FACTS

Five environmental factors affecting your well-being and ways to adjust your workspace at home to benefit your overall health.

1. Lighting: One downside of working inside all day is that your exposure to natural light may be limited. Excessive exposure to artificial light can contribute to eyestrain and headaches. Electric lighting and lack of natural light exposure can impact your circadian rhythm, or your internal clock. Avoid too much exposure to artificial light by studying near a window for natural light.

2. Air Quality: Poor air quality indoors can lead to everything from headaches, dizziness, and fatigue in the short term to respiratory diseases, heart disease, and cancer in the long-term. Better air quality (lower levels of carbon dioxide, improved ventilation, and lower volatile organic compound concentrations) improved individuals’ decision-making abilities.

3. Screen Exposure: The American Optometric Association suggests adopting the “20/20/20 rule” when working on a computer for long periods of time; every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to stare at an object 20 feet away from you. This will help reduce digital eyestrain.
4. Temperature: A study found that temperature had the greatest effect on performance. It measured the performance of call center workers in very hot and very cold indoor spaces and determined that performance decreased significantly in extreme temperate environments. 
5. Workspace Setup: The Mayo Clinic offers the following tips to make your workspace more comfortable:
6. Monitor: Your monitor should be roughly an arm’s length away, and the top of your screen should be at or a little below eye level.
7. Chair: Choose a supportive chair and adjust its height so your thighs are parallel to the ground and your feet rest flatly on the floor.
8. Footrest: If your chair is too high off the ground, consider using a footrest so your feet lay flat.

STATS

• Gallup found that 43 percent of employed Americans spent time working remotely as of 2016, a 4 percent increase since 2012. The percentage of U.S. workers who worked away from the office at least 80 percent of the time rose from 24 percent to 31 percent over the same 4-year span.
• An IWG survey released this year provides compelling statistics: 70 percent of professionals worldwide work away from the company office at least one day a wee0k
• 53 percent use location variety for at least half of the week. The rise of remote and partially-remote work in such vast numbers provides even more proof that reporting to a specific workplace during specific hours—a practice decades and even centuries old by this point—doesn’t work for the vast majority of the modern workforce. 
• Research found that 37 percent of employees in the United States don’t feel inspired or energized by their physical workplaces in the current workday structure.
• Companies could optimize a third of their real estate simply by closing the flexibility gap for just half of the 84 percent of U.S. workers who are interested in location variety.