Purchasing budget office chairs for your organisation can be a costly mistake. Your staff sit for up to eight hours a day, five days a week. Incorrect office chairs are becoming the single largest factor in causing harm to employees’ health and productivity in today’s office environments.
Choosing the correct chairs for your department or organisation is essential, so here are a few things to consider:
Firstly, everyone in the office needs to have a chair. So really, you should not look at the overall expense of the chair but rather the difference in cost between the budget chair and the correct ergonomic chair for your staff.
For example, if the inferior chair is $250 and the correct ergonomic chair is $450, it is just the difference of $200 that needs to be considered. It is then helpful to see that if you take that difference of $200 and divide it over the healthy lifespan of the chair (which should be at least 5 years), the cost difference is a mere $40 a year. This is less than the cost of one visit to the chiropractor, let alone personal pain, discomfort and ‘downtime’ for a worker.
$40 a year is $0.76 cents a week, or $0.15 cents a day. This means that you can have the right ergonomic chair for your staff for 15 cents a day! From a productivity point of view, a staff member only has to produce one minutes worth of work extra a day, to more than outweigh initial cost. It is long proven that when people feel better they work better, and a happy office environment is a powerful lever for any organisation. Furthermore, the superior chair will have a longer guarantee (and lifespan) than the inferior chair. So over time, it is almost always more cost effective to purchase the correct ergonomic chair in the first place.
