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Ergonomics
involves how people interact with their physical working environment, including factors like temperature, lighting, and noise. These environmental conditions impact job performance. Extreme conditions—whether too hot, cold, bright, dark, noisy, or silent—can affect how tasks are carried out. Occupational health and safety legislation often regulates these environmental factors, making it important to understand ergonomics to ensure compliance with these guidelines.
Working temperature
Predicting individual reactions to working temperature is complex due to personal variations and factors like humidity and air movement.
- Lighter work requires higher temperatures, while heavier work needs lower temperatures.
- Performance on vigilance tasks declines above 29°C, and for light manual tasks, it's slightly lower.
- Accident risk increases when temperatures are outside the comfortable range for the task.
Illumination levels
• The intensity of lighting needed for satisfactory job performance varies depending on the nature of the job.
• Jobs like surgery, which involve delicate and precise movements, require high levels of illumination.
Noise levels
Excessive Noise Levels:
- Noise-induced hearing loss is a well-known consequence of working environments that exceed safe noise limits.
- Recommended maximum noise level over a working day is 90 decibels in the UK.
- The decibel unit of noise is logarithmic, with noise intensity doubling every 3 dB.
2. Effects on Work Performance:
- High levels of noise, including intermittent and high-frequency noise, can impact work performance on tasks requiring attention and judgment.
Ergonomics in the office
- Workstation design: Factors like chair height, desk height, keyboard placement, and monitor position are crucial to ensuring comfortable and safe working postures. - Work organization: Planning work times, incorporating breaks, and encouraging changes in activity are essential for preventing repetitive strain injuries and promoting overall well-being.
- Training and information: Employees should be educated about ergonomic principles and how to adjust their workstations and work habits for optimal comfort and safety.
Allocate work times
Estimating work times is crucial for operations management, facilitating task allocation, scheduling, staffing, capacity assessment, and labor costing. This challenging process, called "work time allocation," is influenced by factors such as skill and environment.
Work measurement determines how long a qualified worker takes to complete a specific job at a set performance level. A qualified worker adheres to safety and quality standards, while standard performance indicates the typical output of motivated workers. Despite its difficulties, structured work measurement provides a useful framework for evaluating and comparing different types of work.
Work measurement techniques involve more than just using a stopwatch for time study. Other techniques include:
• Synthesis from elemental data, which builds up the time for a job by totaling element times from previous studies.
• Predetermined motion-time systems (PMTS), which use established times for basic human motions to calculate job times.
• Analytical estimating, which estimates the time required for job elements based on knowledge and experience.
• Activity sampling, a technique involving numerous instantaneous observations to measure the
