The impact of ergonomic practices toward employee's performance in an organization / Adlina Adlin Sabaruddin

Ergonomics or human factors was the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other element of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance (International Ergonomic Association, 2000). Ergonomic was the interaction between employee and the equipment they use and the environment they involve in. The employee's performance was maximized if the workstations and work methods are well-designed. Ergonomic improves health and safety, reduce cost and absenteeism and also ensures to meet the social and legal obligations of employers to their employees. Workplace ergonomic plays an important role in increasing the employee's performance. Employee's performance has relationship with the ergonomic practices at workplace. The unsafe and unhealthy condition may lead to poor performance of employee. This consideration must be tailored to develop good working environment and better performance because an acceptable working condition and equipment help the employees perform job effectively. According to Kingsley Asante, (2012), setting up office work space that fits and adequately supports the needs of the employee in his quest to execute a task, is actually focuses on how offices are designed and laid out; furniture and lighting are set up in the workplace. Generally, from the corporate perspective, the output that employee produces, given the requisite workplace environment, tools and technology assess largely the employee performance. O'Neil (2011 ), clearly states that furniture design using ergonomic principles can improve performance and reduce injury at workplace. On an average working day, one million employees will be absent from work due to job stress (Gutnick, 2007). Performance refers to the degree of achievement of the mission at work place that builds up an employee job. Mostly researchers used the term performance to express the dimension range of transactional efficiency and input and output efficiency, (Cascio, 2006). According to Chandrasekar (2010), there are key factors such as ergonomic practices in the employee's workplace that impact greatly on their level of motivation and performance. The current study concentrates on the impact of ergonomic practices on employees' performance. This study represents an important contribution to understand ergonomic practices such as office furniture used, lighting, office layout and its impacts on employee's performance, because it positive enhance the working ability on employees. This study will contribute to see satisfaction of employees with the ergonomic practices at their workplace. A poor ergonomic practice has proved to be associated with reduced job satisfaction, absenteeism, somatic complaints, burnout and depression phenomena. Developing better and higher performing workplace requires an awareness of how workplace impacts behavior and how behavior itself drives workplace performance. People work individually and interact with others and this requires different workplace solutions (Chandrasekar, 2011 ). How workplace was designed and occupied affects not only how people feel, but also their work performance, their commitment to their employer, and the creation of new knowledge in the organization. Vischer (2008) states these are the cornerstones of the level of research known as the environmental psychology of workspace. According to Abdullah (2010), environmental factors represent the immediate job environment that contains skills required to perform a job, authority, autonomy, relationship with supervisors and co-workers and other working conditions. High performance was a step towards the achievement of organizational goals and tasks. Employee performance was an important building block of an organization and factors which lay the foundation for high performance must be analyzed by the organizations. Since every organization cannot progress by one or two individual's effort, it was collective effort of all the members of the organization. Performance was a major multidimensional construct aimed to achieve results and has a strong link with planned goals of an organization (Abbas and Yaqoob, 2009). Performance is the key multicharacter factor intended to attain outcomes which has a major connection with planned objectives of the organization (Sabir, 2012). Office layouts have encouraged participation as a means to facilitate work transactions and increase productivity. The office layout encourages employees to work a certain way their workstations are built. In doing so, the company was answering the firm's business plan while making sure their employees have everything they need to work (AI-Anzi, 2009).