Problems with office chairs at work...

Oh no not formally, but if you're pregnant you get one 3 days after asking. If you happen to be a young male it seems to take months...
Push harder HR departments are notoriously slow moving people make the mistake of thinking HR is there for the employee when in reality it's sole purpose is to protect the employer!
 
Push harder HR departments are notoriously slow moving people make the mistake of thinking HR is there for the employee when in reality it's sole purpose is to protect the employer!
This. HR is not there for the staff. So keep pestering them until they understand that they need to do something to protect the company.
 
We have a mixture of chairs. Our call centre ones are Orange Box chairs that cost about £400 a piece and are pretty descent, the other office chairs are all fairly good too.

Every new starter/new to department person has a work space assessment. We have lots (lots!) of people with "special chairs".
 
Good luck in your quest. No matter how big the company I'm yet to find an employer in 18 years that spends a reasonable amount on decent posture supporting chairs.

I work for a well known IT company and i reckon the chair i'm sat on cost around £800! Very comfy and plenty of things to adjust to make things more comfortable.
 
Yeah i've never really had an issue with chairs i've been sat on. Remember being shocked at the price of them when i first found out.
 
Without a ticket from a GP or osteopath, Plan B will see you patronised by some fluffy creature from HR with a title such as "Workplace Ergonomics Specialist" who'll just check that your seat height is correct according to your monitor position etc.

As other's have mentioned, taking a 5 minute stroll to stretch your back out every hour will get noticed and then it's done to how much of rectal opening your boss is.
 
Without a ticket from a GP or osteopath, Plan B will see you patronised by some fluffy creature from HR with a title such as "Workplace Ergonomics Specialist" who'll just check that your seat height is correct according to your monitor position etc.

As other's have mentioned, taking a 5 minute stroll to stretch your back out every hour will get noticed and then it's done to how much of rectal opening your boss is.

The patronising has already begun. I've now had 3 different chairs of varying size and they are all crap. The same "family" of cheap tat that they think is acceptable to provide us with.

The facilities staff are useless. It's down to adjusting your posture. Adjust the chair.

Is it ********! It's the naff chairs doing me in! The one I was sat on originally was constantly applying pressure to my back. I could feel it all the way through to the soles of my feet. I'm done in haha!

I'll see how far the process gets me within the next week or so. If all i'm going to be offered is naff chairs then I'm just gonna bring my own in, maybe with a doctors note though apparently they aren't legally binding in any way...
 
As said, you have a new chair so do a new DSE, if your chair gets changed again? Yep, that's a new DSE.

If it still doesn't get going, again, get occupational health involved.

Makes you look like an arse, but it's your health at the end of the day and of they aren't taking that seriously it's a bit concerning.
 
The patronising has already begun. I've now had 3 different chairs of varying size and they are all crap. The same "family" of cheap tat that they think is acceptable to provide us with.

The facilities staff are useless. It's down to adjusting your posture. Adjust the chair.

Is it ********! It's the naff chairs doing me in! The one I was sat on originally was constantly applying pressure to my back. I could feel it all the way through to the soles of my feet. I'm done in haha!

I'll see how far the process gets me within the next week or so. If all i'm going to be offered is naff chairs then I'm just gonna bring my own in, maybe with a doctors note though apparently they aren't legally binding in any way...
Doctors note might not be 'legally binding' what ever that means in this context but it is a significant piece of evidence that the company is failing in it's duty of care and if no action is takev as a result of it a future industrial tribunal would certainly frown upon it.

Sounds like a rubbish place to work I've never worked anywhere that didn't supply decent chairs and all the customer sites I visit are pretty decent to. Who do you work for?
 
My office is wall to wall Herman Miller Aeron which are very comfy.

This seems to be the issue. You either get companies where every chair is Harman Miller and then there is the majority of the rest of the companies where asking to spend more than £50 on a chair is frowned upon despite expecting people to sit on them for more than 8 hours a day.
 
This seems to be the issue. You either get companies where every chair is Harman Miller and then there is the majority of the rest of the companies where asking to spend more than £50 on a chair is frowned upon despite expecting people to sit on them for more than 8 hours a day.

That's my issues, those shoddy blue office chairs just arent design to he sat on all day
 
Hey,

OK so to put things as simply as possible, my new employer (a large company with swathes of money) has done the stereotypical thing and filled the office where I work with a plethora of cheap, crap chairs that look like something from the late 90's or early 00's and are all uncomfortable.

But worse yet is that despite all the DSE bs, I'm getting serious lower back pain and my backside feels like it's been sexually assaulted after each working day due to how hard the seats are. This is purely down to the poor quality of chairs that I must sit on for nearly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

<snip>
Almost exactly the same situation I'm in now.

Have my own DSE assessment soon; no idea what will come of that. The chairs at work are giving me incredible pain, akin as you said to graduating from the George Michael school of public lavatory etiquette.

The NHS physio I saw last time I had back pain recommended one of those BallKissen things. Like a squashed football. I can't say it makes things better tho. Just transfers some of the pain to my tailbone instead of the small of my back.

Oh for a nice chair to sit on. Or at least a comfortable one.
 
That's my issues, those shoddy blue office chairs just arent design to he sat on all day

That. Checked the standard chair we get at my workplace and it's listed as a 4 hours per day operator chair. If I'm very lucky today out of my 12 hours on site I'll be in it less than 9.

Then again, my workplace has the same kind of attitudes as the OPs. One of the guys in here had a similar story, had to go down the full Doctor's note/DSE route, and even then they were trying not to bother every step of the way, kind of fell apart on them when they brought in an outside specialist to shut it down and when it turned out she'd assessed the workplace a few years prior at the previous regimes insistence and was not happy at all to find out not a single thing she had flagged first time had been addressed.
 
They did something kinda worse where I am.

When I started we all did DSE, had chairs given to us that were relatively new and decent. Suddenly 18 months later our team had grown in size so were moved to the basement. We took our chairs with us to only be told they had to stay upstairs.

The management got all our good chairs, and we ended up with back crippling rubbish we had to spend 12 hrs a day on.

Naturally people ended up taking sick time off which made life even worse for everyone.

Companies don't care about DSE, no matter how much they nag you to complete the stupid things.

I think the worst thing they did was leave us without heating for nights on end through the winter. Having worked on sites and outside before, that was nowhere near as bad because you weren't just sat there.

The tight fisted swines even turned the hot water off in the toilets to save money.

Can't believe this firm turns over a billion plus each year. Utter shills.
 
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