Creating a Better Home Office with Humanscale

Nicholas Boever:

Johnathan, I’d like to thank you for joining us today. Before we get into things, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick?

Johnathan Puleio:

Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Johnathan Puleio. I work for a company called Humanscale. They’re an ergonomics company. I’ve been there for about 19 years and my background is in ergonomics. Our specialty there, I support the consulting side of their business, and what we specialize in is the development and implementation of corporate ergonomics programs.

Nicholas Boever:

Let’s talk about the home office, or even maybe the lack thereof. Have you guys done any research into seeing what the spread of home offices are among people who work from home?

Johnathan Puleio:

Could you just clarify what you mean by “spread”?

Nicholas Boever:

Just how many people have developed home offices, or even invested in a home office since starting to work from home?

Johnathan Puleio:

Sure. Well, we specifically haven’t done research on this, but there’s a ton of information available, and what we know is that since the pandemic, more than 85 million Americans have been working from home. That’s well over 50% of the US workforce, so it’s fairly prevalent, and continues today. Even as we arguably come out of the pandemic, home working is incredibly prevalent.

Nicholas Boever:

I guess the question after that then is, do you think remote work is going to let up, or is it here to stay?

Johnathan Puleio:

I believe very strongly it’s here to stay. There are far too many benefits for the employee and there are also a host of benefits for the employer. I think most companies will adopt a flex work environment with some type of a balance between home and office. I think that’s just the reality. We have to come to terms with that. The majority of industries will favor a flexible model.

Nicholas Boever:

Now, for those flex workers, do you think that having a dedicated home office set up is still very necessary for them, even if, I mean, say bare minimum, they’re going to be working from their house once a day once out of the entire week, do you think a home office setup would still be beneficial for them in that situation?

Johnathan Puleio:

Yeah, I do. We define an intensive computer user as just four hours of computer use per day, so even if you were only using a homework environment for eight hours the entire week, that would still present enough risk from a health and safety standpoint where we would absolutely recommend looking at the design of that space.

Nicholas Boever:

Hmm. I think before we launch too deeply into it, we should probably talk about ergonomics briefly, and how that can impact people’s comforts when working in that space ’cause you just mentioning that four hours is enough to trigger some of those issues that they have, I think it’s important to bring people up to speed on that.

Johnathan Puleio:

Sure. Well, in its most purest or basic form, ergonomics is all about fitting the environment to the worker. We don’t typically don’t do a very good job of that in the built environment, or at home, for that matter. In most instances, what we have are environments where the worker is conforming their body to the work. That’s very, very different than the practice of ergonomics, which is a design-based discipline where we’re looking at opportunities to redesign the built environment to better fit the human operator, or the worker, and so it’s all about design, it’s all about fit, it’s all about bringing the body to a neutral posture. Does that cover ergonomics well enough or …?

Nicholas Boever:

Yeah, yeah, that definitely does. It definitely helps out a lot, especially when considering these spaces. I guess I’m curious, how do the standing desk play into that idea of ergonomics, or are those kind of a separate design principle entirely?

Johnathan Puleio:

Well, there’s a tremendous amount of research now on the benefits of integrating movement and varying your posture throughout the course of the day. Static muscle contractions lead to discomfort. Discomfort is what leads to pain and subsequent injury if prolonged. Standing is a strategy in ergonomics for keeping the body healthy. There’s a lot of confusion over standing and certainly a misconception that you should switch from sitting all day to standing all day. Arguably, standing all day is just as unhealthy as sitting all day. Just ask anyone that stands for a living, if you ask them what’s one way that they’d like to change their job, the first thing they’ll tell you is they’d love an opportunity to sit down. It turns out there’s a sweet spot with respect to standing. If we can figure out a way to stand for about 15 minutes an hour, we can achieve the health benefits without seeing any detriment from a standed position.

Nicholas Boever:

Talking about from the perspective of somebody who is helping design a home office, how much of this lies in trying to educate their client on how to use whatever design choices they’re implementing in these spaces?

Johnathan Puleio:

It’s an incredibly important component of the entire equation, actually. You could have the best tools that were ever designed, if you’re not aware of how to benefit from those tools or you’re not positioning those tools properly to fit your body, you could actually make an argument the tools could create a problem, so it’s incredibly important, and that’s why not only is it important to educate and communicate these principles, it’s also important when you’re designing a system or designing a product, the product is incredibly intuitive and easy to use. There’s a few aspects to that.

Nicholas Boever:

I guess we can probably pivot into the products themselves talking about what can contribute to a better home office because going back to what we were talking about on the research end of it earlier, there was this survey by CraftJack, which is this tradesman or contractor sourcing site that was doing a survey on the home office, and it said that 91% of homeowners made purchases related to the home office since the pandemic started, and this was varying between big purchases and small purchases. I think the average money spent was around $200 in these cases, so they were very kind of DIY, sort of small purchases, but it also stated that out of those people, 74% were still experiencing discomfort after their purchases, so there seems to be a clear disconnect for one in what is actually needed for a home office, but there’s also an opportunity to help fix that.

Johnathan Puleio:

Positively. That’s very important research because it puts a spotlight on the problem. The average home worker has a very, very good understanding of what hurts and what’s uncomfortable. They do not have a particularly good understanding of how to fix the problems, and so when you’re in an environment where you’re just out shopping, you can succumb very easily to marketing strategies and pressures and claims that really have no rooting in ergonomics research, so there is a major disconnect. Where the disconnect stems from is this perception, at least what we’ve seen in our experience is the perception is that the chair is the end all, be all solution in the home. In other words, focus 100% on the chair and your problems will go away. The system is much more complex, there’s many other components that need to be addressed, and so when an employee only focuses on the chair or they only focus on, let’s say, a height-adjustable work surface without really fine-tuning that system, there’s a very good likelihood that they’re going to continue to experience discomfort.

Nicholas Boever:

Would you say that space also factors into this? Because I know in terms of a home office, what a home office means for a lot of people can be a variety of different things. For some people, it’s this space set aside in a sunroom, for some people it’s a actual dedicated home office workspace in its own separate room. How does a space play into that as well?

Johnathan Puleio:

Well, it’s critically important, and particularly, I mean, think about the millions of workers in New York City and those workers that maybe have multiple roommates working out of New York in small apartments. There’s no way feasible for them to have three or four desks in a common room. They’re forced to work out of their bedrooms, and in many instances, the bedroom is the size of the bed itself, so the idea of even having a dedicated desk is thrown out the window. Many home workers have had to get incredibly creative with respect to their setups, and as a result, they’ve put themselves in some fairly risky postures throughout the pandemic, and it continues to be a problem.

When the pandemic began, we had no idea how long-term or temporary this was going to be, and so many workers just made do. But interestingly, what the research suggests is that since the pandemic, over 40% of those working from home have increased musculoskeletal symptoms, and that makes perfect sense, given the inadequacy of the home work environments that we’ve seen, so I’d argue that the space is incredibly important. It’s not that you need a huge footprint. It’s not like you need a 10-by-10 dedicated office, but the idea of having a work surface and some level of controllability and adjustability in that space is incredibly important.

Nicholas Boever:

Yeah, that was the other thing that I was going to ask to where setting up a home office in limited space was where I was going with that, being able to, I guess, I keep on wanting to call it “be ergonomic with your office design,” but it is be space-conscious with your office design for designers, being able to figure out how to make the most of the space that you’re in, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

Johnathan Puleio:

Yeah, no, understood. Really, from an ergonomic standpoint, the most valuable real estate to the user from a health-and-wellness standpoint is described by the sweep of the forearms, so you don’t need a terribly large work surface to work in a neutral posture or ergonomically correct. We’ve seen perfectly adequate setups on 24-inch-deep work surfaces that are not even 48 inches wide. I mean, you can probably get away with a little bit less. I don’t know how common those are, but arguably, a 30-inch-wide work surface would be just fine provided you had some adjustability and control over the components, what’s attached to that work surface.

Nicholas Boever:

Hmm. I guess diving deep down into it, because we’re talking a lot about the home office setup and all of these different home office setups, I think the safest way to say is that when it comes down to being able to design a home office, a holistic approach is really necessitated in this case where you need to figure out the space that you’re working with, and most importantly, just the user that you are working with. I think that boils down to one of the other questions that I had for you, which was, how do behavior and habits really pull into this at the end of the day? Because we mentioned that the average consumer doesn’t really know too much about ergonomics in a lot of cases. I mean, even I myself only recently found out how I should be properly using a standing desk after having one in my own office space in a commercial office for a while now.

Johnathan Puleio:

Yeah, really good insight and the behavioral component is paramount to the success of any of these things, and it’s very linked to the educational component that we spoke about earlier.

Let me just give you an example. Let’s say you’ve been working for the last 20 years in a work environment where your keyboard and mouse were positioned on the desk and for the last 20 years, you tended to sit very high in your chair because the desk was high and you leaned forward into your work and shrugged your shoulders and bent your wrists back and anchored your wrists on the work surface. That’s really hard to undo through equipment alone because that’s a habit that’s formed and this user, when I say “user,” the employee, the remote worker may not even be aware that posture is harmful, right, so the way we tackle it is through education. We provide our clients with information on how to achieve a neutral posture, what a neutral posture actually is, and then we’re very, very transparent that the equipment is these represent tools to help you achieve a neutral posture, but that neutral posture will never be achieved unless those habits are broken.

One of the examples or analogies that we use to communicate this point is we ask people to think about the posture that they assume when they’re relaxing at home. Let’s say they’re on a couch or a sofa watching television. You’re much more likely to use that space by having contact with the backrest of the couch, you would tend to have your shoulders very low, right? Your shoulders relaxed, your hands in your lap, your wrists straight, and you’d be transferring a percentage of your body weight to the backrest.

Now, think about how we sit the moment we come to work, or that the moment we start using a computer at home. Immediately, we shrug our shoulders, we lean forward, we start bending our wrists. We change our elbow position, our elbows come forward. No one would ever consider that to be a neutral or healthy posture yet. That’s how we interface with technology. We can’t really blame that on the employee, that’s a function of design, so when we change those variables, and we say, well, let’s set you up with a set of internal, external input devices. Let’s give you a keyboard and a mouse. Let’s get your work surface at an appropriate height. For most people, that means lowering it so that the keyboard and mouse are basically at elbow height, right? Most people aren’t used to using a work surface like that.

But then again, you think about it, where would you put the laptop? A laptop presents a fairly comfortable typing position. It’s only because the monitor is so low that it becomes a challenging long-term position, so we give people control over their hands and wrists and their input devices, give people control over their monitor position so that the top line of text is at or slightly below their seated eye height, provide them with an external source of task lighting so they can illuminate their work properly based on their age, based on their tasks, and then figure out a way to bring their tools close enough to their bodies so that they can use the backrest of their chair. The moment that happens and that home worker is able to utilize the backrest of the chair, straighten their wrists, bring their tools close, just solved probably six out of the eight major postural problems, but we haven’t solved it until we change the users’ behavior.

Nicholas Boever:

Hmm. Now, would you say, just going into the idea behind a home office versus commercial office setup, are aside from different behaviors, obviously that come from working in a commercial space versus working at home, are there any other major differences that people should be considering when it comes to the products for these spaces?

Johnathan Puleio:

The difference in commercial versus of consumer-grade products as it relates to ergonomics are really night and day. It’s not only from a standpoint of material usage, the quality of the products, the longevity of the products, it’s also the research and development that goes into designing the products. There’s just so much more attention that goes into products that are designed to be used for eight hours a day as compared to more of a consumer-grade product, which is often… I mean, probably the largest difference I’ve probably seen in things like seating. If you look at the difference between even the cushion design, the recline mechanisms, the way that the backrest articulates on a commercially designed chair versus a residential chair, completely different as far as not just the articulation, but how the body posture changes as the user moves in the chair. Those are fairly invisible to most consumers and it would to really take a curious, motivated consumer to learn about some of these things, but there’s a tremendous difference.

Nicholas Boever:

Now, with the way these things are set up, are these more? You mentioned invisible, so I’m assuming they’re fairly intuitive, or they operate in the background, and there’s no extra education required to know how to use them, or how to use them effectively?

Johnathan Puleio:

Yeah, a good example would be on a traditional consumer-grade chair to operate the recline mechanism, you would first have to unlock the backrest, so now, the user has to know that the backrest is locked and can be unlocked. If you’ve already reached a barrier, there’s a certain percentage of the population that doesn’t get past that step.

Then the next step is you’d have to know that the chair’s backrest tension was also adjustable. That’s the knob that’s under most chairs, it’s kind of hidden towards the back of the cylinder, and now, the user has to not only understand that the tension is adjustable, but then which direction do they spin the knob, and then how do they know when to stop? How do they know when there’s enough tension? For that system to work well, you’re relying on the user to have a pretty good handle on what it is to sit in a chair properly. Now, all of this information is readily accessible, it’s just, most folks are not inquisitive enough to go out and obtain this information, unfortunately.

Fast forward to a commercial chair. Many chairs today have what are called “self-adjusting recline mechanisms.” What this means is that the backrest tension of the chair is determined by the user’s body weight, so the more the user weighs, the more tension the chair provides, and it’s essentially an automatic adjustment regardless of the user’s body weight. Well, what we’ve done in designing a chair this way is we’ve eliminated the barriers that were in place to benefit from a properly designed recline mechanism. The user no longer has to be aware of how to unlock and tension, the backrest, all they have to do is worry about sitting in the chair and getting to work. There’s other examples, but that’s one of the more powerful ones and I guess easier ones to articulate.

Nicholas Boever:

Right. Switching tracks a little bit, I wanted to talk about cost when it comes to setting up a home office. Related to what I mentioned earlier, where in that study that I was talking about, the average expenditure was about $200, say, which is obviously, having sourced some home office products myself, is very minute in the grand scale of things. I feel as though in just about every single situation, cost winds up being the major limiting factor in a lot of people making a full upgrade because the equipment can really add up quickly in terms of costs, so I was curious, are there any avenues a designer or even the client themselves can be able to help with mitigating this so that more people can make that upgrade into a better home office?

Johnathan Puleio:

Right. Well, there’s definitely components that we’d recommend focusing on. There are certain components that will add more postural benefit to the user than others. There’s a category of need to have versus nice to have and there’s sort of a hierarchy of those tools. That being said, this really needs to be looked at as an investment in one’s health, the same reason why you probably would not opt to sleep on a $100 or $200 mattress. We seemed to have gotten through that conversation as a population about the importance of sleep, the importance of supporting your body when you’re sleeping. If you think about it, most people use their workstations significantly longer than they use their mattresses, and we make investments in those areas.

It’s one of those areas where there is an investment, however, that initial investment does not have to be thousands and thousands of dollars to see a benefit. It also really depends on what we’re starting with and what the company has that homework has supplied. A lot of companies now have programs in place where they’re offering reimbursements for some basic tools like external monitors or wireless input devices. Some companies are even supporting their employees with respect to seating. They may not cover the full value of the chair, but they’re offering stipends to cover a good portion of it, and then it’s on the onus of the employee to decide if they want to add to that.

Really, one of the more expensive things is the work surface and whether or not that work surface is height-adjustable or not. I mean, that can be a big ticket item as well as the chair, of course, but there are ways to reduce costs and there are ways to focus on postural improvement, in some instances, without even buying anything. I mean, as an example, although it might not meet your aesthetic requirements, a box actually functions fairly well as a footrest in some instances, so really, it depends on what the employee is looking to achieve and what their aesthetic requirements are.

Nicholas Boever:

Right. I guess closing out this conversation that we’ve been having, for designers or even home builders that are looking to understand more about ergonomics and home office design, are there any resources that you can point them to on the matter?

Johnathan Puleio:

Yes, absolutely. In fact, Humanscale just launched a residential designer trade program and there’s an application process. It’s for certified interior designers. By applying to the program, they qualify for additional discounting for their clients, and there’s a whole host of educational resources and design tools that are available through that program and there’s actually even a consultative side where the designers can basically work with Humanscale representatives to figure out the best match and the best fit for their client, regardless of what their budget might be. We’re also in the practice of doing regular educational webinars. In fact, we had one just yesterday for residential designers trying to help raise awareness of the importance of this topic and giving them the tools they need to be successful in this space.

Nicholas Boever:

Very impressive.

Johnathan Puleio:

The company’s really invested quite a bit. It’s been a nice thing to be a part of, so I appreciate you saying that.

Nicholas Boever:

Yeah, no, really glad to get a chance to talk to you on the matter as well because I feel as though this is definitely from my, just from my general kind of look-see into the market, let’s say, that this is something that is going to be more prevalent going on, and even from my own experience being a remote worker, or I guess I should say hybrid remote worker, there has been a learning curve when it comes to doing a lot of this just from doing a lot of research on ergonomics myself, trying to figure out how to set up my office spaces, especially given when I first started working from home during the pandemic, I was, as you said, positioned in an apartment with a bunch of other roommates and putting all of our desks in the living space wasn’t really the best option for us, so yeah, it’s definitely something that I think everybody should be more aware of moving forward.

Johnathan Puleio:

Absolutely. And one of the things I just wanted to offer up, we designed at the onset of the pandemic a really comprehensive tip sheet for home workers. Perhaps we could post a link to it. It’s on our website and it actually walks a remote worker through how to get perfectly set up at home in just a few steps, so that might be a good resource for your audience.

Nicholas Boever:

Hmm. Yeah, definitely. Well, it was great getting a chance to talk with you today. I’m really glad you could make the time for it.

Johnathan Puleio:

Happy to speak with you. Thank you very much.