Safety vs. Productivity? or Safety AND Productivity?

Are productivity and efficiency mutually exclusive of employee safety, comfort and zero injuries?  The answer is obviously no.  However how many meetings and projects occur between management, quality and employee health and safety departments?  This answer is almost never.  Why? 

This is one of the things that has frustrated me as an ergonomics professional.  I have never understood why there is such a chasm between safety and performance.  When injuries occur management meets with someone from the health and safety.  When management wants to increase production they meet with someone from quality who knows lean and process improvement.  I have seen many instances where safety changes have slowed down production and where lean/process improvement changes have ignored human factors and/or negatively affected worker safety.  This shouldn’t happen and I propose wouldn’t happen if everyone was around the same table at the same time. 

There are many aspects to this and I don’t pretend I know all of them.  Part of it can be on the safety professionals who just think about how to make the situation safe but don’t account for or don’t know the impacts on productivity/efficiency.  Management tends to lump safety into the same category as workers compensation as treat it strictly as a “cost of doing business”.  I’ve worked with lean/process improvement specialists who discount the need to include ergonomics into their plans. 

What I firmly believe is that employee productivity/performance/efficiency and employee safety/comfort/well-being are intertwined.  When I work with a client I listen to them tell me about the “problem”.  I then ask multiple questions, assess, observe to determine if the “problem” is truly the problem (root cause) or if it is a symptom.  I had one employer whose employees had a high incidence of lower back injuries state to me that they’ve trained them over and over on good body mechanics and safe lifting techniques and still have problems.  My question was why were the boxes on the floor in the first place?  Why were they being carried over a few feet?  Where did the boxes come from?  Where were they going? Etc.  The “problem” the employer identified wasn’t truly the problem.  It was the symptom from a poorly designed process.  The “safety” solution was also the “productivity” solution.  Without going into details we modified the space and methods for handling the products.  The results were that the employees didn’t have to lift the boxes from the floor which eliminated the back injuries and the time required for this task was reduced which increased efficiency.  Both results benefited the employer’s bottom line. 

There are many other examples I could mention.  Suffice it to say that as an ergonomist my goal is to improve the quality of work life for employees while having a positive financial impact for the facility, i.e. safety AND productivity.