitors and laptops replace cumbersome desktop computers, closely followed by smartphones, tablets and universal Wi-Fi. It has been a rollercoaster!
Each edition has been published at the same appointed time and day each month. We thank you for your continued support, especially those loyal readers who have been with us from the start. We know that you are all bombarded with emails on a daily basis and we thank you for taking this time to read this newsletter rather than anything else. As always, we welcome feedback and I would love to hear from you directly. Email me with ideas for the future, compliments, criticisms, reminiscences or anything you would like to share in this context.
SCOTTISH HEALTH & WELLBEING CONFERENCE
As previously mentioned, I shall be speaking at this all-day event at The Scotsman on North Bridge in Edinburgh later this month. There are still places available so do register if you are based in Scotland and actively involved in promoting wellbeing in the workplace. Please let me know if you are attending so that we can catch up for a coffee in one of the breaks.
We are currently carrying out trials of a heated desktop. The design involves a thermostatically-controlled work surface that radiates infra-red heat to the user both above and below the desk. Running costs are one third of a 1kW heater and there is no risk of leaving it on overnight! It can be supplied on a sit-stand frame to offer maximum usage benefits and we see potential for those with Raynaud Syndrome, rheumatism or any individual who just feels the cold! Contact us for further information.
It is very likely that you have seen the recent publicity about ‘The Work Colleague of the Future’ – a report on the long-term health of office workers. If you have, you probably also saw Emma, the mannequin created to represent all the ailments of our current sedentary lifestyle. I have read the report and agree with much of its content. However, I am no biological anthropologist but it seems to me that there are some quite staggering assumptions made to extrapolate the mannequin’s appearance from the report findings – and the cycle of human evolution tends to be rather slower than 20 years! Could this be just a clever (but quite successful!) publicity stunt? What do you think? Join the discussion on LinkedIn!
By the time you read this, we shall probably have sent our 10,000th tweet. When Twitter first appeared, I thought it was a broadcast medium through which we could keep customers, prospects and friends informed about our activities. That all changed when we received our first enquiry tweet. I still remember that question vividly. It was ‘Which is better – trackball or ergonomic mouse?’ Try answering that comprehensively in 140 characters! We decided we couldn’t and responded with this blog.
Posted by Guy Osmond 
Osmond Ergonomics 