Every business needs to pay close attention to the health and safety of employees. In any work setting, this should be a top priority. However, even the businesses that do a great job of preventing accidents and keeping employees safe sometimes overlook ergonomic safety. This isn’t a huge surprise because most ergonomic hazards are long-term health concerns rather than short-term safety risks. Nevertheless, no workplace can afford to overlook ergonomics for the sake of their employees.
Just like any other aspect of workplace health and safety, this process begins with an assessment. Naturally, if the economic assessment isn’t conducted properly, it will be hard to make the necessary changes to help protect employees from injuries and health concerns. Therefore, we wanted to outline the whole process of conducting an ergonomic assessment in the workplace so that companies can get the job done right.
The first step in an ergonomic assessment is always to review the information you already have. Even if you have never conducted an ergonomic assessment before, there will still be information about some of the equipment used in the workplace.
There should also be a history of workplace injuries and accidents that could be related to workplace ergonomics. This can even include employee illness logs, employee complaints, workers’ compensation reports, or anything else that’s related to workplace accidents and injuries.
All of this information is potentially relevant and could prove useful in creating a baseline for your ergonomic program and policy. Therefore, none of the existing data you have should be overlooked or dismissed without a close examination.
After looking at the things you already know, the next step is to conduct a comprehensive inspection of the workplace from an ergonomic perspective. This means observing employees as they go about their day-to-day tasks. Take notes on things that you see while also documenting the inspection with photos and video.
The more detailed you can be with observations, the more information you’ll have for putting together an ergonomic safety program. In all likelihood, changes will need to be made to the way employees do their jobs. However, you can’t know what changes need to be made unless you study the current state of things and ways that employees are putting themselves at risk of getting hurt.
Observing the work of employees is key to the review process, but so is speaking with employees directly. Ask employees about some of the things that were observed during the inspection. Try to find out why they do things a certain way and how they feel about the current state of affairs. It’s also important to ask them about how they were trained to do certain tasks and if they continue to do things the exact way they were first trained.
Keep in mind that not every employee is going to have the same job. That means ergonomic safety will be a little different for every individual. Therefore, it’s important to ask every employee about the strenuous nature of their job, how much fatigue they feel each day, and how much discomfort they feel from doing their job. Even if the focus is on ergonomic safety, allow employees to voice concerns about overall workplace safety as well.
If it helps, employees are sometimes more likely to be candid if they fill out an anonymous survey rather than speak in a one-on-one setting. The most important thing is to get honest feedback from employees about concerns they have and the best way to change them. Whatever method needs to be used to get that information is the best way to go, so keep that in mind when conducting an ergonomic assessment.
After speaking with employees, the next phase in the process is to start organizing all of the data that’s been collected. That data should be broken down as much as possible so that it can ultimately be applied to useful actions. Try to create a list of every job and every task that exists in the workplace and then compile all of the ergonomic data you have for each specific task. This will help you to break down everything that you know and everything that you need to know from an ergonomic safety perspective.
For example, what does the specific job task entail? What is the injury history of employees performing that task? What concerns were observed for that ask? What type of feedback did employees share about this task? All of this information needs to be in one place so that safety leaders can make sense of it and start to draw conclusions about the state of ergonomic safety in the workplace and what can be done to improve it.
Once the data has been gathered and analyzed, companies can conduct a full risk assessment with regard to ergonomic safety. This is where you perform a deep dive in an attempt to answer key questions. For example, what types of injuries are employees at risk of with a specific job
or task? What is the likelihood of an injury while doing that job properly? What is the likelihood of that injury if there is an accident or mistake? What could the severity of such an injury be? What can be learned from past injuries suffered during this type of work?
More times than not, these aren’t going to be easy questions to answer. But finding out the answers is going to be the only way to accurately assess ergonomic safety risks and begin the process of trying to create a safer workplace.
Following a formal risk assessment, companies can create a mitigation plan for how they will create a safer work environment from an ergonomic perspective. With any luck, the risk assessment would have led to some ideas about how to reduce the risk or severity of injuries. From there, it’s about deciding what steps are realistic, how quickly they can be implemented, and how they can be implemented.
Again, these probably won’t be easy questions to answer. But the more specific your answers can be, the easier it will be to start creating a safer work environment. There isn’t one method or plan that is going to be universally effective. This is why companies need to do the hard work of performing an ergonomic assessment and looking for specific ways to reduce the risk of ergonomic injuries and give employees the safe work environment they deserve.
Needless to say, conducting an ergonomic assessment takes a lot of time and effort. Then why should companies go through the trouble to do one? Here are some simple reasons why an ergonomic assessment is a good idea.
For starters, every employer should consider it their duty to protect the health and safety of employees. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly one million instances of musculoskeletal injuries in the workplace every year. It’s estimated that more than half of those are serious enough for employees to miss work. In other words, this is a problem across a variety of industries, which is why companies need to be aware of it and do more to protect employees from potential injuries.
Aside from being the right thing, making the financial investment in improving ergonomic safety is typically the best fiscal decision for companies. As mentioned, employees often miss work for musculoskeletal injuries, which can reduce productivity and cause companies to pay employees while they take sick days. This doesn’t even consider the cost of workers’ compensation claims if an employee has a serious injury. The bottom line is that there are both direct and indirect costs associated with workplace injuries, which is why most companies are better off investing in ways to prevent those injuries as much as possible.
Even if employees have minor injuries that don’t cause them to miss work, ergonomic injuries can cause their work to suffer. Their productivity can decline, as can the quality of their work. Workstations that don’t consider good ergonomic conditions can leave employees frustrated and unable to do their best work, even if they aren’t hurting. Either way, paying attention to good ergonomics can result in better productivity and quality.
Employees are usually aware when their employer is acting in their best interest. When companies conduct ergonomic reviews, workers recognize that the idea behind it is to protect them. This will give them a more favorable view of their employer, which can help with employee morale throughout the company. Needless to say, happy workers are a good thing for any business because a happy and healthy workforce will also be a more productive workforce.
If you’re asking if your business needs to do an ergonomic assessment, the answer is probably yes. If you aren’t already staying ahead of the curve with workplace health and safety by using a comprehensive safety system, there is a good chance you’re lacking when it comes to ergonomic safety. If your business is experiencing a lot of injuries, a lack of ergonomic safety is potentially to blame.
It’s also worth noting that ergonomic assessments should be conducted whenever a new task or workstation is added or work processes undergo significant changes. Even companies that are usually proactive will need to perform an ergonomic assessment sometimes to make sure they aren’t falling behind or missing key details. In other words, every business will require a full ergonomic review at some point, although some need one more than others.