ErgoBlog - Ergonomics Thoughts

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by Stephen Jenkins

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Cost of Ergonomics / Cost of Accommodation

3 Nov. 09

Scanning on-line newspapers reveals many issues, but often it is the angle chosen to tackle an issue that intrigues me.  ‘No Cookies at Faculty Meetings’ to illustrate hard times at Harvard University is in my top ten.  Doesn’t Harvard have a multi-billion dollar endowment?  Workplace health and safety, disability and other occupational health-related issues are creeping back into the U.S. news.  This may be fueled by the national health care debate here in the U.S., but these issues have a life and tone of their own.  An October 9th article in the New York Times; Disabled Workers; Employer Fears Are Groundless encompassed all these occupational health issues.  The subtitle sums up the article; “Studies show that hiring the disabled does not lead to higher accommodation costs, worker comp, or sick leave, yet these myths persist.”  This is great news – and likely long known information for most professionals in this field.  We, the occupational health professionals, need to trumpet this fact.  Employers need to understand that fitting the job to the worker or accommodating the worker is not an expensive venture - but rather a cost-effective venture.  Many management books promote having the best talent to be the best company – this seems pretty obvious.  (Read Good to Great for a prime example of the need for a great team in any workplace.)  Talent is not defined by the person’s physical size or physical ability or mental ability.  Constraining your talent pool by limiting it to employees that are strong or large or any other singular demographic, makes it harder to find people who can the job well.  It makes it harder to have the best talent.  This is not new.  Neither is the fact that accommodation does not have to be expensive.  We did a study and found that more than 50% of ergonomics-related issues were resolved for less than $1000.  We can and need to break the myth that ergonomics and accommodation are expensive.

 

Ergonomics Tools in Business

Two things are on my mind about trying to apply the science of ergonomics in the workplace.  First, many people in workplaces view ergonomics as a singular, narrow-scope concept.  They believe they can get trained in this concept and that the training will resolve their issues.  Second, ergonomics assessment tools are generally narrow in scope.  The results may not yield practical information or easily lead to solution options.  These two issues are interlinked and feed off each other.  They make it difficult to decrease the risk of injury and improve human performance in the workplace.

Speaking of ergonomics as a singular and narrow concept, I spent this past week in San Antonio at the National Voluntary Protection Program Participants Conference http://www.vpppa.org/.  It was an energetic gathering of progressive organizations aiming to ‘To be a leader in health and safety excellence through cooperation among communities, workers, industries and governments’.  I had many wonderful and informative conversations.  A number of people asked “how do I get trained on ergonomics?”  This prompted me to realize that many people think that education alone will resolve their ergonomics issues.

 Education is a critical aspect of any improvement process.  However, education alone is insufficient.  I was reminded during these conversations that workplaces are still relying on “Ergonomics 100”.  Courses confined to:  this is ergonomics, this is what ergonomics does, this is an injury caused by poor ergonomics, and so on.  Again, this is good to know, but insufficient to significantly reduce risks in the workplace.  (Disclaimer, I know everyone who reads this is well past this level, but it remains a common situation.)  And these are people from progressive health and safety companies.

 To be effective, you have to progress past the awareness stage to a stage where there is a reasonable understanding of issues and how to control them.  This brings me to the second issue.  The IRSST (Institut de recherche en santé et en sécurité du travail) - http://www.irsst.qc.ca/en/home.html, is a private, non-profit agency funded primarily by employers in the province of Quebec, Canada.  This institute is well known for its high quality applied ergonomics research.  They recently published a study that found commonly used ergonomics analysis tools to be woefully lacking.  They found that many organizations still use worker surveys as their sole assessment tools to ergonomics.

 While I am all for surveying workers and support participatory ergonomics as highly beneficial, these approaches rarely lead to an understanding of root causes. (I think anyone practicing ergonomics, by default, values employees and their input.) To illustrate, let me use a simple home-life example of a health issue – noise.  If I ask my 5 family members if the music is too loud, the parents say yes, the kids say no.  We, the parents, are outvoted 3 – 2.  Although the music often exceeds 90 decibels, we do not routinely wear hearing protection (although perhaps we should).  We are not protected after that vote.  This same phenomenon can occur in the workplace with body discomfort, job difficulty ranking or other employee surveys.  In addition, most people do not understand that noise may create a risk or at what level it becomes a risk.

 Well, let’s put these pieces together.  Suppose that I think my employees can describe my ergonomics risks with a survey.  I first trust them to accurately identify and describe the problem.  (This usually requires a very mature ergonomics process.) Then I conclude that I can educate them to effectively control risk based on this information. This approach is rarely successful.  It is time to move beyond this type of thinking.  It is time to get vocal about how to assess risk and assess it in a manner that others in your business can understand and through this process, allow employees and employers to tackle ergonomics.

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Gridlock Implementing Change - is it Altman's Law?

Stuart Altman of Brandeis University, a veteran of health overhaul efforts under presidents Nixon, Carter and Clinton observed that everyone’s second choice has been the status quo.  Everyone has their own ideas and they're very invested in those ideas and when others disagree with those ideas, the second choice is the status quo and that's why you end up with the gridlock.  Many experts believe that most of the public and health care interest groups are willing to go along with 80 percent of the agenda, but they simply can't live with 20 percent of the agenda. And the critical problem is, everyone has a different 20 percent.

This tendency toward status quo has been called Altman's law.

Most of us in ergonomics have seen this same phenomenon in trying to enact change in the workplace.  Very few argue with the logic and need for a sound ergonomics fix.  However, getting the fix implemented, if it impacts very many people or costs very much is very difficult.  I think Altman’s Law helps to explain why this occurs.  As barriers and compromises must be made to finally reach a workable solution, we can easily reach a point that we no longer want to compromise, and busy lives and inertia brings us back to status quo.

Altman has identified several things that help to avoid status quo gridlock.  Labeling alternatives to accentuate their positive attributes helps steer the decision away from the status quo.  We need to use simple terms to explain ergonomics tools, processes and outcomes.  The solutions and their rationale need simple labels – labels that can be understood by all parties in the workplace.

Part of increasing the simplicity includes decreasing the number of attributes or alternatives.  Altman states that adding alternatives negatively effects making a choice and increases the chance of status quo being maintained.  Many times I have seen workplaces freeze in the implementation stage, unsure of which alternative to choose.

It goes without saying that good ergonomics is simplified when there are clear labels and few choices.  In other words, a path with few turns that comes with clear directions.  Moreover, it is critical that we include not just the science of ergonomics, but that we carry this thinking over to the workplace processes that utilize ergonomics.

 

Stephen Jenkins

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Ergonomics - In employers we must trust

We continue to hear a lot about ergonomics regulations in the US.  Michigan is fully engaged in trying to enact a rule and there is plenty of news to come from there.  As I wrote earlier in this blog, there is plenty of energy - both pro and con - for ergonomics regulations.  I often look at other aspects of life for parallels - and the salmonella in a Georgia peanut plant - certainly has me thinking.  The FDA will be pressured to respond to problems in the food supply.  We expect our food to be safe and it is a societal breach of trust when food is not safe.  My kids, my spouse, me, we all eat peanut butter.  We like to think there are checks and balances in place to keep our food safe. 

Well I am sure you know where I am going with this.  Workers have a similar expectation or trust - they expect a fair wage for a fair day's work.  When a dastardly employer - and I know there are dastardly ones because of FDA reports on the tainted peanuts - puts an employee in a risky job that employer steps outside the bounds of trust.  There are many employers that this is not directed at.  And that is the catch.  I don't think anyone wants to unnecessarily burden good employers.  But how do we ensure the ergonomic equivalent of the salmonella at the Peanut Corporation of America does not occur?  The company knowingly (allegedly) shipped tainted product and people died.  It is not OK to knowlngly hurt anyone.  It is not OK to assign someone to a job on which others have gotten hurt.

Stephen Jenkins

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What should OSHA do for ergonomics

It has been almost 2 weeks since the election of Barrack Obama as President of the US.  The lead up to the election has gotten ergonomics back in the news.  Ergonomics had virtually disappeared in conversations from Main Street to Wall Street in recent years.  The recent upsurge in media coverage can be credited to both proponents and opponents, the former raising the need for and and the latter the travesties of, respectively, ergonomics.  The common pro arguments of worker protection and the cons of ergonomics equated to a pseudo science will be pitted against each other in the months to come. 

There was controversy, even in the ergonomics community, over the 2000 Federal OSHA regulation that was repealed by the CRA in 2001.  The range of criticism was as vast as what was and was not included in the ergonomics regulation.  Perhaps we in the ergonomics community need to take a page out of the President-elect’s page and find a bi-partisan approach to ergonomics.  OSHA’s mandate is to protect workers.  How can they promote and support ergonomics and meet this mandate?  We would love to hear from you – how should they achieve this goal?  Is an ergonomics regulation the best response?  Are there other responses that OSHA could reasonably assume within their mandate?  What is the counter-argument to the statement that MSDs are more a function of psychosocial than physical ergonomics?

Stephen Jenkins

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Justifying ergonomics

How do you justify maintaining an ergonomics process or continuing to pay for an Ergonomist in your facility or corporation? At some point in the management hierarchy your job and success reducing injuries is translated into cost - benefit.  If you use injury costs, they are often inadequate to justify even the cost of a low 5-figure project.  As I pointed out in my last blog – once injury costs are controlled what do you use?  Another dilemma, Ergonomists and ergonomics are often housed in H&S or EH&S so they are held accountable only for injuries.  Most of other folks in EH&S deal with regulatory issues – things a company has to do.  These issues are a cost of doing business.  So the Ergonomist is in a unenviable position – or are you?

Ergonomics is not just about injury prevention – those are firefighting or system failure issues.  Ergonomics is truly about human performance.  As a human performance specialist we should focus on gains; production gains, quality gains.  Let me know, if you have made this transition.

Stephen Jenkins

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Cost of ergonomics

Cost related to ergonomics has been a frequent conversation over the last few weeks.  With these economic conditions it is very understandable why that is.  I have heard cost discussed in 3 different ways; how do you control costs, what if you can’t find any costs to control and how do you measure gains.  All are interesting topics and I will try to touch on each over the next few blogs.

Most of us start ergonomics programs aiming to control costs – generally injury costs.  When we are successful, we are left with a dilemma.  There are no more injury costs left to justify our existence.  Have we truly worked ourselves out of a job!  At that time we often start to search for indirect cost savings, savings related to injuries but not directly due to the injury – costs like absenteeism, hiring and training and what not.  (As an aside, I don’t care much for the term indirect costs – they are what they are – costs.  But more on that later.)

There is a much bigger question tied into this, what does it cost to maintain a low injury rate.  Perhaps that is the question with which management is truly struggling.  We fundamentally believe it should cost less to maintain a system than to purchase it or bring it under control.  Think about this in your own life, with your house or your education – buying or renovating / upgrading should cost more than normal day-to-day living if things are under control.  So how do you justify to management what it should cost to maintain ergonomics in your company or facility?  Why should they continue to pay you at the same rate if the injury rate is down?  Let me know your thoughts….

Stephen Jenkins

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Managing the ergonomics system II

Thanks for the feedback and comments on the last blog.  As I suspected, there are a multitude of great ideas and approaches out there.  Many folks described how they interact with management and find themselves translating science to communicate with others in the workplace.  Many folks appear to be confronted by the management dilemmas – and some keen observations made.  I will get into many of these …..

How to provide management with a documented process they can assess and rationally set budgets for was often described in emails to me.  A colleague from HP described the difficulties marrying subjective data that workers describe - such as comfort or morale information - with the hard financial data required by management.  This challenge of comparing ‘soft qualitative data’ with ‘hard financial numbers’ is common.

One of the few accounting models that marries ‘soft data’ with ‘hard numbers’ is a ‘Balanced Scorecard’.  Companies that use a Balanced Scorecard have placed company-specific values on human resource issues.  I have seen several variations of Balanced Scorecards, but only a few that included ergonomics.

Whether your company uses a Balanced Scorecard or not, you can turn soft ergonomic data into hard numbers.  We have been exploring the idea of risk quantification – and this implies holistic and consistent quantification - for many years.  It also implies that you measure risk.  You may measure risk in concert with other ‘soft’ measures such as comfort, fatigue or morale, but you need to measure and quantify risk.  Quantifying risk to manage risk is one of the common traits of world-class ergonomics systems.

Next time I am going to explore how risk quantification and budgets can be linked, but until then please keep your thoughts coming – they are inspirational.

Stephen Jenkins

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Managing the ergonomics system

We have the luxurious opportunity to discuss many issues with folks who have deep insights into ergonomics.  Most days, someone in some corner of the world poses a question or raises an issue that gives us pause to think.  These conversations are what make our job interesting and exciting.  Issues ranging from risk to injury and from managed systems to training teams are discussed in our office, over the phone and through the internet.

Rather than repeating these questions and discussions over and over, I am going to raise them through this blog.  This will allow you to weigh in with your thoughts on these issues and raise the bar on the discussion so to speak.

Lately we have had frequent discussions on managing ergonomics – and what that means.  And believe me, it seems to have far ranging meanings.  One thing does appear clear, that we in the ergonomics profession have matured from trying to do laboratory-like research in the workplace to being expected to consistently produce results in a predictable fashion.  For us practitioners with roots in science and research this can create a dilemma. How do we overcome this tension between science and business.  It seems that one requirement is a repeatable process that provides consistent data across a wide variety of situations.  In other words, it seems like we need convergence in the way we do things so it can be explained in the same way over and over again to different people.  Unfortunately very few folks can claim to do this.  Or at least I haven’t talked to many. This may why Eastman Kodak was so impressive.  They had a consistent methodology and process for ergonomics. The voluminous and ahead-of-their-time books spoke to this detailed process.  However, it would be interesting to know if such an approach would stand up in today’s need for continuous improvement and ever-shorter improvement and change cycles.

I could continue on this theme for a long time.  I will stop for today. Next blog I will continue on this theme of the business of ergonomics – unless someone raises a more exciting discussion over the next few days. 

Please chime in.  Contact me and add your thoughts. 
Stephen Jenkins