NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Mick Anderson, Eaton Corporation
DR. ORTA-ANES: The next speaker will be Mick Anderson. Mick is the Chairman of the Region Seven Voluntary Protection Participation Program Association, and this is a chapter covering Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas. He has been the Safety Director of the Eaton Corporation for 14 years. Mick is on the Advisory Board of the Great Plains Safety Council in Nebraska, and he has represented and coordinated several out reach programs throughout Region Seven. He also participated in OSHA's VPP Invention Meetings held in Washington, D.C., as well as participated in the Assistant Secretary of Labor Grassroots Meetings for the new OSHA effort. Please join me in welcoming Mick Anderson.
MR. ANDERSON: Thank you. Good morning. Take a couple of seconds, if you want to stand up and stretch. If we could get the lights turned back on to stretch. I know it feels better for me to get up, and you need that opportunity too.
As Lida said, I am the Safety Director for Eaton Corporation in Nebraska. Our company is a worldwide company. We are located in 270 sites across the world. So we have several locations. Our particular plant makes automotive valves. You may be familiar with them. They go in your car engine or your truck. We make the valves from the raw steel to the final product. We make approximately 350,000 every 24 hours. So you guys keep buying the cars and the trucks, and we will be happy. That is one of the products that we make.
The other product that we make at our facility is precision force gears, and they go in a range of products from farm implements to heavy duty construction to recreational vehicles. The range in size is from a two pound gear that goes in golf carts and lawn mowers to a 38 pound gear that goes in some farm implements. So you can see we have a lot of opportunity for several ergonomic inventions.
Eaton Carney is a voluntary protection (VP) site, and this morning in the general session you may have heard David Carroll talk about VPP programs. The Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) is an OSHA sponsored program. What it does is it recognizes and encourages facilities across the country to promote good safety and health programs. There are certain criteria that you have to meet to be a VPP site, and then that is laid out in a program that they offer. If you are interested in the VPP program or if you have never heard about it before, there is some literature in the hallway on the table. The VPPPA, the association that helps promote the program, has a table set up, and they helped sponsor the workshop this week. So if you want to pick up more information on a VPP site, you can do that out in the hallway.
When we talk about ergonomics, I would like to look at two different levels of participation in ergonomics. The first level is probably the traditional ones where you call a meeting, everybody shows up, one person directs that meeting and they stand up there and pretty much carries through the meeting and all the employees are involved because they are sitting around the table.
The second one that I think everyone would agree upon that probably is more effective is when you empower the people to make the solutions, to come up with the best practices that are going to work in their operation. Here is a couple of examples or case studies of some ergonomics that we have done as far as team participation. The first one is how we have designed our teams. In order to come up with solutions on ergonomic problems we selected the ergonomics team. We read all the information and listened to people talk about having a wide variety of representation. So we have tried to take someone maybe from engineering, someone from maintenance, management, and that is good representation. Then we went out and looked for problems and tried to solve them.
We were somewhat successful in that method, but as opportunities arose, we suddenly found ourselves not having the key personnel to solve that problem. We may have an engineer that wasn't as familiar with this operation as they might be in our High Bay or Forging operations. So we looked back at our ergonomics team and said we need to maybe look at where the problems are at and then go out, select the people from that area and design our ergonomics team. It may not have looked as nice on paper. The flowchart says this is our ergonomics team and it will always be our ergonomics team, but it was more effective for us to get the right maintenance.
If we made adjustments to the workplace from the maintenance in a different department, and they had to come in and make improvements on that or fix that operation they weren't as familiar with it and maybe not as likely to work with those issues then when we look back and look at success stories by going out and finding the ergonomic opportunities, develop the team around there and maybe get the supervisor from that area, obviously the operators, but also the maintenance and engineers that may have a specialty in that area. How many would agree that employees are probably your best resource on ergonomic problems, developing solutions? How many would agree that we always get the best information out of our employees to solve those problems? If we know that they are our best source of information for developing ergonomic solutions, we should always get that best information. I know from my own experience that looking back we maybe don't always get that information out of them. We didn't always get all the information that they had about that operation, how they could make that better.
Does anyone maybe notice, maybe in the back that we have some different bottles up here. What is different about these bottles? They are all different size and shapes, like every one of us in here, like everyone out on our work force. We are all different sizes and shapes. Not only are we differently made up in different size and shape of body mechanics, but probably something that is more important, we talk about effective employee involvement, as we are all different in personalities. As many different bottles and shapes are in here, we have as many different personalities in this room. That is a very key part of ergonomics, getting the information to solve the problem.
Let's take for example this bottle's personality and see that. This person comes to the meeting. We ask for information. Look at that. It probably flows out pretty easy. It is not restricted. Everything is pretty open. They don't have a problem communicating. They understand what we are trying to get, the information out. That is great. It is probably not that easy because at that same meeting we have this person. This person has a hard time explaining their ideas. They have some great ones because we can see they are full of great suggestions down here, but it takes them longer to communicate that. They have to channel those thoughts out. It is not that they don't want to participate. They may be intimidated by people in the room, and as much that we would like to believe that we are all neutral sitting in there, they know who is in management maybe, engineers, but they want to communicate. So we have to be very careful in our ergonomics program that we don't make things too complicated. We have to be careful that maybe we take them and get with them in smaller groups. They are more willing to share their information if they are not sitting in a large environment. It is very critical. Maybe one of the most important things that we have to do when this individual is on our ergonomics team is be patient. (Long pause) That was less than 30 seconds that I didn't communicate with you. Everybody was wanting to help me out there, like maybe I forgot what I was going to say. Maybe I did, but we have to be patient. They have got great suggestions. We just have to be patient with them and help get those suggestions out.
How about this one? Anybody ever have to deal with this one? That is the lid on it. Number one, we have got to figure out ways to get that lid off. We can't get information in, and they are not willing to give information out until we can come up with ways to get the lid off. They are resistant to change. They say things like, "Never going to work, no. We have done this for 20 years. It is not going to work that way." So we have got to come up with ways. How are we going to get them to change their thought process? What are we going to do to get them to get the lids off? Maybe set up some time frames. Let's try it today or let's try it for a week. If it doesn't work, we will take it off and we will redo it the way you used to do it. Give them some outs that they are not totally committed because they are not a committed person because they don't even want to share information. So we set up some time frames that might work with them.
What do we have here? It might be something if the lid comes off. Someone sees the bottle half empty instead of half full. They find all the things that aren't going to work in this project instead of the things that might work. We probably have some of those. Maybe not, but what we do is try to focus on the things that are going to work. Let's focus on this part of the bottle. What do you like about this that we have changed? Then it is easier to expand instead of saying let's list all of the things we don't like, and pretty soon we are out of time. So let's look at the things that we do like, the things that we think will work, and then let's expand from those rather than focusing on the ones that won't. It is a lot easier.
I know this might be difficult to see, but right here is a little beaker with a little spout out here. You definitely want to have them in your core. They are not really willing to share information on their own operation, but they are willing to pour into other operations. Maybe they have a knack for that. If they like that kind of stuff, let's use these. They are willing to give input on an operation that doesn't affect them, but they see the benefit maybe for that individual or for the whole company.
What do we have here? A wide mouth mason jar. You probably don't have any of those in your groups, but we really need to be careful. You always have someone that really wants to carry the group. Saying things such as, "Well, I am speaking for the whole operation here" or "We really don't want to make those changes." Just because they are the loudest, maybe the next five in that operation really want to make the changes, but this puppy here is the one that we listen to because they are the loudest, the one with the big mouth. So we have to be careful not to allow someone to say yes and no.
On the same hand, we have to be careful not to say yes, that is what we want to do, we make those changes and then a week down the road those other four or five people aren't happy at all and it is not going to work. So we have to be very careful and selective that what we listen to is factual, we get the good information in. We use these wide mouthed mason jars. They are our best salesmen. When we have success stories we let these people be involved and tell everybody how great that is. So they are very useful too.
How about this little individual in here? You know it would be great to say we have 100 percent participation on teams, but you know, some people just don't want to be on a team. It doesn't matter what you do, how wonderful you make that team sound, they don't want to be on a team. Is that all bad? They probably still have great information, good suggestions for some ergonomics at their operation, but they don't want to participate in the team. They don't feel comfortable. For whatever reasons, they don't want to be on the team.
So what we have to do is come out to their environment. Don't just say they don't care about their operation because they didn't come to the meeting that was scheduled at 9:00. We will come out to their operation. We will get in their environment. We will make it easy for them to give us input. Maybe we will take notes out there, make up some mock demonstrations of some changes that might be made. It is not that they don't want to participate as far as giving you information, they just don't like the team setting. So let's make sure we utilize those individuals.
My last one that I will share with you, if you can see that, that is a bottle with six sides, six sides. That is my ergonomics champ. He or she sees things from everybody's point of view. They can see it from management, the operators, engineers and maintenance. They can just have a way about them that they can see things, how things are going to work or how improvements can be made from several points of view, maybe even an accountant's point of view. I might be stretching it, but they can look at things a lot of different ways. Those are the people that may be the core of your employee involvement, people that have a knack for looking at things several different ways and at different levels also.
As you have seen, we have just touched on a handful of the bottles and sizes and shapes and personalities, and it is very critical that we include everyone of these to get good information. In closing, I guess I would like to stress that employee involvement can be your best resource for ergonomic solutions. As you have seen here today, it is tougher than just having meetings, saying we have employee involvement, we invite people there. Ergonomics is about people, and our challenge is to develop ways not only to implement solutions for problems that affect different sizes and shapes of people, but we really need to come up with methods to get good information out of people, to have effective employee involvement. Thank you.
