People + Process = Performance

5 Most Common Reasons Ergonomics Programs Fail: Part 6

Reason #5: Absence of Continuous Improvement—Real Time Metrics

If the CEO came to your office and asked, “How is effective is our ergonomics program today?” what would be your answer?  Would you even be able to answer?  What would your answer be based on?  What metric or measure would you base it upon?

Often times we measure ergonomics and safety success based only on the numbers and costs related to worker injury.  Those numbers, whether are good or bad, do matter, but they only matter for yesterday.  They don’t tell you what is going on today.

The reason I started with a lack of systems and systems approach as the #1 reason for ergonomics program failure is because without a well-designed system it is often hard to identify, define and collect meaningful real-time performance metrics.  The purpose is to focus on building into the system feedback mechanisms th

at alert you to success or “molehills”.  The reason we want to identify things in real time is so the problems are identified when they are small—before they turn into mountains.  We also want to know what’s going on in real-time so we can assess and determine what improvements we need to make so the ergonomics system is even better.  There are changes happening all throughout your company and facility each and every day.  If we aren’t on top of those changes and aren’t aware of the impact they have on the ergonomics program, we will soon find ourselves behind the “eight ball”, wondering what happened.  At that point, our response and attempt to “fix” things may be too little, too late.

The ergonomics project or program may be long forgotten as the company’s leadership is onto the next initiatives.

Let me briefly define metrics.  In order to have a metric (measure) we need to first define the performance objectives and then the performance goals.  The metric is the actual measure.  For example, a performance objective might be having ergonomics assessments completed with every new equipment purchasing decision.  The performance goal would be to have ergonomics assessments completed 100% of the time for new equipment purchasing decisions.  The metric would be the actual percentage that the ergonomics assessments were completed for new equipment purchasing decisions. (Harvard has a good site on performance systems, objectives and measures)

So, what do I mean by real-time metrics.  Well, first of all they should be leading or concurrent, i.e. trending the future or looking at today.  The type of metrics used will obviously depend upon the focus and goals of why ergonomics was started in the first place.   Let’s take a real simple real-time example.  Let’s say that there is an ergonomics committee.  The committee is the key driver and evaluator of the ergonomics system.  The performance objective for the committee would be that every member show up and participate in each meeting.  One performance goal would be 100% attendance.  The metric would be the actual number of attendance.  If one or more people couldn’t attend, then the coordinator should ask and find out “why?”  If they were sick or on vacation that would be acceptable excuses. However, if they “just forgot” or something else “more important” came up then that would be a potential warning flag that those members aren’t committed and may need to be replaced if attendance continues to be an issue.  [As a side note, did workers and supervisors have to apply to be on the committee?  After all, it should be a privilege to be on the committee in which their decisions affect the livelihood of the company and employees.]

The examples of objectives, goals and metrics for ergonomics systems are too numerous to go into for a blog.  I hope the example starts getting you to think about how to measure success (or gaps) today, not yesterday.

This concludes my blog series on the top 5 reasons why ergonomics (as well as other) programs fail.  Please let me know what your top 5 reasons would be.