Choose Ergonomic Office Chairs of Right Size for Petite Office Staff

Are you a bit shorter or petite than most of the office staff? Is the office chair that suits others also comfortable for you? Just like a pair of shoes, office chairs can never fit all of us and the wrong sized ergonomic office chair can easily cause back pain.

Purchasing an office chair is to some degree little different to buying shoes. We will never purchase a pair of shoes sized 10 if we only take size 6. Similarly, we need to ensure the chair to be a good fit. The wrong sized shoes can never give us comfort. The wrong chair also will bring us negative effects. If the chair we use is much suitable for bigger size, we can tend to experience back pain from sitting too far forward on the bigger chair's seat, because there is just little support on our back from the chair.

Unlike the shoes which often come in various sizes, office chairs, though adjustable, hardly come in set sizes. We can see office chairs with low, medium or high backs. The difference in the back is just a feature of the chair, yet hardly can be a standard for a good fit or not. For petite staff, choosing a one-size-fit-all chair only ends up with disappointment and discomfort.

Ergonomic chairs are now adjustable. But chairs are designed to suit the 5th–95th percentile. A 5'2''female is technically right at the 5th percentile yet may find most of the chairs just not fit properly. For a chair with overly deep seat, petite persons may end up with circulatory issues for the lower legs. For a properly sized chair, its seat usually allows width of two or four fingers between the front of the seat edge and the back of the knee. If the chair is just not suitable in its height, an easy way to fix it is a foot rest.

Besides the seat height, the arms of the chair may also be a factor that decides whether the chair is suitable or not. If the chair has arms which are too far apart, it will offer little support to our arms and shoulders, which may lead to arm, neck issues. When the arms are very high, they may easily stick into us if we are shorter. If the arms of the chairs can be adjustable, that will not be a problem.