Who Is At Fault When Management Doesn't Care About Ergonomics?
Over my nearly 22 years of experience working with various industries I’ve had the opportunity of working with many HSE, occupational health, HR and sometime quality professionals who are in charge of or want to implement ergonomics in their organization. It is during these occasions when these professionals want to talk about their relationship with management and/or their executive team or I should more accurately say their lack of relationship with management. Most want to vent about how management doesn’t care about employee health, safety and wellness and get advice about how to deal with inaction or conflict with management.
Many are surprised when I say to them the real problem likely is with them (us) and not with management. Ergonomists are really “employee and system performance professionals”. It’s not the managers don’t care about ergonomics; however, many managers just don’t understand ergonomics. In addition, most don’t know how to use it as a competitive advantage instead of treating it as an expensive option. Remember management’s main job is to create a profitable and reliable organization. They just don’t realize that ergonomics lies at the core of that need.
It’s not enough for “employee and system performance professionals” to know all there is to know about ergonomics—even if you are an ergonomist, there are so many specialty areas and facets of ergonomics and human factors that it would be impossible to know everything. Instead, it is your job to educate management and never allow them to make uniformed decisions. All too often it is the “employee and system performance professionals” who haven’t done an adequate job of communicating the importance of ergonomics to management. Consider the following 3 issues why “employee and system performance professionals” are having problems:
1. Language of Management: Managers talk about sales, profit, loss, output/hour, error rate, etc. Each of these categories has unique words with specific meanings and numbers that are used to measure progress towards meeting the scorecard. Ergonomics enhances profitability, reduces loss, increases output/hour and minimizes error so why isn’t Ergonomics a prime category? Because we failed to educate our managers.
2. Language of Ergonomics: Managers don’t understand the language of ergonomics. Managers tend to think that ergonomics belongs “in the office” or deals with “posture”, “carpal tunnel”, “stretching” or “lifting”. (If you think that’s what ergonomics means then you are adding to the problem) Managers are extremely busy people (just like you) so they expect you to be able to explain what you do in a few sentences at most. Nuts and bolts: You need to plan your approach, know what you need to say, get to the point and most importantly put it in management terms. The “So why should I care?”…answers the impact to the bottom line!
3. Self-Image Issue: In most organizations, those who reside in HSE, HR, Risk Management, Occ. Health and Quality are often un- or underappreciated and are under constant scrutiny to provide justification of their existence. Even in good economic times these areas are often down-sized, budgets are cut or eliminated. This can definitely talk a toll on one’s self-image. “Employee and system performance professionals” (notice how positive that title is) need to take charge of improving the performance of their organizations by improving the performance of their people and the systems within their organization. This is where value is shown, profits are realized and status & respectability come from.
So, what’s the solution to changing management’s minds? The solution to these problems doesn’t require wholesale changes in management or a new set of policies and procedures. The solution lies within our hands. We must keep in mind at all times that we serve at the discretion of management so we must learn and use their language if we want to help our organizations succeed and help ourselves at the same time.
What can you do right now? I’d suggest doing a self and department assessment to understand your credibility and influence with management and develop a different approach.