Impact of Office Ergonomic Elements on Employee Performance: A Case Study of Larsen and Toubro, Surat

Abstract

Ergonomics is said to have a great potential when it comes to designing of any artefact. Office ergonomics, a branch of ergonomics, seeks to understand how physical characteristics of humans are relevant in designing the workplace and is often used by organisations as an input to minimize the amount of discomfort faced by the employees. The provision of this input by the organisation generates a need to understand if it has any impact on the output produced by the employees. This paper seeks to understand this relationship and study the impact of office ergonomics on the performance of the employees. Additionally, it tries to discover the presence of participatory ergonomics (PE) in the organisation. 75 employees were randomly drawn from different departments of Larsen and Toubro, Surat, India and a questionnaire was administered to assess the relationship between 9 ergonomic elements (independent variables) and employee performance (dependent variable) by building a multiple regression model in R. The regression was first carried out for the 75 employees, post which the type of department that employees belong to (manufacturing or non-manufacturing) was added in the multiple regression model to test if department type moderates the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable. The study also tried to understand the implementation of PE in the organisation. Overall, for all employees, architectonic details and colour of the walls showed significant impact on performance. When departmental setup was introduced in the model as a moderating variable, it did not change the results of the model. Thus, departmental setup was found to be irrelevant in moderating the relationship between the variables.