Learn how to implement a proactive ergonomics process in five common sense steps.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” — Anne Frank
As discussed in last week’s article, a proactive ergonomics process identifies and reduces ergonomic risk factors before injuries occur. You’ll be making workplace improvements that make the world — especially workplace athletes’ world — a better place.
Elements of a proactive ergonomics process
At the core of proactive ergonomics is the decision to adopt a proactive approach to managing risk. From last week’s post:
“The advantage of a proactive ergonomics process is that you can stop guessing and start knowing what the risk is in your workplace.
Then you will have the opportunity to focus your efforts on workplace improvements rather than reacting to another injury.
You can get in front of the problem rather than deal with the consequences of a reactive approach.”
Assess risk levels and implement solutions before injuries occur
A core element of proactive ergonomics is assessing risk levels and implementing solutions before injuries occur. It’s about identifying and controlling risk factors already in your workplace.
Develop design guidelines for new job tasks
The other core element of proactive ergonomics is to implement ergonomics in the design phase of new job tasks. The “prevention through design” approach is the most cost effective and the best use of your resources moving forward. The earlier ergonomics is considered, the better.
Five steps to implementing proactive ergonomics
The following five step process is a common sense path to implementing proactive ergonomics.
1. Make the business case for ergonomics
The willingness of leadership to adopt a proactive and best practice approach to ergonomics often depends on the culture of your facility. If you’re having a difficult time getting leadership on board, it’s especially important to make the business case for ergonomics. Tie ergonomics process objectives to other organizational goals and initiatives leadership cares about.
Audit your facility to benchmark it against a best practice facility so you understand and can communicate the improvement opportunity.
2. Establish a program guidance document
A program guidance document is an important tool that establishes goals, roles and responsibilities, timelines, audit criteria and training objectives. You will circle back to this document often as part of the continuous improvement process.
3. Engage people throughout the organization
Engage people throughout the organization and embed proactive ergonomics directly into the culture. Begin by communicating leadership support and then follow that up with a marketing and roll-out plan that follows through on this commitment.
Education and training for people at all levels of the organization generates awareness — which is important — but also must translate into the knowledge and skills necessary to help people fulfill their responsibilities in the process. Everyone must be equipped with knowledge, skills and resources they need or they will get frustrated at leadership’s lack of actual commitment to the process.
4. Implement the process
Now it’s time to implement the process and begin assessing ergonomic risk factors and implementing solutions to control the risk. As you begin to learn more about the risk levels and problem areas in your facility, you can begin to create design standards and guidelines that will help you scale solutions in the most cost-effective way.
5. Measure both leading and lagging indicators
We recommend both leading and lagging indicators to measure ergonomics process performance.
- Leading indicators: A leading indicator is a measure preceding or indicating a future event used to drive and measure activities carried out to prevent and control injury.
- Examples include percentage of job tasks assessed for ergonomic risk factors, percentage of job tasks with little or no risk and number of effective workplace improvements made.
- Lagging indicators: Lagging indicators measure a company’s incidents in the form of past injury statistics.
- Example include injury frequency and severity, OSHA recordables, lost workdays and worker’s compensation costs
Using a combination of activity metrics (leading) and bottom-line metrics (lagging) keeps your organization focused on getting things done and accountable for the results of those efforts.
Make the world better, one job task at a time
Follow the five common sense steps in this article to implement the core elements of proactive ergonomics into your facility. Your workplace athletes will thank you for it, and the world will be a better place because of it.
