injured worker

One of the things I frequently do as a consultant for my clients are ergonomic assessments because of this I often get asked about what an ergonomic assessment is and what does it involve?  Well, I hope to answer this question and some others about ergo assessments in this blog series.  Of course, ergo assessments can vary as what I look at and analyze depends on what it is I’m specifically assessing but the nuts and bolts of an assessment are the same.

Basic components of an assessment

The second phase of creating a project brand, in our case an injury prevention (IP) project, is planning.  This is the four blog in the series on Branding:  Why All Projects Need One.  In the last blog I discussed the first phase in the brand campaign which was the pitch.  Phase 2 is the PLAN.  This is fairly self-explanatory—the Plan identifies the project goals, activities and steps involved.  It is also defines who is involved from the key stakeholders to those who will have minimal but necessary involvement.  The roles and responsibilities of each person/group involved defined as well a

“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.

Part 2 of They’ve Been Trained, So Why Do They Still Not Do (fill in the blank)?

In my previous blog I asked the question, “Why Do Employees Still Not Do What They’ve Been Trained?”  It’s been my experience that they are at least four common reasons why employees don’t do what they’ve been told.  The first one I want to focus on is habits. Habits are a behavior that we repeat and repeat without even thinking.  For all habits, the brain-body connection is well worn in.  We do it without thinking so to stop doing it requires us to think about it.

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?

Managing Risks and Optimizing Human Performance

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.

All too often I hear safety professionals lament that safety is compromised for increased productivity.  They tend to be dismayed by the fact that the focus of the operations managers and corporate level executives are to maximize efficiency and productivity as much as (humanly) possible.  For the safety professional, the focus is on employee health and safety.  It’s not the safety professionals don’t want profits and it’s not the corporate executives want injured employees, however if the corporate executives are forced to choose between safety and productivity the choice will almost alway

When I left the “comfort” of the my corporate position to start Kelby Ergo Design I was immediately struck by two things:  1) the majority of the people I met at business networking events hadn’t heard of my title, “ergonomist”, although most had heard the term ergonomics, and 2) they shared similar misconceptions of what ergonomics was and the impact it could have on business.  I thought I’d address the top three common “myths” that I see as an ergonomist.  There are definitely more than three but I’ll save those for other posts.

Myth #1—Ergonomics is just about safety