NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Sheree Gibson, American Industrial Hygiene Association
MR. BURLINGTON: Our final speaker today is Sheree Gibson. Sheree is an ergonomics consultant with 20 years of experience in engineering and ergonomics. She is a registered professional engineer. She is certified in professional ergonomics. She has a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S.E. in applied ergonomics. She is currently the Chair of the Ergonomics Committee for the AIHA and a member of the ANSI Z365 Committee. Both of those are opportunities that I have had to at least work with Sheree, and I think that she will be able to give us a perspective of what it is like coming from a consultant's point of view.
MS. GIBSON: How to select an ergonomics consultant. When I was asked to do this as Chair of the Ergonomics Committee for AIHA, I called OSHA back and said, "I'm real flattered folks, but I am an ergonomics consultant." OSHA's response was, "Well, that's okay. Who better than you could tell us how to go about hiring somebody."
So I am going to start with "when do you actually hire an ergonomics consultant?" I am going to surprise you. The answer is not right off the bat. I am not going to tell all the people in the audience to go out and hire an ergonomics consultant.
What I think you should do is evaluate if you are ready. The first thing you need to figure out is, is there something free out there already that you are already paying for in some other way. You need to determine that you have objectives that a consultant can meet that you cannot with internal resources. You don't have an ergonomist on staff. How many people out here have an ergonomist on staff?
I didn't think so. There aren't too many of us out there, so it was kind of an easy question that I had a feeling I knew the answer to. If you need an ergonomist and you don't have somebody on staff, that is one of the criteria. If you cannot get more help from your insurance company, some of you may be self-insured and may have a problem because your insurance company is you, but if you belong to a national insurance company for workers' comp, for example, they can sometimes help you with some assistance. They may have an ergonomist or somebody who works as an ergonomics consultant.
If OSHA cannot help you, the state consultation program, if that is not available for you, maybe you are too big an employer or maybe you have used all the resources that you can and they are really saying, "Okay. Now you're on your own, go hire somebody," that is a clue that it may be time to go hire a consultant.
Now, this is important and most people overlook this. Is your company ready to do what the consultant suggests, or at least listen to them and evaluate it? The reason I ask this is a lot of folks think that they can go out and hire an ergonomist, a consultant, and they pay a lot of money for this. Then they put that report somewhere in a file. I will tell you as a consultant, that is my nightmare. Because, why did I do this? Yes, I got paid for it, but I really prefer to work with people who are going to do something.
The other reason I don't recommend this is if you do that and the folks like Angie from compliance come knocking on your door, you have just made their case for them. One of the things they are going to ask you is, "Have you ever had any ergonomic analyses done?" You are going to have to, because you have a legal obligation to, cough up this report. You have just made at least half of their legal case for them, and they can give you a citation a lot more easily. So you don't want to do this (hiring a consultant) unless you are serious about it.
Sometimes you have a problem that is going to require considerable ergonomic expertise that you can't get from an insurance company person. It may be that you are going to require more than OSHA can give you. Not everybody is as lucky as Wisconsin in having ergonomists on staff. It is actually a rarity. I work in South Carolina. South Carolina doesn't have any ergonomists. They use me when they need help.
Now, the first thing to do is define your needs and your expectations. This is going to help you and it is definitely going to help the consultant. You need to figure out ahead of time a little bit about what you want. The first question you should ask yourself is "what is your company's vision for ergonomics?" Are you interested in doing it from a safety standpoint to reduce injuries? Are you trying to do it for quality or productivity problems or are you worried about turnover? Are you worried about being cited by OSHA? You need to figure out why you are there.
Then, "what are you trying to accomplish?" Literally, if I'm going to do a whole program or I'm going to dip my foot in the water and I'm going to see what happens, do a little bit of education maybe and get started.
The third question you need to ask yourself was alluded to by several people this morning. You need to find out if senior management is committed to doing this and to doing something to help. Because if they are not committed, I hate to say it is going to doom your project, but it is probably going to put it on the terminal list anyway. You need to have that management commitment.
You also need to figure out who is going to be involved in this. If you have a union representative, how you are going to involve them, how you are going to involve your employees, senior management and how much they are going to be doing? Have somebody from purchasing on your team. How much is engineering going to do? That's important. What sort of resources are you going to provide?
No ergonomist, no matter how good they are, can work in a vacuum. If we are coming in from outside, we need to know certain things. We need a lot of information. What's the line speed, how many widgets do you make an hour, how often do you rotate, if you rotate, how long have these people been on the job? All sorts of information. So, number one, you have to have a liaison that the person can talk to, somebody that can answer their questions, because they are going to have a lot of them. We are incredibly nosy that way, I guess.
You are going to need to figure out what you are going to do and what the ergonomist is going to do, because if you have a lot of money you can hire somebody who will do a lot of stuff. But if you have a very limited amount of money, you may decide, well, what I want to do is, I want to train my engineering staff. I want to make myself self-sufficient very quickly.
That is going to make me recognize, okay, these people have a limited number of funds and this is how we are going to do it, this is the best use of their funds. We are going to use their engineers to do all the projects. We are going to use their human resources to implement some of the training and other things.
Now, I asked other consultants, "Tell me what makes you uncomfortable," because there are certain things that all of us have gotten involved in, sometimes inadvertently, that are almost a red flag. We need to have warning bells going off. Consultants can do certain things, and certain things need to be left inside that company.
Consultants are very good at performing audits. They can come in just like an OSHA inspector would and walk through your facility and look around. It is a great introduction to an ergonomist. Have them tell you what they see before somebody with an ergonomics degree and a compliance officer's credentials come in at the same time.
You don't have to give that sort of information a citation-level urgency. You can have some time if an ergonomist, a consultant, tells you to deal with it without feeling like you've only got 90 days to alleviate this. So it may be to your advantage to do that.
They can do training. That is one of the things that a lot of us get involved in performing training. Not just the kind of training that you do with an hourly employee, although that is one of the things, but management training. To talk to your senior management, talk dollars, talk savings and productivity and quality. Talk about things to your engineers, talk their language.
One of the clues I will tell you here is, and I have had several people tell me this, if you want an engineer to be trained in ergonomics, have an engineer do it. Because engineers talk engineering-ese. We literally have a shorthand for things and we have a lot better credibility. So when you go to pick your ergonomist, you may want to look for somebody who is an engineer if you are going to do engineering training.
Have the consultant help you develop a plan of action, or a program if you want to call it that. I call it modifying your process more often than not, but that is important. A lot of people are going to need some help in doing that. So you are going to look for somebody who has experience.
Perform analyses and recommend solutions. That's what most of us think about when we talk about hiring a consultant, whether it is in a department or throughout your plant, or whether it is a particular job that is causing you headaches.
Determine the effectiveness of the solutions and help check the plans for new operations. This is one of the best uses of a consultant. Ask them, if you are going to build a new line, to look over the plans for the line. To talk to the engineers. To make sure you are not creating the same problems all over again that somebody else did five years ago when they put in your last line.
Like I said, there are some things that send chills up any ergonomist's back, and one of those things is being asked to run an ergonomics program. Now, some people don't tell you that is what they are asking, but they really expect you to run their program. It won't work. No one outside an organization can run something as critical as an ergonomics program.
It has to be somebody within the line organization. The responsibility has to be there. So don't ask a consultant or expect a consultant to do it. They can't. Obviously, they would have to be on site and they would have to be part of the organization in such a way that they had certain responsibilities but also certain strengths that you can't when outside. Don't ask them to work without assistance. The worst thing in the world is to have a consultant show up at your front gate and there is nobody there to meet him.
Produce change without company commitment. The company has to commit to making something happen. I had a client who complained to me one time and said, "You know, we didn't get any reduction at all after you were in."
I said, "Really? Did you implement a, b, c and d?"
And they went, "Well, no, why would we do that?"
"Did you read your report?"
"Well, no."
Don't expect miracles. We are not magicians. No one can implement a change if you are not willing to do the things that are required.
Now, how do you find good consultants? Lacking fortune tellers and crystal balls, usually the yellow pages are probably not the best place to go looking for ergonomic consultants. Well, the first thing I would do is take advantage of this opportunity. You have colleagues who are in the safety profession, no doubt. Ask them if they have hired a consultant. The best recommendation you can get is from somebody else who has already hired one, who has worked with them, who knows how they work, that they were dependable. That is the best snapshot you are ever going to get without ever spending a dime. Make some phone calls.
Contact a professional society. The American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Society of Safety Engineers, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society all have listings of consultants. But you don't know anything about them other than they have a listing. They belong to the organization and they have a listing in the directory. It is a place to start if you want somebody local, maybe. It may help you compile a list, but it is not going to help you narrow it down much.
Attend professional meetings like this. Talk to people. Mill around with people tonight or on the breaks and talk to people. Ask them who they have worked with, who they liked. That is probably one of the best things that you can do. If you go to a meeting, especially one on ergonomics, talk to the speakers. Read newsletters, journals, things like that. There are a lot of folks out there who are in the ergonomics field who are writing articles. If you see a practical article and the person is a consultant, put them on your list.
So now you have a list. How do you pick the right one? Well, maybe you don't have a good set of darts. You have to go to something else. I would recommend doing a couple of things. The first thing is, if you are talking about local consultants, set up a visit. Have them walk through your plant. Let them find out what they are getting into. That is really critical.
Now, sometimes it is not feasible. You may be in Arkansas and the consultant that you really have your eye on is in South Carolina and you don't have the money to spend to have say five different consultants fly out. They are not really willing to spend $800 or $1,000 to do that. So set up a protracted phone call. Call them ahead of time and say, "Hey, look, I'd like to talk to you about this. When is a good time for you?"
Explain your goals and your resources. They need to know ahead of time. You don't have to tell them how much money you have to spend but say, "Look, I think I can handle training maybe this year, and maybe next year we will talk about an audit system or something like that."
Ask them about their academic background, their certifications and their experience. Academic background is important for a couple of things. You are probably looking for somebody who has at least a master's, and maybe a Ph.D., in ergonomics. There are people out there who don't have that kind of a background but who may be practicing ergonomists. In that case, if they don't have the academic background, I would expect a lot of experience.
Certifications are one of the shortcuts, probably, to looking at academic backgrounds. Somebody has already checked these people out and found them to be at least minimally qualified. Those of us who have gone through the certification experience would like to think more than minimally qualify.
CPEs, the Certificate in Professional Ergonomics is one of the groups that does -- a certification that literally is based on a lot of experience, test scores, academics. They have already checked them out. So you can sort of assume that they have some basic understanding of the field.
Experience. If you are looking for somebody to help you set up a program, look for somebody who has already set up some programs, whether as the consultant or when they worked in-house for somebody. You probably don't want to have somebody who is right out of school because although they may be cheaper on an hourly rate, you may find out that you are paying to educate them. Look at experience and say, "Okay. Can I afford to educate this person? How complicated is my process?"
Above all, check their references. If they don't offer you any, ask for them. Call the people, at least one or two of them. Find out how they performed in the past. You don't want somebody who has gone through a whole series of jobs and basically doesn't have anything that they can point to that was a success. You don't want somebody who is going to cost you an arm and a leg and then not give you anything that is feasible and implementable.
Pick someone you are comfortable with. You are going to be working with this person at least for, I would guess, a couple of days, if not a longer period. In some cases, we are talking about a relationship that may span years. If little warning bells are going off and you are not comfortable with the person, I would think again and look a little longer.
Consider the size of the firm, the location that they are in and the cost involved. Size is important from one standpoint, and I think probably one standpoint alone. If you have a situation where you need to get something done, say you are a major tire company, you have 20 plants throughout the country, and you need them done by October, because OSHA has been in to cite you and you only have until October to get all this stuff set up, look for a big firm. A one-person firm can't do it. Look for somebody who has multiple people that they can send.
Now, it may be that a one-person firm could network with other folks and mobilize, but it is probably easier for you to pick a big firm. On the other hand, if you deal with a small firm, you have another advantage in that you are probably going to be dealing with the same person time and time again, because they have much lower turnover. Some big firms have a real turnover problem.
Location can be important if it is an ongoing thing where you are going to have them in for a long period of time. Otherwise, travel is usually such a small part of the equation it doesn't really make a big difference.
Be cognizant of the fact that people do charge different rates. If they are on either end of the spectrum, I would be a little wary. A cheap consultant can be very expensive. I have had folks who had me in after they have had another consultant who might have charged half my hourly rate. And I will be very honest with you. When I asked them why, their answer was, "Oh, yeah, they charged $50 an hour or $25 an hour or something, but I couldn't use anything they gave me."
Well, the problem with that is not just that you wasted your money, and their answer was to totally automate your line, it is worse than that. Again you have something on paper now that has to be fessed up to if you have continued injuries. It is a major legal liability.
Am I right? Angie is over there going uh-huh, yeah. This is how to make my case. So a "cheap consultant" can be very expensive in the long run.
Beware of the consultant who says they do it all. If you are looking for a generalist, fine. Go for a safety person, an industrial hygiene person, who does ergonomics on the side. If you are looking for somebody who really has a lot of ergonomics experience, hire an ergonomist. It makes sense. Very few of us are jacks of all trades.
Beware of the person who has a much lower hourly rate. As I said, they probably have a reason. There has to be some reason why they are charging half of what anybody else does. On the other hand, there are people who charge three or four times the norm. I wouldn't pay for that, just as a consumer. There are a lot of folks who are in a relatively reasonable range, and I would look for that. Also, somebody who has a low hourly rate has to be making up for it somewhere and it may be that they bill you for every phone call.
Beware of somebody with little or no experience. As I said, they can sometimes get you in problems. Beware of a consultant who doesn't return phone calls. If you make phone calls to somebody and they are not returned before they have a contract, when they are the most eager to get your work, they are not going to return them after you have a problem, after they have already been paid. You will never see them again. You want to avoid those fly-by-night folks.
Now, that said, there are a lot of good ergonomic consultants out there who can help you. A good ergonomist, I like to think, is a pearl without price. Okay. Maybe I was pushing that one a little bit. But they can save you a lot of time and money. They can save you a lot of grief. It is much better to have a consultant tell you what is wrong with your process than a compliance officer. It is much cheaper, too.
One of the things most people don't realize is, it doesn't cost $20,000 to bring a consultant in. It depends on what you want, what you need. It can be a very inexpensive, couple of thousand dollars, to have an audit of a facility. If you want a thumbnail sketch, that is what they can provide, as long as you tell them that.
They can help you reduce injuries, they can help you increase productivity, and ergonomic consultants can definitely increase your quality in a lot of cases. They can be a valuable asset to your safety team. I would advise you, if you are at that point, to go looking for one.
Thank you.
If anybody has any questions, since the whole session has been recorded, the request has been made that you go to the mike, identify yourself, and ask the question. Any of our panelists would be happy to answer them.
Any questions of any of us? If not, thank you for your attendance and we look forward to seeing you the rest of the day.
(Whereupon, the session ended.)
