World Spine Day falls on 16 October every year, and it’s usually treated as a personal health message – stretch more, sit less, mind your posture. All fair. But in a workplace, spine health isn’t purely a personal responsibility. It’s a shared one, and the law backs that up.

If your team spends most of their day at a screen, you have a legal duty under the DSE Regulations to assess their workstation and make sure it’s set up properly – chair height, screen position, keyboard and mouse placement, the lot. This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the same duty whether your team is in an office, hybrid, or working from home, and it applies however small the business is. A proper DSE assessment picks up the things that quietly cause problems over months, not days – a monitor slightly too low, a chair that’s never been adjusted for the person using it now rather than whoever had the desk before.

Away from the legal side, the thing I see most often when I’m assessing workstations is how little most people know about their own chair. Not the brand or the price – whether it’s actually adjusted for them. Seat height, lumbar support, armrest position: three settings most office chairs have, and three settings I regularly find have never been touched since the chair was delivered. Posture advice only works if the chair underneath you is set up to support it. That’s a five-minute fix, and it makes more difference than almost anything else I recommend.

Both of these matter, and neither one replaces the other. An employer meeting their DSE obligations and an employee who knows how to adjust their own chair are solving two different halves of the same problem.

I run DSE assessments and training over Zoom, and in-house at client premises where that works better. If you’re not sure whether your business is meeting its DSE duty, or you just want your team’s chairs properly set up, get in touch and I’ll talk you through it.

Fit4Work owner Angela Hinton