Lawn chairs and kitchen tables: Ergonomics in the involuntary work-from-home era

Enlarge / This is your skeleton. This is your skeleton working from home. Any questions? (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

With offices shuttered around the world, many people are experiencing working from home for the first time-or experiencing it in much longer doses than they were used to. Many companies are planning to keep employees working remotely at least part of the time well into 2021. And some are considering making it permanent.

Countless people have had to improvise their work-at-home workspaces. But now that we're several months in, some of that improvisation may be wearing thin. And one of the things that often gets pushed to the back burner in all this improvisation is ergonomics. If you haven't worked from home regularly in the past, and you're now sitting at the kitchen table every day working from a corporate-issued laptop, you're probably feeling the physical strains of this never-going-to-be-normal reality.

As someone who has worked primarily from home for a quarter of a century, I've had a lot of time to figure out what does and does not work in a home office. The changes that have come with COVID-19-including having my wife and daughter in lockdown with me, both working from home themselves-have required some adjustments and some re-equipping. We needed our home workspaces to support the new world of work while maintaining comfort and a reasonable level of sanity mid-pandemic.

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