201 GREAT IDEAS for Your SMALL BUSINESS, Third Edition

GREAT 11 IDEA: Think Ergonomically

I'm usually the last one to urge any entrepreneur to spend money on fancy office furniture. In my previous life as a white-collar crime reporter, I quickly learned the glitzier the office, the worse the criminal who owned the company.

But with repetitive-motion injuries costing U.S. business owners hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity and millions more in workers' comp claims each year, it's important to make sure you and your employees are sitting on good chairs behind the right kind of desk. (Every year, there are more than 500,000 cases of repeated trauma disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, affecting workers from white-collar executives to meatpackers.)

Providing a safe and comfortable ...