Seating and Storage Details Employers Can’t Afford to Overlook – Daily Business

Hybrid working is now a fixture for many Scottish employers. Teams split their week between the office and home, desks are shared, and the old model of one person, one desk, one chair is fading fast. That flexibility has plenty of benefits, but it also raises practical questions that are easy to miss until staff start raising them.

Comfort is one of the biggest. When employees spend long hours at a workstation that doesn’t suit them, the effects tend to appear gradually: more breaks, lower concentration, aches and strains, and in some cases, extra time off. None of that shows up as a neat line in the accounts, but over a year and across a team, the cost can be considerable.

Start with the seat

Of all the elements of a workstation, seating has the most direct effect on how people feel at the end of the day. Standard chairs are generally specified with cost in mind rather than long periods of sitting. The alternative is a set of ergonomic office chairs, which are designed specifically to support the spine and reduce strain. They tend to share a handful of features:

• Adjustable seat height, so feet can rest flat on the floor
• Lumbar support shaped to the lower back
• Adjustable armrests to reduce strain on the shoulders and neck
• Adjustable seat depth to suit different body types
• Breathable materials for comfort over a full working day

For firms with shared desks, adjustability matters even more. A chair that suits one person for a morning may be wrong for the next person in the afternoon, so controls need to be simple enough to use in a few seconds without a manual.

Know your obligations

Employers have legal duties here as well as practical ones. Under the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992, employers must assess the workstations of staff who use screens as a significant part of their normal work, and act on the risks identified. The Health and Safety Executive publishes guidance on this, and it applies to people working at home as well as those in the office.

In practice, that means a one-off assessment isn’t enough. Hybrid arrangements change how and where people work, so assessments need to be reviewed when circumstances change, such as a new role, a change in working pattern or a reported problem.

Don’t forget storage

Seating tends to get the attention, but storage is the other half of the picture. In a hot-desking environment, staff have nowhere to leave belongings, and that leads to bags under desks, coats over chairs and clutter on shared surfaces. It also creates security worries, because laptops, documents and personal items are being carried around or left unattended.

One simple answer is to provide lockers. Giving each employee a secure space for their belongings means they can arrive, store their things and settle at any available desk, while the workspace stays tidier and easier to clean. For firms with confidential paperwork or valuable equipment, secure storage also supports good information security practice.

Practical questions to ask

If you’re reviewing your own workspace, a few questions can help to focus the exercise:

• Have staff been asked about comfort and any aches or strains linked to their workstation?
• Are the chairs adjustable, and do people know how to adjust them?
• Do home workers have access to the same guidance and support as office-based staff?
• Is there somewhere secure for staff to leave belongings when they don’t have a fixed desk?
• When were workstation assessments last reviewed?

Think about the age of your workforce

Many organisations now have employees who plan to work well into later life, whether by choice or necessity. Joint stiffness, reduced flexibility and slower recovery from physical strain become more common with age, and furniture that doesn’t accommodate those changes can affect comfort and performance.

That points to a wider lesson. Furniture isn’t a uniform, one-size-fits-all purchase. It needs to serve a workforce with a broad range of ages, body types and physical needs, which is one reason adjustability is worth prioritising.

Training is the often-forgotten ingredient. A well-designed chair does little good if nobody knows how to set it up, so a short walkthrough at induction, or a laminated guide at each desk, can make a real difference.

Phase the spend

Few businesses can replace everything at once, and they don’t need to. A sensible approach is to start with the highest-use workstations, or with staff who’ve already reported discomfort, and phase the rest over time. Seating is often the most cost-effective place to begin, since it can deliver noticeable comfort improvements without a wider redesign of the office.

It’s worth involving staff in the process, too. People who’ve had a say in how their workspace is set up are more likely to use it properly, and they’ll tell you quickly what’s working and what isn’t.

The bottom line

The shift to hybrid working has made the workspace a more flexible but also more complicated environment to manage. Comfort and storage may look like small details, but they affect concentration, wellbeing and retention, particularly as workforces become more varied in age and working patterns.

The key thing is to treat them as part of the business case rather than an afterthought. Review your workstations, listen to your staff and make the practical changes that keep people comfortable, secure and productive wherever they happen to be working that day.