Screen workstations are regulated in Annex number 6 of the Workplace Ordinance, making them one of the few office areas with concrete requirements. The employer must design the monitor, input devices, furniture and lighting so that ergonomic working is possible, and must additionally offer occupational health screening for the eyes.
What the Workplace Ordinance requires
The ordinance works with protection goals rather than centimetre figures. It requires the workstation to be adaptable to the person and the task. The essential points:
- Monitor: flicker-free, adequately large and sharp, tiltable and swivelling, free from disturbing reflections, with characters displayed large enough.
- Keyboard and mouse: separate from the monitor so that an ergonomic posture is possible, with enough space to rest the hands.
- Desk: an adequately large, low-reflection surface allowing flexible arrangement of monitor, input devices and documents.
- Chair: stable, height-adjustable, with an adjustable backrest.
- Lighting and environment: adequate lighting, no glare or reflection, avoidance of disturbing noise.
- Software: adapted to the task and without monitoring performance without employees' knowledge.
The concrete dimensions and recommendations come from DGUV Information 215-410, and for lighting from ASR A3.4.
Setting it up in six steps
Most complaints arise not from missing furniture but from wrongly adjusted furniture. This order works and takes five minutes per workstation:
- Chair height first. Upper and lower legs form roughly a right angle and the feet are flat on the floor. Only once the chair fits is everything else aligned to it.
- Match the desk height. With an upright posture the forearms rest roughly horizontally, with upper and lower arm at approximately a right angle. If the desk cannot be adjusted, raise the chair and add a footrest.
- Viewing distance. For common monitor sizes this is usually between 50 and 80 centimetres. Rule of thumb: about an arm's length.
- Monitor height. The top line of the screen sits at or slightly below eye level, so the gaze is angled slightly downwards. A monitor set too high is the most common cause of neck complaints.
- Orientation to the window. The monitor sits at right angles to the window, so neither facing it nor with your back to it. Facing it causes glare; backing onto it causes reflections in the screen.
- Keyboard and mouse. Directly in front of the monitor, with roughly ten to fifteen centimetres in front of the keyboard to rest the wrists.
A laptop is not a workstation
On a laptop the screen and keyboard are fixed together. That means either the screen is too low, which loads the neck, or the keyboard is too high, which loads the shoulders and wrists. Getting both right at once is structurally impossible.
For occasional use while travelling that is acceptable. For sustained screen work an external monitor plus an external keyboard and mouse are needed, or a laptop stand combined with external input devices. This applies in the office as much as when working from home, where it is the point that shows up most often in self-declarations.
The often overlooked duty: offering screening
For employees at display screen equipment the employer must offer occupational health screening, in particular an appropriate examination of the eyes and eyesight (ArbMedVV). Where this shows a need and ordinary corrective lenses are not sufficient, special lenses for screen work must be provided.
The construction matters: this is offered screening, not mandatory screening. The employer must make the offer; nobody has to accept it. What must therefore be evidenced is the offer, not the uptake. A list of who was offered what and when takes care of that. The screening is organised together with the occupational physician.
This is the duty most often missing in office businesses, because it is easy to overlook and easy to fulfil. Conversely, it is easy to check during an inspection.
Light: the underrated factor
Lighting is the point least often checked in offices and most often solved wrongly. ASR A3.4 gives minimum illuminance values; for office and screen workstations these are considerably above what ceiling lighting alone delivers on a dull afternoon.
Three mistakes occur regularly. First, ceiling light only: it lights the room evenly but not the work surface. An additional task light solves that cheaply. Second, excessive contrast: a bright screen against a dark wall, or the reverse, forces the eyes into constant adaptation. Third, glare from luminaires in the field of view or reflections in the screen, usually from an unfavourable position relative to the window.
A simple test without a light meter: if you cannot read documents on the desk easily in the late afternoon without an extra lamp, there is not enough light at the workstation. Equally revealing is a look at the switched-off monitor: if a window or a luminaire is reflected in it, it is reflected during use too, just less visibly and all the more tiringly.
Movement rather than perfect posture
The best sitting posture is the next one. Even a correctly adjusted workstation leads to complaints if someone sits in it unchanged for eight hours. The ordinance addresses this by requiring screen work to be interrupted regularly by other activities or breaks.
In practice that does not mean prescribing breaks but enabling change: phone calls standing up, printers and meeting rooms away from your own desk, height-adjustable desks where they make sense. A height-adjustable desk only has an effect, however, if employees know how and how often to adjust it, and that is exactly what belongs in safety training.
Open-plan offices and desk sharing
Two developments change the classic screen workstation and are rarely reflected in risk assessments.
In the open-plan office acoustic exposure is the determining factor. Conversations and phone calls at the next desk disturb focused work more than steady background noise, because intelligible speech captures attention involuntarily. Zoning, acoustically effective elements and quiet rooms for calls are what work. The topic also belongs in the assessment of mental stress.
With desk sharing the fixed workstation disappears, and with it the one-off adjustment: anyone sitting at a different desk every morning either readjusts daily or not at all. In practice it is the latter. Desk sharing therefore needs two additional measures: consistently adjustable furniture at every place, and training that makes daily adjustment a routine.
What gets noticed during a walkthrough
Seven points account for most of the objections raised about screen workstations:
- Monitor directly facing the window or with the back to the window.
- Monitor too high, often on a plinth or a stack of files.
- Sustained laptop use without external peripherals.
- Chair never adjusted since the person moved in.
- Too little light in the afternoon, because only ceiling lighting is used.
- New employees at an inherited desk that was never adjusted for them.
- No record of the screening offer.
The first six can be fixed the same day, usually without any purchase, because the furniture is generally adjustable and simply was never adjusted. For the last one only an appointment with the occupational physician helps. All of them belong in the office safety checklist, so they surface before an inspection rather than during one.
Why this pays off twice
Musculoskeletal disorders are among the most common causes of days lost to sickness, and in an office they arise mainly from posture and lack of movement at the screen. A correctly adjusted working environment is therefore not only a duty but the point with the best ratio of effort to effect.
The evaluation of each workstation belongs in your risk assessment, and the adjustment rules in the annual safety training. Only then is it evidenced that employees know how to adjust their workstation, and not merely that it could be adjusted.
Safety Club reviews screen workstations as part of its support and documents the results ready for inspection, with an occupational safety specialist on site. How getting started works is set out in the four-step process.
This article is general guidance and does not replace legal advice on your individual case. What governs is the current version of the regulations mentioned, together with how your employers' liability insurance association (Berufsgenossenschaft, BG) interprets it.
