Ergonomic hints

Better lighting, larger type and video displays are some of the simple ergonomic changes companies can make to help older workers stay productive, say psychologists.

Such strategies help older workers compensate for perceptual declines in vision, hearing and motor skills, which are an inevitable result of aging. Although everyone faces declining memory and slowing cognitive skills as they age (see main article) many work-related problems that may appear to stem from cognitive declines, may instead be the result of these easily corrected perceptual problems, says Florida State University psychologist Neil Charness, PhD.

'The key is to design a workplace that doesn?t handicap the older worker,' he says.

For example, poor lighting may slow older workers down. Indeed, increased lighting improved print legibility in proof- reading tasks for young and older participants in a large study of 98 people age 20 to 82, found Charness and Katinka Dijkstra, PhD. In the same project, they found that lighting in offices and homes tends to be well below recommended levels.

Automated equipment should also be designed with older workers in mind, says Wendy Rogers, PhD, of Georgia Institute of Technology. In several studies of how people use automatic teller machines?which may generalize to other forms of technology?she and her colleagues found that reducing glare from the video screen, better aligning keys with functions and using larger text reduces mistakes and increases older people?s willingness to use the machines. They also found that older people perform better if task menus are less hierarchical, says Rogers.