5 signs your office needs an ergonomic audit
Musculoskeletal discomfort rarely arrives as a single complaint, it builds slowly, and most workplaces don't notice until it's already affecting people day to day. Here's what to look out for.
People are already fixing their own setup
Look around a typical open-plan floor and you'll usually find a few homemade solutions: a stack of reference books under a monitor, a rolled-up jumper for lower back support, a keyboard pushed back at an odd angle to reach a screen that's too far away.
These small adjustments are a signal, not a nuisance. They mean people have identified a problem with their setup and solved it themselves, because nobody offered a proper fix. If you're seeing this on more than one or two desks, it's worth treating as an early warning rather than individual quirks.
End-of-day fatigue is becoming the norm
Occasional tiredness is normal. A pattern of headaches, neck stiffness or eye strain that several people mention independently, especially by mid-afternoon, usually points to something structural, screen height, chair support, or desk layout, rather than simply a busy week.
It's worth asking the question directly in a one-to-one or a quick survey, rather than waiting for it to surface as a formal complaint.
Furniture hasn't changed since attendance patterns did
Many offices are now used differently to how they were before hybrid working became common: more hot-desking, more days with partial occupancy, more people sharing a smaller number of desks across a week. If the furniture and layout haven't been reviewed since then, it's often still set up for a way of working that no longer applies.
A desk that suited one person permanently doesn't necessarily suit several different people using it on different days, unless it's genuinely easy to adjust.
You've had a DSE-related complaint, or a near-miss
Under the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations, employers have a duty to assess workstations and act on the findings. A single complaint about back or wrist pain linked to someone's desk setup is usually a sign that others have the same issue but haven't said anything yet.
Treating one complaint as an isolated case, rather than a prompt to look more broadly, is one of the most common ways smaller problems turn into bigger ones.
Chairs are older than their intended lifecycle, or their adjustability isn't being used
A chair with height, tilt and lumbar adjustment only helps if people know it's there and know how to use it. In practice, a lot of adjustable seating ends up used in one fixed position for years, which defeats the purpose of specifying it in the first place.
If your chairs are past the manufacturer's recommended working life, or nobody can remember the last time someone showed staff how to adjust them properly, that's usually enough reason on its own to take a closer look.
What an ergonomic audit actually involves
A proper DSE workplace assessment is a face-to-face review of how people are actually using their workstations, not just what furniture is in the room. It looks at chair and desk height, screen position and distance, keyboard and mouse placement, and how the space is used across a working day.
The outcome isn't always new furniture. Sometimes it's a five-minute adjustment to an existing chair; sometimes it's a monitor arm or footrest; sometimes it does mean replacing seating that's reached the end of its useful life. The point of an audit is to find out which, rather than guessing.
