Communicating the Value of Ergonomics to Business Stakeholders

okay i'm going to give you the brief introduction to our presenter blake mcgowan blake is a certified professional economist at the human tech and he is a member of the acgih aiha and hfes a lot of the professional association he is also the past officer for the aiha ergonomics committee at the human tech blake oversee a large-scale economic initiative that helped organization building internal ergonomic solutions and using the software uh methods he leads the ergonomic research group at human tech to incorporate the latest technic technologies into the human texture software solutions and he also consults with niosh and university and a lot of people from different organizations to advance their economic services and i've been to many presentations by blake at the national and international conferences and i always learn a lot of a great deal about his new insights and i thought it's a great opportunity to bring him to niagara so today we actually have a live audience at the laboratory in cincinnati ohio and right now it's minus degrees through baco and hopefully you have a warm room in your own room listening to this weapon art and uh without further ado we welcome blake um for his presentation thanks jack i appreciate the introduction and honor to be here in cincinnati at the nash facility to share some information about how to communicate the value of ergonomics to stakeholders and what i mean by stakeholders is business stakeholders and just a little preview for the presentation for those of you online i'm going to share a little bit of information on how to communicate the value of ergonomics for an initiative as well as a ergonomic intervention but i hope we can kind of wrap up my portion of the presentation about half an hour and create a good discussion as jack had mentioned i've given this presentation a few times at the human factors and ergonomics society conferences as well as the international ergonomics association uh conference and we continue to build on this this information to kind of provide some support for people in industry as well as practitioners of you know how can we advance what we're trying to accomplish and so i'd like to kind of introduce our approach our story of how to communicate the value of ergonomics to stakeholders right so it's just at a very high level um you know things that we'd like to kind of cover today are listed out here i think it's always great to start off with a reminder of what ergonomics truly is and i think there is some differences in definitions across the globe i have a preference for one definition over another and i think sometimes we undersell our value and i'd like to cover that first um kind of list out giving you a preview of who who i feel or what research tells us who are all the benefactors of having a good ergonomic initiative and i think there's a lot more than just the health and safety professional and then follow that up with what are the actual benefits that each of those benefactors receive and support that with with data and um you know really to kick off that uh that discussion the third bullet point we're talking about what are really the true social as well as financial um i guess uh costs of having poor ergonomics and for most of us we understand those are musculoskeletal disorders or msds and then going through some of those benefactors what can they really get from from ergonomics and again i hope there's a lot of questions and discussions and and your feedback uh please feel to type questions during the presentation and we'll ask those or answer those at the end so i think this is a point that as ergonomists that we sometimes overlook and i think it's valuable to go back and remind ourselves really what is ergonomics and this kind of topic prompted my deeper thought about it when i was over at the iea conference and really talking about what is the value of ergonomics there and i i think we need to extend our definition beyond just msds to making sure we know that it actually optimizes human performance and what we'll see here next on the screen are are the actual definitions pulled from a couple of uh ergonomic related research related websites one being the international economics association as well as the hfes website and not to go through and read it all but the underlying areas i think are really important for us to remind to remember it's about optimizing human well-being and overall system performance and i think sometimes when we start to look at um sorry going back we're really trying to optimize the performance of that person making sure they perform things as best as possible maybe even thinking of ourselves as carbon-based machines that come with instructions and capabilities and and go beyond what sometimes we only focus on here in north america and here's the definition from cdc as well as niosh you know there's that really big focus on ergonomics being about reducing soft tissue injuries and you know maybe the emphasis of optimizing performance of people and that's not just contained to the the us when we look at the same definition on the ccohs website in canada they say ergonomics is all about reducing risk from ergonomic hazards in the workplace so what i want to share today is information to kind of take us beyond just focusing on msd risks but also understanding that those are a primary driver for why we do what we do there are huge social as well as financial costs to musculoskeletal disorders and we need to understand those and we also need to understand that that may not drive all practitioners or businesses to act there's really compelling data here that i want to share but it's not the only data that we can use moving forward so just at a high level i'd like to kind of summarize who benefits from good ergonomics and what are some of the values and then start to get into the details and hopefully those details will prompt some some questions this might be a little bit of an overwhelming graphic to look at at first but what we're trying to convey here visually is you know who are those benefactors and what are those benefits at that top row we have a series of graphics of of people and the bottom row are kind of the benefits that those individuals receive so starting in the top left hand corner the person with the yellow bump cap you know that is our employee obviously they benefit from having good ergonomics reduce discomfort improved comfort improved performance moving to the right it might be an individual who's in hr um maybe even someone who is part of um you know just the admin side of your facility and there are some benefits that they receive with regards to turnover as well as absenteeism moving further to the right we see an individual that might be associated with health and safety maybe even ergonomics and their benefits may include things like reductions in risk reductions and injuries reductions in cost associated with injuries moving further to the right we have production and we see there's a lot of connection between good ergonomics as well as good production especially with things like lean manufacturing we know that wasted motion or ergonomic risk factors are associated with wasted motion in many cases and there's ways that we can identify and quantify those impacts moving further to the right quality personally i feel the biggest benefit of good ergonomics is improved quality and a lot of data has been published in the last decade or so showing that there's massive benefits to quality based on good ergonomics so there's all types of things like improved quality reduction in defects reduction in cost to actually correct those quality issues and then moving further to the right there's a lot of data showing that people such as esg environmental social governance individuals corporate finance people and c-suite leadership all benefit from good ergonomics because ergonomics improves human capital as well as management systems for safety and so there's a big benefit there to individuals in the leadership side of the financial side good safety equals good performance in business okay so there's benefits that we traditionally think of kind of those employee well-being benefits that may rest in the departments of safety or hr and what i want to lay out today is their benefits even that go beyond that maybe business benefits such as increases in profit increases and sustainability quality as well as productivity now let's maybe step back a little bit uh to maybe update the information that's available to practitioners and people in business of what are the true social as well as financial cost to soft tissue injuries specifically musculoskeletal disorders and there's been a lot of great data being published over the last few decades and we're going to start maybe at the highest level we start to see this graphic presented a lot at ergonomic conferences especially internationally talking about the global burden of diseases where do msds and other type of soft tissue injuries fall within all the other types of diseases that humans experience when you take a look at this graphic it's it's kind of messy it's kind of detailed but at the top of the list it basically says that heart disease is the number one global burden of disease followed by respiratory issues cerebral vascular issues and hiv is number five and then when you go down the list number six is low back pain well one of the things i've never seen is a run or walk for low back pain i've seen runs and walks for hiv or heart disease or breast cancer but sometimes we we don't really realize how big of an issue soft tissue injuries as well as low back pain are from a global burden of disease standpoint as we go further down that list still in the top 25 we have neck pain as well as other msds so msds make up three of the top 25 global burdens of disease and if we just want to represent that in a little different format you know since 1999 through 2010 over a kind of a 20-year period we see from left to right on our screen in the graphic you know the number one through number 25 global burden of disease and things like low back pain at number six and neck pain and other msds are increasing over time this may be due to the fact that we're actually practically in an absolutely reducing risk in other areas and therefore these ratios are actually increasing for the soft tissue injuries but in some ways we're not really having any impact at all and this was a great slide that i saw from bill maheris talking about the years lived with this ability and low back pain was the number one cause in 1990 2005 and 2015. and his short summary of this was based on all the effort that we've been doing all the research we really haven't had a lot of impact and either we need to focus on this a little bit more or maybe change the way that we actually start to measure how we're affecting these types of diseases so low back pain msds are absolutely a global burden of disease that affects people and many of their years lived this is important stuff now we start to look at the occurrence of msds globally and there's data for all different types of parts of the world but three that i chose were the united states canada as well as europe you know kind of anywhere between thirty percent and 50 of uh of all injuries are msd related i mean this is a certain uh definitely a very high number and warrants our attention and we start to look at the costs associated with these these are kind of the direct costs of msds in the united states on an annual basis is about uh uh 500 billion dollars we start to incorporate the indirect costs it rises to about 339 billion dollars more and it just keeps elevating now when we start to look at individual types of msds we see that the upper extremity disorders have a lot of costs associated with them you know maybe on average it's about thirty thousand dollars in direct cost to kind of address an upper extremity issue that may be carpal tunnel syndrome it may be an upper extremity a shoulder issue now when we look at low back pain you know maybe on average is about fifty thousand dollars to address that issue these are significant dollars and what we're showing here are only the direct costs now we look at you know what are the leading causes of these types of workplace injuries i refer to the great data set from liberty mutual the workplace safety index you know the leading cause of those non-fatal occupational injuries are material handling you know the lifting the lowering the pushing pulling carrying throwing those types of activities are the driver of these msds and so if we look at the details from the 2017 liberty mutual workplace safety index we can see about a quarter of all non-fatal occupational injuries are related to these over exertions these pushing pulling carrying those types of activities looking further across the graphic all the way to the right repetitive motions are not as big of a concern as they used to be about three percent of all those uh workplace issues are related to repetitive motion the majority are due to forceful exertions now unfortunately if you start to do a little analysis of that data the percentage of non-fatal occupational injuries that are related to push-pull lift lower really hasn't changed over the last decade or two decades it is pretty consistent which probably tells us that we haven't found the cause or we're not doing the right things i think it's a little bit of both i think there are some really good approaches out there that we've shown that have reductions in these types of injuries but i think there are some interventions that we continue to use that have very little impact at all now the one thing that has changed with regards to these over exertion injuries are the costs they continue to rise and they probably will continue to rise over time so this is not good news for us and we need to figure out ways how can we engage our business partners to help us address these issues in the workplace all right from a health and safety standpoint perspective i think we all get it if we design the workplace for good ergonomics for what people can do we see benefits and we see those benefits across things like risk and injuries and costs and what i wanted to do is just step you through some of the data that's available and i think there's enough data in all of these categories it's just telling the story i'm not too sure if we need to gather new data or do more studies on what the benefits are i think we've got a good foundation of that so if we look at an individual site intervention and this is a study done by emil tompa out of ontario and one of the nice things that i like about this study is emil is an economist he's not an ergonomist he's an economist and he's taking an uh economic view of ergonomics and they went ahead and did an intervention in a small manufacturing facility in southern ontario and they showed some amazing benefits with very little investment you know things like first aid cases going down by just putting in some improvements long-term sickness reductions duration of those long-time sicknesses reduction of modified duty cases as well as casual absenteeism but i think one of the most important parts of this study was the show of the return on investment and i think this return on investment is in line with others that i've seen out there they invest roughly 65 000 and they got more than 350 000 back in value and most of the money they spent was on educating employees and safety team members and making simple improvements that their maintenance team could put in place we're not talking about complicated engineering solutions even the simple employee driven improvements have a return on investment and that return investment in general terms is basically 5x so for every dollar that you invest either in the people or the time or the actual intervention we are getting at least five times that benefit in business performance now if i were to take this type of argument over to production or to a quality department say i have a solution that can have a return on investment of 5x generally speaking that manager would say go ahead and get started what type of money do you need to allow us to do that now my experiences when we do that in health and safety we ask for money i don't think we always communicate that there is this type of benefit available now when we transfer from maybe just a site initiative to more of a corporate participatory initiative and this is data from nancy larson from 3m we see similar results you know over a 10-year period putting in a participatory ergo process where it's mainly driven by the employees we see all types of reductions in recordable injuries lost time cases compensation claims and costs associated with that and this data is pretty solid this is you know peer-reviewed data it's not just from inside of a you know a company this is this is has the highest standard of review data coming out of alcoa and and yale with from linda cantley had some really nice uh findings they basically said for every ergonomic intervention that they put in place they see approximately a seven percent reduction in risk which can be equal to about a five percent uh reduction in injuries for a hundred person years worked again there's some meaningful data uh from a health and safety and wellness standpoint okay expanding on on nancy's work uh over the the next 10 years of that deployment within 3m they really focused on what they called that macro ergonomic initiative transferring the responsibility of ergonomics from the participatory approach or the driven more to having systems in place where the engineers can make decisions early on an engineer can take on the ownership of it and we saw a continued reduction in things like risk incident rates case rates from the health and safety standpoint so no matter if it's a participatory intervention or it is a macro we are seeing those benefits to employee well-being follow-up this is uh from cummins uh they presented this at the applied ergo conference several years ago uh they show with just a participatory type of initiative they're showing massive reductions in incident rates related specifically to ergonomics okay and we see these types of results within you know not too many years we're seeing almost 50 reductions in one to two years and even more reductions over time and one of the favor uh i guess papers for me to cite is the gogen study out of washington which put together you know kind of pooled all the data that was out there and kind of summarize all that information in the late 2000s and it consistently shows that there are these well-being benefits across the full spectrum for good ergonomic interventions but going beyond that i thought one of the best parts that rich did was quantify the impact of different types of interventions really showing those interventions those engineering controls that eliminate the exposure or reduce the level of exposure are the ones that have the biggest impact and almost equally important showing the ones that reduce exposure time things like job rotation or things that rely upon behavior such as lifting techniques don't have as many benefits our real benefits come from engineering type of controls taking advantage of those hierarchy of controls and putting in those things that change the workplace rather than ask the person to change so going beyond just the health and safety person there are also benefits for human resources and i think we completely underexploit these benefits in business or in practice we may be communicating with this individual to share the importance of ergonomics but we're relying completely on data related to uh injury reduction risk reduction cost reduction there are tangible benefits to things like turnover and absenteeism you know some general data shows that you know anywhere between 20 to 50 percent of an employee's salary is required in order to find a new person to fill that job if it turns over and in today's labor market where the unemployment is so low and people can choose where they want to go to work and they can look at where those you know how nice it is to work in certain areas if someone chooses not to work in your area because i think it's physically demanding you're investing a lot of money to go find that new person and that has tangible cost to it so good ergonomics can reduce your turnover as well as your absenteeism and it's not absenteeism from having an injury it's just absenteeism saying i just don't want to be there because this is physically demanding maybe even more important to communicate to the human resources person is what type of impact does ergonomics have on employee engagement and this is a survey that we sent out to our current clients at the human tech a few years ago of asking them what are some of the benefits that you get from deploying a systematic ergonomics initiative and we gave some choices and there was also options to write in and kind of to our surprise our client said that the one of the number one or the number one benefit from deploying a systematic ergonomic initiative was employee engagement above risk reduction above management involvement it is engagement it's a way to engage all their employees on helping them make their workplace more effective and efficient and allowing their employees to be part of the job improvement process so i thought that was really surprising information but but meaningful because we do know that if you have an engaged employee they can be up to 20 more productive than just a normal employer or someone who's disengaged so this is meaningful things that have you know an impact on business performance and a few years ago i had an opportunity to participate in the harvard human capital project through the chsh group and one of the the participants stood up and was talking about the impact of health and safety on on business and and said something that i thought was pretty profound and specifically with regards to health and safety and ergonomic they said you know the ergonomic condition of the workplace reflects stakeholders respect for the employee and he said you know it gives the employee a clear understanding of how my boss either does or does not respect me and i thought wow that that's a pretty pointed statement and in order to have people that are engaged in the workplace they need to feel trusted and respected and if they have a work environment that maybe doesn't meet their needs or they don't feel that leadership or management is interested in making their work environment more comfortable for them they're going to be disengaged now if leadership and management is engaged and they respect the person and they show that by actually providing a workplace that meets their needs i think there's benefit to that all right now transitioning to operations and i think there's some really strong data here that uh at least in my experience when i've communicated this to people in production or manufacturing in quality they're often surprised but they they see it and they just weren't aware of it and there's a lot of good data and the one that i want to share here is uh from virginia tech from mari nussbaum they did a really nice study here with boeing talking about um the impact of adjustability on things like quality and defects in production they showed a very strong correlation between if we can reduce msd risk in the workplace we can increase performance they have some good studies that show that if i provide more adjustability in the work environment i can get the task done faster with less time between tasks better quality less defects i think one of the interesting things about this one is if you just provided a simple solution that really didn't solve the problem it wasn't very beneficial you actually have to go ahead and address the root cause of the problem just putting in kind of a low end solution doesn't work you have to put in a meaningful solution following up on the data from emil tampa their study on just showing that participatory ergonomic initiative they showed that those simple improvements had at minimum a one percent increase in productivity and a five percent increase in product uh sorry uh quality one percent increase in quality and five percent increase in productivity again if you would just if you were to share that with someone in production and say i have an engineering solution that can do these types of things you're very likely to get funding to do that one of my favorite studies comes out of scandinavia from volvo and faulk has done a series of great studies on the impact of msd risk on the quality of your your product had a lot of data that was being able to use for the study and basically what she did is she put every job within the wolves facility in one of three categories either either a low risk category for msd risk a moderate risk or a high risk and basically if you look at the graphic in the bottom left-hand corner it's we're trying to quantify the number of quality errors per msd risk level and it's normalized to low risk and basically if the job has medium or high msd risk it has anywhere between four and five times the number of quality errors i think that's pretty impactful now the failure rates if you look at the bottom center graphic for medium and high risk msd risk jobs we have anywhere between four and a half and six and a half times the failure rates and then the bottom right hand graph the cost to correct quality errors is anywhere between six and eight times more expensive compared to for sorry moderate high risk jobs compared to low risk so we know that we have more errors we have more failures and we incur more costs for jobs that are higher risk there's more quality issues associated with higher msd risk i think that message needs to be communicated more to quality managers and lastly how should we communicate with the c-suite there's been a lot of good data published on the impact of good health and safety management systems on stock performance corporate credit ratings sustainability and it's starting to get noticed by investors investors are really interested in investing in green companies in companies that show sustainability that show transparency and i'm hearing more and more from health and safety directors as well as vps that their ceos are asking them for information to share with their investor relations people because investors who are looking to spend or invest a lot of money are interested in their injury rates and what they're doing to improve employee well-being a lot of this data had come out of or i guess maybe the start of this data has come out of the the harvard human capital initiative and uh an early study by aaron bernstein and larry beeferman has shown that human capital which is all those skills and and abilities that people bring to work if you invest in human capital it is material to business performance which basically means the more that you invest in your your people or support your people the better that your company will perform from a financial standpoint and this data has been backed up by multiple studies from economists okay the study on the far left hand side the first one under figure one is from fabius it's a group of economists as well as physicians uh occupational physicians who did a couple say showing that if i were to mythically invest ten thousand dollars in the s p 500 over a duration of 12 or 13 years and compare that to mythically investing 10 000 into companies who have received awards for being really good at safety and safety culture and they found that if i would have invested ten thousand dollars in the s p 500 between 1999 and 2012 i would have lost 76 dollars if i would have invested 10 000 in the 29 companies that had received safety culture awards i would have made over seven thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars so that is uh material to business performance we are showing a direct correlation between safety systems and the management of those safety systems and business performance now they thought well this this may not be true let's try and replicate this with a different safety culture award and then get sold did a follow-up study with a different safety award and showed a similar difference you know outperforming the s p 500 companies that invest in safety management and safety culture outperform the s p 500 now as a result of that you're starting to see a lot more companies being open and transparent to sharing this type of information with investors now in my experience years ago maybe in the in the 2000s if i would have asked a company to share their injury and illness data with me you get a lot of strange looks and say no we can't share that and even if you try to go on a website it might be hard to find and so as you know a few years ago in 2011 data from the s p 500 500 shows that only maybe 20 percent of companies were willing to share that type of information on you know the employee well-being information now over time as data is showing that this sustainability or human sustainability information is important to business performance investors are starting to ask for it and companies are more willing to show it and they're a lot more willing to be transparent so in 2017 85 of companies are willing to share this information because they know it's related to business performance in the last uh study i'll show and this is kind of an extension of the s p 500 research intelligence group they looked at corporate credit ratings and they looked at the impact of environmental social and government governance or esg factors on corporate credit ratings and really a corporate credit rating is the ability for a company to borrow money and get access to money and they said that um about 12 percent oh sorry but about four percent of all of the corporate credit rating changes and there's thousands and thousands of those that occur in a year are impacted by social factors and human capital management and safety management were the primary drivers of those social factors now if you have a poor human capital management system or poor safety management system it can actually reduce your corporate credit rating and that reduction in the corporate credit rating may drop your stock price by 10 to 20 percent now that's some good data to maybe share with your c suite now there's also evidence that if you have good human capital management as well as good safety management it can actually increase your corporate credit rating which in turn can actually increase your stock price by 10 to 20 percent so the things that we do in our safety systems in managing people in ergonomics by improving employee well-being has an impact on business performance now kind of summarizing before we open this up for questions i think we should maybe start to think of the graphic i showed earlier with i started off on the top left hand corner was the employee maybe as practitioners people in industry we may want to start our initial conversations with a c-suite or our leaders or quality or production and maybe that's too much much to ask for at this point but at least we should start to engage them to help them understand that what we're trying to accomplish has a positive impact on what they're trying to accomplish let's try to bring in people from beyond just health and safety let's include people from human resources and production quality esg investor relations you know those types of people into what we're trying to accomplish and build support because there are meaningful and tangible benefits to all of us and if i were to summarize all those benefits into a simple graph and i've shared this with a couple other researchers who do work in this area i get a lot of head nods on this if we were to graph value on the vertical axis and influence on the horizontal axis and try to summarize the benefit of ergonomics you know we do have meaningful and tangible benefit to health and safety but we have even greater benefits to things like hr production operations and the c-suite if the things that we do in the field of ergonomics can improve our human capital management can improve our safety management where people are more interested in investing in our company i mean that shows tremendous value to the organization so kind of just to summarize and before we open it up to questions from um the participants online i think we we have this opportunity to take ergonomics beyond just employee well-being and into operational and business performance benefits so thanks jessica any questions yes so we've got our first question it says you shared a lot of great studies that can show the value of ergonomics however how do we get from the interventions our programs are doing to show the value of them maybe repeat the last part of it the value of it how do we get from the interventions our programs are doing to show the value of the intervention yeah if i understand the question i think we have to start off with understanding some of the data that's out there you know we typically start off with understanding that we have an injury we have illnesses we have costs associated with those and our interventions can actually reduce those over time but if we don't measure those types of things pre and post it's hard to show the value now going beyond just the health and safety benefits we also need to go ahead and say what's our production rates what are our quality defect rates in advance of putting in that intervention and then measuring those afterwards and showing those reductions i hope that answers the question okay are there any more questions online you can maybe take one from here in the audience and and wait for these folks to respond if there's any additional questions excellent there's been a lot of excellent talk and comments there so you may have done such a good job there aren't many questions okay all right well we're just waiting for the microphone to walk across the room and then we'll i know the cochrane report had said that there was a conclusion that there weren't enough ergonomic intervention studies that showed value and so i'm just wondering the timing of that and that that's that came out several years ago so i was just wondering if you could comment on on that yeah um you know i think there are some studies that show both a positive impact and a negative impact i think there's an opportunity that we just don't have to rely upon you know risk reduction injury reduction injury cost reduction when we're doing an ergonomic intervention and take our definition beyond msd and take it into what we're trying to do here is optimize human performance and when we do that we get employee well-being as well as massive business performance benefits as well and it's an opportunity for us as practitioners to start engaging with people from production as well as from quality to get that pre-data and we put the intervention in and then measure the post data and say you know we are actually seeing reductions in defects we are seeing increases in productivity uh we are seeing increases in employee engagement uh our ceos are giving us the thumbs up saying this is value added we are seeing reductions in turnover so i think we can go beyond just that that one single you know ergonomic related data set and blake how does human tech or your clients how do you measure employee engagement do you have a specific instrument for that yeah i mean it could be as simple as are you happier or not as happy after the the intervention there are some standard ones like the gallup polls there are engagement employee engagement polls and surveys that you can use and and measure that over time that's what we would suggest to our clients a lot of times we find that our clients have their own internal employee engagement survey or process all right the microphone's just walking across the room okay sorry about that um so as a follow-up to the first question i think they were asking are there any tools that you recommend using for showing return on investment i don't know if there is a tool that summarizes everything a risk assessment and there's many different risk assessments out there that can show a value return on investment from a risk standpoint so for example if you did a lifting equation pre and post would show value um and then it's just kind of straight data you know hey what was my quality rate issues how much money were we spending on an annual basis now what are we spending you can do motion time studies you can do type of burden you know what percentage of the employee is burdened i think that's a big one we find especially from a manufacturing standpoint a lot of companies have a a limit saying we can only burden the employee at x percentage and prior to the intervention maybe we were above that value and after the intervention we can actually go ahead and measure that we're below we've reduced that burden and i think the next question kind of flows into this same thought process this is how can you frame your data such as recordable rates and loss day work cases in a way that help others who are not an ergonomist understand the impact and how can these be used to indicate the risk of future injury yeah that's a tough one i mean i think risk is the best uh data point to use i'm always careful of using uh potential injury cost reductions like if i put in this intervention i'm going to reduce x number of dollars related to to injury cost that's i think that's sometimes a risky approach because you never know who is going to be doing that job someone may have moved from one industry to another showed up at your doorstep and you know using that perfectly designed intervention but hey they're they're just at a certain you know uh they've got enough trauma in their body already that they get injured um i'm always i like to use the the production data hey i can increase productivity by x and we can show that our hey we can reduce quality issues by x and that's related to reduction in quality costs and one of our niosh colleagues who couldn't make it here today ask how do niosh scientists communicate the value of ergonomic research that we do or interventions that we test and then get adopted so is that a question for me [Laughter] i don't know if jack wants to answer that question maybe repeat the question then it says um so how do niosh scientists communicate the value of ergonomic research that we perform or interventions that we test and then get adopted do you want to grab the mic jack or yeah it's always hard to communicate our research finding to the society and our practitioners and that's what we're trying to accomplish one of the things um like national maybe we start going to the c-suite conferences instead of occupational safety health conferences he has a so much larger impact and the safety conflict so that's one of the things we might want to consider seriously uh i don't know play about a comment on that absolutely one of the highlights from iea was interacting with three researchers that are primarily doing research in the field of ergonomics that they are located in either the department or school of business or in economics so you look at someone like emil tampa who is in the department of economics at university of toronto um the other german uh from the netherlands uh john duel school of business and then um a gentleman out of waterloo who's all just transitioned over to a school of economics and business so there seems to be a little bit a trend of people recognizing that you know what we do has an impact on business and and it's also an opportunity for other researchers who may not have the ability to get the funding for massive intervention studies or i guess epi studies to do research on you know what's the impact of ergonomics on business performance you know it doesn't take a lot of financial um i guess resources to do that type of of analysis so it's nice to see those types of uh researchers in business or economics and i hope that they continue to research the impact of good interventions on the bottom line i have another question um just follow up on brian lowe's question regarding the the measurements for employee engagement yeah as a researcher at nioh we've been doing a lot of research on majoring in social psychosocial effects including job satisfactions and i totally agree with you that most of the studies have shown that the just satisfaction is one of those strongest predictor for uh the msd risks or even the injury rate and so other than that um can you comment on what are the other measurements we can do as far as the employee engagement right if you go to see your clients and they are asking you to improve their uh their performance for certain jobs do you actually get their workers involved what kind of people would you get involved in terms of designing ergonomic innovations as well as uh uh measuring all the risks and stuff like that can you have them you know absolutely um i think when we engage with our clients we we definitely recommend a participatory approach you know the employee is a vital part of that job improvement process they're actively involved in the data collection of the work area to understand what those msd risks are we constantly engage with them asking questions on what do they like what do they dislike what do they have challenges with what would they like to see you know personally i feel the employee is the world's expert in that job there's no one else who has more experience no one else that does that job more than 40 hours per week and so they are a primary source of of knowledge as well as a solution i've always found that sometimes they're a little bit resistant to engaging with us as regardless or engineers not because they are feel for fear full of us i think they have had experiences in the past where we're not able to follow through we come up with a great intervention and then we fail to justify it to leadership to get funding so the second time i go back and talk to that same employee they go well i spent a lot of time with you and nothing happened so why would i spend time with you again but when we can actually show them that we can follow through it's amazing what further information they give and how much of a supporter they are for our initiatives and i always enjoy the situations where you interact with that individual that's really negative who hasn't had a good experience and then you solve their problem and they're your biggest cheerleader so i think one of the most important parts of ergonomics is engaging with that employee and then um solving that problem for them and then you know making sure that they help in future uh interventions uh they're they're a major source of of of support oops yep the right one so so employee engagement is is critical i think that's that's where i try to spend most of my time you know data collection i can do elsewhere and i think we've got tools to make data collection go a lot faster and understanding the risk the solution's only going to work if the employee actually likes it it was a long-winded answer to partially interrupted well that allowed a couple more questions to come through and we apologized for that um as they mentioned before we did have some snow and weather here and i think that was a snow blower that was outside the door that everybody probably heard um so let's get back says so from your experience to organizations that have higher rates of msd injuries typically have lower rates of other serious injuries so for example you had showed that 30 percent in canada or 30 in canada or in the u.s and 50 in canada does that mean that canada has done a better job of lowering other types of injuries or an inadequate job of lowering msds or is it hard to tell great question i don't have that information off the top of my head i think it's it's probably within you know the error of and just the sample you know basically if you're gonna summarize it you know forty percent of injuries are msd related i'm not too sure if one country is doing a better job than other or focusing on other things i think it's just that sample you know a good portion of non-fatal occupational injuries are msd related i think that's the message do you have any recommendations for intervention effectiveness studies absolutely what was shown here was the richard goggins study probably halfway through where basically he showed that you know interventions that focus on engineering solutions that eliminate the condition have the biggest impact followed by those engineering interventions that focus on reducing the risk have the next biggest and the ones that have the least amount of impact are the ones that focus on employee behavior and reduce exposure so i gave a couple examples of those one being job rotation and i'm really excited to see there's been some good data coming out of jack dennerlein's lab at harvard and northeastern and sean gallagher's lab at auburn and jacob elish's lab in wisconsin showing really the ineffectiveness of job rotation as an intervention and almost being a negative and then you look at say interventions that rely upon things like employee behavior such as lifting techniques you know there's a lot of good data from 25 years ago and from recently that so you know these have nominal impact so i think focusing on engineering that address the issue remembering the hierarchy of controls those are the interventions that have the biggest impact and i think this next question kind of follows into that same thing i don't know if you'll have anything additional to add it says do you know of any methods or tools to use to find leading indicators of ergonomic injury it seems that most data methods focus on lagging indicators yeah i mean risk is the biggest predictor you know we have a lot of good msd risk tools out there the nash lifting equation the snook and serial tables for push-pull carry you know the strain index the acgi-htlvs there's all types of good risk assessment tools out there some that are expert based like the ones i mentioned and others that are more you know i guess workplace or practitioner friendly or ergo team friendly there's a good suite of tools available and i think the last question well maybe two but last question is if i understood right should we start applying the ergonomics process with the ceo and leaders of industry i would highly encourage you to engage those individuals help them understand what type of impact and benefit ergonomics can have now it may not be the first person you talk to today but i think we hopefully we trend towards that let's start with engaging them and i think there's an opportunity there at least what i'm hearing from directors and vps of ehs is that the c-suite is asking those individuals for information to support investor relations to then provide that information to potential investors that door is now open let's take advantage of it that's all we have online

2022-04-23 00:45

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