| Happy New Year! We are now well into January and it’s business as usual again. Budgets have been finalized, goals have been set, and it seems like the year is already in full swing. Ergonomics is on the agenda again, and this is the year to really make a difference. It is now a matter of using the resources available to determine what it’s going to take to raise your program to the next level, and knowing what your options are is half the battle.
Kaizen Events
Kaizen is a Japanese term that translates to “change for the better.” During these events, cross-functional teams commit to making simple changes that will improve the working conditions in a defined area of your facility within a given timeframe. They are a great way to get a new ergonomics process off the ground or to revitalize a stagnant one that needs a little bit of wind in its sails. These events typically focus on making simple, low-cost improvements to generate awareness and fuel the momentum needed to sustain an all-hands-on-deck continuous improvement effort.
Risk Assessments
Whether you are in a reactive state and responding to a seemingly never-ending list of worker’s compensation claims and injury investigations, or trying to be proactive and mapping out where your high-risk jobs are before injuries occur, it is essential to have up-to-date risk assessments of all your jobs on file. For any job, it is important to have a Physical Demands Analysis (PDA) available that details the physical requirements of each task. A PDA can quickly determine whether a newly hired employee or a person returning to work from an injury is physically capable of performing required job tasks. On the other hand, having a riskmap is an excellent way to be proactive and quantify the presence of ergonomic risk factors across your facility before injuries occur. A risk map enables you to rank-order your jobs from highest risk to lowest risk and prioritize where you are going to focus your efforts moving forward.
Training
Demonstrating the value of ergonomics through effective training sessions will certainly raise awareness of the importance of having a strong ergonomics process. Types of training can range from ergonomics awareness training for hourly employees over a lunch-and-learn session, to teaching your safety leaders how to conduct risk assessments, to training your engineers in using ergonomic design guidelines. As long as you can speak the language of the stakeholders involved to demonstrate the value of having a solid ergonomics process, you will be successful. For example, if you can demonstrate to the plant manager that providing funding to support ergonomics initiatives is going to have a positive impact on the bottom line of the business, you will get buy-in. Similarly, if you can show that improving working conditions is going to reduce turnover rates, you may quickly become friends with the HR Manager. And at the same time, if you can enlighten your manufacturing engineers on how to improve productivity by incorporating ergonomic design guidelines into workstation setups, they will have your back.
Tracking Software
It is always a good idea to have a secure database in which to store your most important information, and with technology moving toward cloud computing, a web-based system is the way to go. An online system can provide varying levels of access depending on the roles and responsibilities of those using it. For example, the North American Director of Health and Safety may need to monitor how his or her program is progressing from a corporate standpoint, whereas a regional Safety Leader may only require access to information from a defined list of sites. Online databases can also incorporate a computer-based training component, which can be a very cost-effective way of providing refresher training to a large number of employees in a short amount of time.
Here at Humantech, we’ve set our New Year’s resolutions and fully intend on seeing them through. 2012 is the year to make a difference. Our mission is to provide all the elements for our clients to achieve effective, efficient, and sustainable improvement in all business metrics related to ergonomics. This time of year most people are talking about New Year’s resolutions…we prefer to talk about New Year’s solutions. |
