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One of my recent clients that had me analyze the design of their products also asked to me assess the human factors of the brand and associated marketing and instructional material.  What was very interesting for me was to learn about the process they undertook when developing a brand campaign for their products.  That experience serves as part of the basis for this blog.  There is much to be learned and can be applied from an external customer focused branding/marketing campaign to an internal project branding/marketing campaign.  The framework and phases involved serve as the foundation o

“Image Is Everything!”  That was the branding/marketing message for Canon cameras back in the early 90s.  Tennis star Andre Agassi was their spokesman for TV and print ads.  In writing this second part of my blog series on branding this branding message immediately came to mind.  Why?  Because more often than not the approval and success of a project depends on its image—whether inside or outside an organization.

What is ergonomics?  What is human factors?  How can human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) help my business?

“Safety is an attitude.  How’s yours?”  That tagline was one I created for one of my clients as a way to get the staff and management excited and bought into the new injury prevention system that I was assisting in design and implementation.  Attitude is vitally important to success whether it’s in regards to safety, sales, marketing or performance.  A company’s attitude towards employee health, wellness and safety will go a long way into attaining zero work-related injuries.

Do you think it’s possible to eliminate work-related injuries (in your company)?  Is your (company) goal to have zero work-related injuries?  I frequently ask these two questions to my clients.  The answers (and looks on their faces) are quite varied.  There are those who immediately answer the first one by saying it’s “impossible” to have no injuries.  I’ve sometimes gotten the sense that they think I’m nuts for even asking the question and thinking that it is possible.  With the given response to the first question, their obvious answer to the second question is “No”.

The last of the four common reasons for why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained to do are barriers.  Think of barriers as a thick and high brick wall.  There is no way for a worker to do what you’ve told them because a wall is in their way.  The workers lack the equipment and tools or authority to they need to do their job as they’ve told.  Barriers must be addressed and removed as soon as possible as they prevent the ability to perform the task, perform the task safety and/or take safety precautions that control their and their coworkers’ exposure to risk.

Have you ever seen an employee continue to do some “unsafe act” or not use the safety equipment provided to them just after they’ve been trained in the new policies and procedures?  If you have you’re certainly not alone.  Unfortunately, this is a common frustration of safety professionals everywhere.  I’ve personally experienced this on more than one occasion, especially early on in my career.  I’ve also had colleagues ask me if this has happened to me and what I’ve done about it.

It’s often tough to admit that you’re average, especially when comparative measures show your competition is better than you.  This is especially true for company leaders when they compare themselves to their competitors on customer satisfaction, productivity levels and profit margins.  The C-suite is frequently looking at these scores and trying to improve them in order to improve the bottom line.  Is this the case when companies compare themselves on employee engagement and safety scores?

In Part 1, I stated that successful ergonomics programs manage risk and optimize human performance and reviewed key elements of a successful program.  Now that we know ergonomics is not about safety, we need to convince the C-level and operations people that ergonomics truly is a worthwhile investment.

ROI Justification Models

There   review the top 3 ways that can be used to convince management to implement ergonomics programs.  Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses.

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.