The headlines are lurid. One 2012 University of Arizona study swabbed chairs, phones, keyboards, computer mice and desktops in offices in New York, San Francisco and Tucson, Arizona. It , the most abundant “common inhabitants of the human skin, nasal, oral or intestinal cavities”. A study last year found that the .
How to win at work
Make your work work better for you – from dealing with pesky colleagues to taking the perfect break and doing less for more money
In excess of 130 million UK working days were lost to sickness in 2017, well over half of them due to complaints that could be picked up in the office, from colds and coughs to flu and gastroenteritis. Should we be donning hazmat suits at our desks?
Advertisement
Probably not, says Sally Bloomfield at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as focusing on how many microbes there are in the working environment is highly misleading. “We’re constantly shedding stuff into our environment, but these organisms are mostly harmless,” she says. Unless we are made to hot-desk (see “Winning at work: Why hot-desking and open-plan offices are bad for you”), our desks are our safe havens: the microbes there are largely our own.
“The average desk at work contains 400 times more germs than a toilet seat”
Besides the daily commute if you use public transport, the danger zones at work are communal areas, says Bloomfield, especially shared surfaces such as door handles. Simple precautions limit the risk: washing our hands frequently, and perhaps using an alcohol hand gel when we return to our desks.
Winter months, when infectious diseases such as colds and flu tend to be at their height, are particular risks. Again, the simplest solutions are the best, principally keeping your germs to yourself by staying at home when you are ill and covering your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze. The cold virus can lurk for quite some time among desk clutter, so it might be as well to tidy up at the end of the day in the winter months to allow the space to be disinfected. Richard Webb
Take-home message: Never leave your desk
How to stay awake
During dull meetings, it is sometimes hard to stifle a yawn. In the worst case, you feel your eyes getting heavier and heavier… Next time you gruntingly return from the land of nod to your colleagues’ disapproving stares, try blaming the room.
The fact is, our buildings are making us sleepy. “In the past 40 years, we have tried to conserve energy by building airtight offices,” says Joseph Allen at Harvard University. “But it’s not beneficial to the people working within.”
As ventilation rates fall, odours and harmful chemicals build up. In poorly ventilated offices, carbon dioxide can reach as high as 2500 parts per million, a concentration more than six times that outdoors. This increases the incidence not just of fatigue, but also of headache and respiratory tract irritation.
, Allen and his team put workers in an office space in which the CO2 level was varied from day to day, and measured their information-gathering skills, attention levels and ability to manage crises. On days when the CO2 concentration was at a common indoor level, workers performed 15 per cent worse than when the level of this gas was halved.
If the windows are sealed in your workplace, the best thing you can hope for is a good ventilation system. Otherwise, crack open windows regularly to replenish indoor oxygen. If colleagues who are sensitive to the cold protest, tell them it is for their own good.
While you are there, take a good look at the view, too. “Human eyes are organs to exercise. It’s good to focus on something far away, then near and then far away,” says architect at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. The muscles in your eyes will get stiff after too long staring at a computer screen, increasing your sense of tiredness. Plus, exposure to daylight has a role in . This helps us stay awake during the day and get a good night’s sleep – the number-one way to avoid embarrassing board-room snoozes. Yvaine Ye
Take-home message: Too much CO2 is bad for you
