How physical workplace elements affect safety, productivity, and worker health

Physical Elements of the Workplace Environment

Among the most important areas of consideration within Human Resource Management is the nature of the physical working environment. At the operational level, the layout and other aspects of the physical environment can either support and facilitate the business goals and productivity of the organization or, in the alternative, they can fail to support productivity and actually interfere with the organizational mission and the fulfillment of its fundamental operational objectives.

From the perspective of human welfare, the elements of the physical work environment can directly influence attitudes about work and about the organization; they can also determine whether a workplace provides the safest possible environment for employees. In that regard, different specific physical elements of the workplace environment can determine the relative risk to human health and welfare in the short-term in relation to acute injuries or in the long-term, such as in connection with factors that influence the development of chronic injuries among workers. Some of the most important physical elements of the modern work environment include those that relate to public safety and fire codes, those that correspond to the relative risk of on-site, physical injury to personnel, and those that may contribute to the long-term development of chronic injures such as those typically associated with ergonomic issues and fatigue.

The first category of physical environment elements, public safety and fire codes, is essential because it determines the extent to which employees (and others) are unnecessarily at risk in the event of serious emergencies, such as those requiring immediate evacuation of the premises. The failure to properly manage exits, emergency routes, and exits in the workplace can result in tremendous preventable tragedy in the form of loss of life and limb in the event of emergencies in the workplace.

The second category of elements in the physical workplace environment includes those that might either contribute to maximum safety or maximum risk of physical injury in the workplace. Seemingly mundane elements such as the physical arrangement of furniture, choices of materials for carpeting and flooring, and the physical relationship between fixed objects and passage ways can be tremendously important to workplace safety. Is respect, Human Resource personnel must share a thorough conceptual understanding of how the workplace functions and of patterns of behavior to enable them to design functional and safe workplace environments. The third category of elements in the physical workplace environment are those that are associated with potential risk of long-term chronic injuries, such as back and eye strain and neck, wrist, and hand injuries from prolonged periods working at a computer terminal.