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Work-From-Home Risks: The Toll of Bad Ergonomics

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The early days of COVID-19 saw employees camped at home, using kitchen tables, beds, sofas and whatever else they could use as makeshift workstations. The compounding stress of prolonged sub-optimal work conditions in a residential environment is taking a significant toll on the workforce’s physical health and mental wellbeing.

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Unless organizations intervene to address this situation, the problem is likely going to snowball into a very expensive oversight.
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Ergonomics aims to increase efficiency and productivity, and reduce discomfort. If left uncorrected, however, an un-ergonomic desk-chair-monitor-keyboard combination can lead to numerous manifestations of so-called “sitting disease,” such as repetitive strain injuries (RSIs), fatigue, vision complications, metabolic syndrome (weight gain and diabetes), circulatory issues in the legs, and musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) like chronic back, neck and shoulder pains.

The appalling work-from-home conditions for millions of employees in the United States may also soon be a nightmare for HR when it faces massive payouts for occupational injuries and MSD complications. The productivity losses that will ensue may also impact organizational performance as a whole.

Minimizing Workstation-Related Health Risks During Quarantine

Here is a snapshot of typical company costs for treatment of MSD-related complaints, in terms of direct and indirect workers’ compensation. In some regions, the average claim amounts for these kinds of injuries can be two to four times larger. Multiply these numbers by the number of potentially affected employees, and the math begins to look pretty grim:

• Wrist/Carpal tunnel injury: $7,600 average cost

• Tennis Elbow: $9,100 average cost

• Shoulder/Rotator Cuff injury: $14,800 average cost

• Neck injury: $21,000 average cost

To address these issues, employers can improve work conditions at home by offering ergonomic solutions. Ergonomic workstation equipment, such as sit-to-stand desks and proper standing mats, monitor arms, keyboard trays, active chairs and other flexible accessories help mitigate the most common health risks associated with desk jobs, such as back and neck pain, eye strain, wrist and carpal tunnel injury, and sitting disease. Here is a breakdown of the most common injuries and the office equipment that may address each:

Back and Neck Pain is caused by a lack of movement while holding the body in a fixed (often awkward) position, forcing discs to bulge and exert pressure on the spinal nerve. One solution is ergonomic sit-stand desks and desk converters, which allow employees to work while standing. This stretches out the spine, relieving pressures that accumulate in the back and neck areas.

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More time spent standing also reduces risks of heart disease and high blood sugar while boosting the body’s metabolic rate for weight loss, increased energy and improved mood.

Eye Strain is caused by having a computer monitor placed too close or too far away from the face, making the eyes work harder to focus or forcing the body to lean forward and strain the neck and eyes. One solution is an ergonomic monitor arm, which allows the user to move the screen forward or back and up and down to keep the center of the screen comfortably located between 15 and 20 degrees below horizontal eye level.

Wrist and Carpal Tunnel Injury is caused by long hours of keyboard use, resulting in painful fluid build-up, pressure on the median nerve, as well as awkward positioning of the hand and wrist while typing. A vertical mouse, which places the hand in an upright position, or an ergronomic keyboard tray can prevent this injury.

Sitting Disease and physical inactivity can lead to health consequences such as obesity, increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, accumulation of belly fat and abnormal cholesterol levels. Switching from sitting to standing to walking throughout the day is the most prudent regimen. Using a treadmill desk can help mitigate the debilitating consequences of sitting disease while potentially giving the body more oxygen, increased focus and enhanced mental acuity.

The human body was not designed to sit for many hours at a time doing repetitive work. Before the industrial revolution, people spent only three hours per day sitting. COVID-19 has effectively made an already known health risk many times worse by restricting employees indoors and forcing them to work off beds, sofas and kitchen tables.

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The onus is now on employers to get proactive about employee health and productivity while lowering healthcare costs.

Spending Risks Shift as the Pandemic Continues

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When Twitter offered permanent work-from-home status to all of its 4,600 employees in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it did so with a $1,000 stipend per employee to furnish and set up functional home office spaces.

For many organizations, such a sweeping move would carry higher risk as more employees, especially those not trained in company spending policy, would be expensing items. During COVID-19, enterprises of all sizes contend with the changing financial implications of adjusting business practices.

Data scientists at Oversight—a global leader in spending management technology—saw out-of-pocket spending increase 17% from April to May and expected this number to rise further in June as more employees without a corporate card make COVID-related expenses. These findings are published in the company’s Spend Insights Report, which analyzed information derived from customer interviews, market observations and Oversight data.  

Several Oversight clients reported finding big-screen TVs and soundbars on expense reports for work-from-home setups. Any of these could ultimately be for personal use or resold for personal gain. One client found that one of its employees spent $7,000 in corporate funds to set up a new home office space.

The months since COVID-19 forced employers everywhere to pivot their office strategies and open expensing capabilities to a broader subset of the employee base. As a result, the fundamental assumptions about spending and risk management in finance operations no longer apply.

New patterns of risk are emerging from these new transactions. However, finance operations teams that take the time to analyze these patterns can develop best practices.

Five key lessons enterprises should understand about spending risk in the 2020 business environment are:

1. Good and Bad Spending Have Reversed Roles

When the rapid shutdown of normal business operations forced the global workforce to shelter in place, travel discontinued abruptly. Airline and transportation activity plummeted in both March and April, as did hotel spending. But purchasing activity was higher than expected in the high-risk categories of mail/phone orders and miscellaneous stores (including merchants such as Amazon, Best Buy and Apple), while out-of-pocket expenditures in the name of business continuity increased dramatically. The result was a business scenario in which much of the historically “good” spending, like travel expenses, was suddenly deemed wasteful to the organization. In contrast, much of the traditionally categorized “bad spending” was now necessary.

2. The Pattern of Risk is Shifting, As is Mitigation Collaboration

Because the risk looks significantly different than it did before the pandemic, finance operations teams are applying more scrutiny to employee spending, and collaborating more. Operations teams are engaging more than ever with counterparts in forecasting, tax and audit to navigate the nuances of risk during the crisis, creating a new best practice that makes identifying and mitigating spending risk easier.

3. Rising Miscellaneous and Out-of-Pocket Costs Cause Payment Platform Risk

Third-party payments increased 40% year-over-year in April according to the Spend Insights Report, as the pandemic drove a significant increase in online shopping activity. That shift to online—as reflected in rising miscellaneous and out-of-pocket spending—was often processed using third-party payment platforms like PayPal and Stripe. When employees spend using these platforms, organizations are exposed to greater risk due to limited visibility into transaction and vendor data.

4. New People Spending is New Risk

Regardless of COVID-19’s impact on an organization, one good rule is that risk is a function of people. According to Oversight data, 70% of employees are good stewards of corporate funds. An additional 25% may make errors or act out-of-policy in certain circumstances, but these individuals are not intentionally involved in waste or fraud. The remaining 5% of employees could use opportunities like COVID-19 to spend maliciously or otherwise act outside of corporate compliance guidelines. Every organization’s goal should be to engender visibility into the 5% of bad actors, while simultaneously seeking to better inform the remaining 25% about the steps they can take to adhere to policy. 

5. Align your Teams and Tools to Ensure Visibility into Spending

By quickly understanding as an organization what employees are spending on today, and at what frequency, leaders will be better suited to manage and mitigate risk. While the profile may be different than before the pandemic, the same tools that guided visibility into spending and risk are available to help organizations understand and analyze spend in the new business climate.

The situation at most organizations is fluid. The essential take-away is to develop a framework and process for near-real-time awareness of employee spending and the associated risks. By recalibrating your sense of the necessary expenditures now, organizations can ultimately ensure continuous control over risks as they emerge.