Has your company implemented Lean or Ergonomics? Or, is your company more forward thinking and knew that both systems are best done in tandem and tried to implement them at the same time? How successful have you been?
“What’s the Brain Got to Do With It?” The answer in one word would be EVERYTHING! How many times have you written the best policies and procedures, trained employees on the proper way to do things and provided them the right tools and equipment for them to do their job safely and efficiently and yet they still don’t do what they were trained to do or as one safety manager said to me, “it’s like his brain just stopped working!” Let me tell you right now that your employees were thinking…just not thinking in the way you expect them to think. Stop banging your head against wall wondering “how could he/she/they have been so stupid” or “what happened to their common sense” or “s/he should’ve seen it coming” and use your Brain to make the job fit their Brain (actually it’s the same Brain I’m just assuming that if you’re reading this you are in charge of or involved in making the work happen).
In part 1 we looked at current business disciplines, their associated strengths and weaknesses and the reason for why a new strategy and approach is need for proactively and reactively solving productivity, efficiency and safety issues. In part 2 we are going to explore the power of L.E.S.S. ™
The Power of L.E.S.S. ™
Normally communication is a good thing, actually a necessary thing in order for work to get done properly and in a timely manner. In fact, I encourage my clients to evaluate and improve their communication and communication processes with their employees. This makes rolling out new initiatives (such as Lean, Ergonomics, etc.) as well as general everyday work go smoothly with minimal frustrations, misconceptions or “mis-work”.
The CDC’s statistics regarding obesity in America is sobering when one considers the impact on our healthcare system and for employers who need to provide jobs that accommodate the physical characteristics that occur with obesity. According to the CDC, the percentage of Americans adults over age 20 who are obese is 35.9%. The percentage essentially doubles if t
Recently I gave a presentation at Safety 2013, ASSE’s professional development conference called the “Nuts and Bolts of Effective and Sustainable Ergonomics Programs”. The “Nuts and Bolts” focused on the management system of ergonomics, not on the tools and methods used for ergonomic assessment. I did this because the reasons most programs, whether ergonomics or other, fail is because they lack a management/business system. Thinking of ergonomics in terms of a management system isn’t routine or common to most people who are responsible for ergonomics. This was verified by the comments I
It seems as though everyone is doing Lean these days—Lean Office, Lean Manufacturing, Lean this and Lean that. Lean is a very good process improvement methodology started by Toyota.
Last week I presented the first 5 reasons of my Top 10 list for why ergonomics (and lean) programs failure. Here are the next five:
“We started off well but things have fallen by the wayside”. “Employees were trained, they were enthusiastic and then things just started slipping away…” The previous two statements are ones I’ve heard from companies who wanted to do ergonomics that then proceeded to get a program together and implemented who currently find themselves with a program “in name only”. Common reasons given for demise of the program were that other priorities came up that took precedence or people just got tired of doing it. There can be numerous reasons given for program failure but with a closer look can b
