by Melissa D. Ing

Created on: August 18, 2008   Last Updated: February 04, 2012

Most of us don't consider office work to be detrimental to our health. Recent studies have proved however; that many of us experience both mental and physical health challenges in our office environment. Any work environment is subject to state/federal or provincial health and safety laws; that said many employers don't take them into consideration or do their best to down play them. Here are some typical health challenges involved in office work and what you can do about them.

Physical health challenges: Inadequate mobility and accessibility

We've all worked in one, the office tower that has an elevator that is broken more often than it worked. I worked at one call center on the eighteenth floor, and at 5pm when most offices in the twenty floor tower closed, the overworked elevators would begin to break down, or work so slowly you could end up waiting an hour for one!

After a couple of weeks of hoofing down 18 flights of stairs, with a 100 other employees hard on my heels, I left. It was either that or wait 20 anxious minutes each night until I felt safe to descend. Management was no use, and the bottom line was that they should have rented in a different location that was more accessible to so many employees.

Other inadequate mobility challenges in offices occur when the office itself is difficult to reach. I have worked in several that were not on a bus route; and despite car pooling the closest they could drop me off was three blocks away. I cannot tell you how many times I arrived at work bedraggled from the rain or snow, and in the end this job was just not worth the health challenge. I simply got too many colds!

Inadequate and unsafe storage

Our information world is moving faster and faster and generating more and more paper. Offices are becoming overwhelmed and storage is becoming a problem. I cannot tell you how many offices I worked in as a temp that had inadequate and sometimes dangerous storage areas.

I have had to go up and down rickety wood stairs to damp basements with spiders and goodness knows what else to retrieve old files. Other times I had to go into filing rooms and stand on the top rung of a ladder to retrieve boxes of documents, and I was always afraid of falling. No office employee should be placed in physical difficulties just to do paperwork. If management won't do anything, leave!

Poor ventilation and inadequate heat

Currently there are no laws governing how hot or how cold an office environment must be. There are also no laws that

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