“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.
Brands. All organizations have them. Every product has one. Nearly every service has one. Even some people have them (think Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey). I’ve worked in some companies and some of their customer service and wellness programs have them. But rarely, if ever, do ergonomics projects have them. Why is that and why is it important?
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.
“It was just an accident.” “S/he made a bad judgment.” “S/he behaved unsafely.”
Do any of those causes sound familiar to you? We’ve all heard these or similar reasons for why an injury occurred. However, are they the true root cause? The “cause” for injuries or accidents is typically attributed in some way to “human error”.
Have you ever had an experience with a product or a machine in which you said to yourself, “This is a poor design”? Or, have you ever walked into a space (office, store, restaurant, etc.) find yourself saying, “Why is this here and not over there?” or “What were they thinking (when they designed this)”?
Continuing on with my blog series on the four common reasons why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained, I’m going to take a closer look at perception. The scenario I’m going to use as the basis for this is one which is occurring in many hospitals and long term care facilities around the country: caregivers not using safe patient handling (SPH) equipment to move patients. This has become a source of frustration for many SPH program leaders. As you will see, the lack of SPH equipment use could easily involve all 4 reasons but for this blog we’ll focus only on perception.
In my last four blogs I’ve discussed four common reasons that contribute to why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained and know to do: habits, perceptions, obstacles and barriers. Before we can address them we obviously need to determine the root cause. We need to know the answers to these questions:
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.
I’m going to continue my blog series about why employees who’ve received safety and/or ergonomics training still don’t do the things they were trained to do. It’s been my experience that there are at least four main reasons for people not to follow through on what they’ve been taught. In my last blog I talked about habits. Today, I’m going to cover the second common reason: perceptions. Perception means the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.
