Injury reports only show the tip of the iceberg. If injury statistics are the only thing guiding your ergonomics efforts, you’ll always be chasing the ambulance. There are better ways to identify jobs that may be creating problems—and better ways to decide when an ergonomics assessment is actually needed.
The goal isn’t to assess every job. It’s to use the information you already have to identify where ergonomics could make the biggest difference, then use an ergonomics assessment when you need objective information to understand a complex problem or evaluate potential solutions.
Here’s how I suggest prioritizing your ergonomics assessments.
Ask the Employees
Start with the people doing the work.
We use a confidential survey, which is admittedly easier to do as a third party. Employees can tell you what’s difficult about their jobs and how those difficulties affect their ability to perform.
That information can provide valuable baseline metrics. It can also help with cost justification later: if employees consistently identify a particular job as difficult, physically demanding, or disruptive to their performance, you have more than anecdotal evidence that something may need attention.
Employee feedback can also reveal problems that haven’t resulted in injuries—yet.
Ask the Supervisors
Don’t just ask supervisors what they’re hearing from employees, although you should ask them that too. Ask which jobs employees try to avoid when given a choice. Ask which jobs can only be performed by certain employees. Which employees are the most difficult to replace when they are away? Ask which jobs are most likely to cause a bottleneck, require extra people, or take more time than expected.
Then ask supervisors to show you what happens when mistakes are made. Does the product require rework? Is it returned? How are repairs made? If a customer complains, what is the process for correcting the problem?
These questions can help you identify jobs where the physical demands may affect more than injury rates. They may also affect productivity, quality, staffing flexibility, and customer satisfaction.
Visit the Quality Department
Quality teams can provide another useful perspective. Ask which jobs they most often have to support. Are workers missing key instructions? Do they have trouble with specific processes? Have they noticed trends in when errors occur? Could worker fatigue play a role?
And what does it cost to correct those quality issues? A job that generates repeated quality problems may deserve an ergonomics review even if the injury data doesn’t identify it as a high-risk job.
Ask HR
It’s not just about workers’ compensation statistics. Look for trends in absenteeism. Are certain jobs associated with higher absenteeism? When new workers are hired, are there certain jobs where onboarding is less successful? Are new employees more likely to leave during their first month because they struggle with the work?
What does it cost to hire and train someone who leaves after a short period?
Look at modified work, too. Are employees regularly placed on modified duties because they can’t tolerate a particular job? Are there certain jobs that are difficult to accommodate when someone has restrictions? What is modified work costing the organization?
HR data won’t tell you exactly what is wrong with a job, but it can help you identify where to look.
Look for convergence
Once you have input from employees, supervisors, quality, and HR, you will likely start to see trends. You may find jobs that can only be performed by experienced, physically strong workers. Those same jobs may be associated with more quality issues, especially when experienced workers are away.
Perhaps employees report that the job is difficult, supervisors say that people avoid it, quality reports frequent errors, and HR sees higher absenteeism or difficulty retaining new workers. When multiple sources point to the same job, you have a good reason to dig deeper.
You’ve also gathered useful information that can help you build the business case for change.
Just Do It, if you can
Here’s an important question: Do you always need an ergonomics assessment? If quality, production, HR, and workers are all pointing to the same problem, and the solution is obvious, easy, and affordable, do you really need a “deep dive” ergonomics assessment first? Sometimes the answer is no.
A detailed ergonomics assessment can be a significant investment of time. That investment makes sense when it helps you identify a feasible and effective solution. But if the hazard is obvious and there is an equally obvious way to eliminate it, you may not need weeks of analysis to confirm what you already know. For example, utility service workers might choose from several different tools to perform a physically demanding task, such as exercising valves or removing maintenance access covers. You might want to know whether one tool is better than the others. Or perhaps you need to understand whether some valves are more difficult or awkward to turn. Those questions can be answered through observation, measurement, and ergonomics assessment. But if someone offered a low-cost, powered solution that eliminated the heavy efforts associated with the task, you wouldn’t need an ergonomist to tell you that eliminating forceful, awkward, repetitive work is likely to be beneficial. Don’t assess something simply because you can, unless you have unlimited access to ergonomics expertise. If the problem and the solution are obvious, just do it.
Use ergonomics assessments to help solve complex issues
A detailed ergonomics assessment can be a significant investment of time. That investment makes sense when the assessment will help you answer a question that isn’t otherwise easy to answer. This is particularly true when exposure is variable or complex.
Consider the utility service workers, choosing from several tools to perform a physically demanding task that is done under a variety of conditions. Those questions require more than simply identifying that the job involves forceful exertion. You may need to observe the work, measure forces, compare tools, and determine how the exposure changes with different valve locations, heights, or operating conditions. That is where an ergonomics assessment adds real value.
More and more of our projects fall into this “complex exposure” category. We are rarely asked to assess a simple “hand-bombing” job anymore. While a highly repetitive task can often be assessed relatively quickly, a task involving multiple variables can require considerably more observation time, force measurements, and iterations through the analysis process.
For example, imagine a job involving valves with different levels of tightness, at different heights, using different tools. A useful assessment might need to answer several questions:
- Which tool requires the least force?
- Which tool is easiest to use at different heights?
- Which valves create the greatest exposure?
- How frequently does each scenario occur?
- Does the best tool for the most common situation also perform well in less common situations?
You can make the project faster by limiting the question. Instead of asking, “Which tool is best for this job?” you might ask, “Which tool is easiest to use for the most common valve?” That narrower question may be appropriate—but it can also lead to a recommendation that overlooks less common, but equally important, scenarios.
This is one of the reasons it is important to define the question before starting an assessment. The goal isn’t simply to produce an ergonomics score. The goal is to gather the information needed to make a better decision.
And sometimes, an assessment isn’t necessary at all. If workers, supervisors, production, and quality are all pointing to the same problem, and someone proposes a low-cost solution that eliminates the manual exposure altogether, you may already have enough information to act. You don’t need an ergonomist to tell you that eliminating forceful, awkward, repetitive work is likely to be better than continuing to expose workers to it. In those situations, the best ergonomics intervention may be to just do it.
Use the assessment when you need it—when you’re trying to understand a complicated exposure, compare potential solutions, quantify differences between tasks, or determine whether a proposed change actually reduces the exposure. The purpose of an ergonomics assessment isn’t to prove that a job is hazardous. It’s to provide objective information that helps you decide what to change, how to change it, and whether the change actually solves the problem.
What about in the office?
The examples above are drawn primarily from physically demanding work: pushing, pulling, lifting, gripping, and other manual tasks. Does the same data-gathering approach apply in office environments? It does.
Furniture is one of the most common sources of ergo problems in office environments. Adjustable chairs are often designed or selected to fit most typical-sized workers. Adjustable desks are also designed or selected around typical users. But there will always be workers who are smaller or larger in one or more dimensions and don’t fit the office standard. If lots of tall employees are complaining about the new desktop converters, chances are they don’t rise high enough (don’t get me started…). If there’s a rash of footrest requests despite recently implementing sit-stand desks, odds are the desks don’t adjust low enough for some employees.
You can use the same sources of information—employees, supervisors, HR, and others—to identify patterns and focus your efforts on office ergonomics issues. The underlying principle doesn’t change.
Use assessments to answer the right questions
Ultimately, ergonomics assessments provide objective information about exposure and risk. They can help guide the implementation process by ensuring that a proposed modification actually addresses the problem. But an assessment isn’t always the first step. Start by asking: What do we know about this job? Talk to the people doing the work. Talk to supervisors. Look at quality, production, absenteeism, turnover, and modified-work data. Look for patterns that point to the same jobs.
Then ask a second question: Do we know what needs to change? If the answer is yes, and the solution is straightforward, you may be better off implementing the improvement than spending time documenting an obvious problem. If the answer is no, that’s where an ergonomics assessment can be particularly valuable.
Use ergonomics assessments when you’re not sure what to change, whether a change is needed at all, or how different solutions compare. The goal isn’t to perform more assessments. The goal is to make better decisions about where ergonomics can have the greatest impact—and to use assessment strategically when objective information can help you get there.