NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Steve Gutmann, 3M
MS. STOCK: I'd like to now introduce Steven Gutmann who's from 3M. He has worked with 3M since 1981 in the Industrial Hygiene Services Group of the corporate medical department. He's been active in the area of ergonomics for 12 years and full time for the last eight years. This has included technical support and training for 3M's manufacturing, engineering, administrative and research organizations. He's a certified Industrial Hygienist. He's in comprehensive practice from the American Board of Hygiene. He's a certified professional Ergonomist. He's also the Vice Chair of the American Industrial Hygiene Ergonomics Committee and he's also an alternate to the NCCZ 365 Committee for the control of work-related CTD's upper extremities. So I'd like to welcome Steve Gutmann.
MR. GUTMANN: Good afternoon. What I'd like to do is take off on some of the comments that Tom Albin provided during the opening session today. He gave an overall structure of what we've done with the program. Now, I'd like to talk about what we've done in terms of the training aspects. And what I'd like to do is talk about an alternate view of training than perhaps what we've pursued in industry for quite some time.
I'd like to start this afternoon by discussing the problems at 3M and other companies and organizations have had with what I term the traditional approach to training. What Laura Stock referred to as some of the hit and run type of back training efforts that really concentrate primarily in giving information to hourly employees, and not necessarily backing it with anything else to find where the real issues are and resolve them. So what I'd like to do is to discuss what we've done to try and combat some of these particular problems.
But just a little bit of background about 3M, because we're what you might call a big, small company. We have about 37,000 employees here in the United States in over 100 locations in 34 states. And we have the challenge of trying to address issues in about 65 different countries internationally. So it's a very interesting challenge for us. We generally have very small facilities of only 200 to 300 people. So as far as local resources are concerned, we have a lot of people wearing different hats, and we have to be creative in terms of trying to address any kinds of health and safety issues let alone ergonomics.
We usually tend to have light manufacturing jobs, chemical processing and offices. We make and sell about 65,000 different products. Tom Albin referred to roofing granules. Well, we also make Posted-It notes, sand paper, medical devices of one variety or another. The list goes on.
In terms of 3M's formal ergonomics program, we've had an effort in place since the late 1980's as Tom referred to. We attempted to start small establishing where the issues were to focus some of our education and training. We selected certain facilities where we wanted to test some of our programs and efforts and also to conduct project work to demonstrate effectiveness to see if our approaches really worked.
We introduced a formal ergonomics program in 1993, and this is a program that goes corporate wide. It is a general, performance oriented type of standard, and we used the meat packing guidelines, among other resources, to give us guidance in terms of setting up the program and hitting the high points.
Tom and I are based in a corporate group where we provide assistance to the different organizations, and it's really up to the facilities to implement these programs themselves. So we try to enable the facilities to put these types of programs together. And wherever possible, as I referred to earlier, we attempt to integrate the ergonomics efforts with other programs. This includes safety and health programs, quality programs and hopefully, we can avoid duplication of effort and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Now, there's a traditional approach to training. I use the term "traditional"; that's just my biased term. But really, a lot of the problems that we've had in the past have come from our tendency to throw training at certain audiences, particularly the hourly employees. And the efforts tend to hit big. It's a big flashy program. There is a big splash, and then they tend to fade away. No wonder we have some cynicism in some of our operations. The problem here, and I'll generalize very broadly, is that perhaps the training again is targeted towards the hourly employees and may not necessarily pull in other structures or other audiences that really need to hear certain types of information. I'll address that a little later.
Efforts tend to be very superficial with the "traditional" approach. "This is how you lift correctly", whereas, you may not necessarily get at some of the underlying engineering problems or layout issues. Or there may be a lack of a systems approach to some of these underlying issues such as how do you deal with cases as they come up? How do you deal with issues that the employees raise as they come up? And at times, some of these programs can be champion-driven. You have someone who is really fired up to do it and then they move on and everything fades away. This certainly was an issue with the quality movement a number of years ago, and I think by making it more pervasive throughout organizations in general, we've tended to avoid that type of problem.
A number of years ago, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, did a study where they looked at training in terms of its impact on reduction of costs. In their particular study when training alone was done, there was really no change in the cases or the costs. However, when training was combined with, engineering controls in a more formal program, there was at least a one-third reproduction in the costs. And that's the premise I think that we have been attempting to work on.
In many organizations there has been a change of approach that has been taking place. There certainly has been what I'll term the quality revolution. Ford Motor Company talks about quality as job one, and actually, I think they've really attempted to make it a part of their organization throughout the different levels. That this must be a process and not just a program. That there's a training component, but there are also systems that are needed to address some of the underlying issues. That people have to be involved at all levels throughout the organization; the employees who know the operations far better than anybody but also a clear and consistent message from upper management.
And finally, that there are many parallels between quality and safety and health as I'm sure we've all heard over the years. That includes the use of statistical process controls and other techniques for evaluating the effectiveness of programs.
This is 3M's view of training. We've basically tailored this to our organization. This is not a panacea. This is what we have found works for us. Maybe some of this will work for you. You're going to have to tailor this to your own particular organization. But we really wanted to adapt this to our organization and culture to help establish a system for dealing with issues and to assure long term results. As Tom Albin referred to earlier, we attempted to find what worked with our organizations and then build on that success as time went on.
As a part of this effort we defined training needs at several levels. And we define training in this particular sequence that you see here starting with management and ending up with the hourly employee. Now, this is not to minimize anything that the hourly employees do or contribute at all. But I think you'll see as I go through my sequence here that there's a reason why we wanted to pursue our training in this particular order. Starting with management, then engineers, supervisors, safety and health teams or committees and finally the hourly employees themselves.
As far as management training is concerned, we've viewed it as very important for them to understand the impact of ergonomics; where we can quantify things in terms they understand, especially the impact on their bottom line, productivity, product quality, other types of issues. We also emphasize the need to look at injury and illness trends such as OSHA 200 logs, first aid logs, the need to establish a case management system that also looks at workers' compensation costs and minimizing those wherever possible. We look at productivity and quality issues and costs such as unnecessary work or re-work that may take place, process bottlenecks and why do you have those process bottlenecks?
Are you filling those bottlenecks with employees to do manual transfer of a product? Unnecessary inspection which really gets to be a process issue which is something that Deming has hit on pretty hard. High job turnover rates. Is this a job that is terribly demanding on people, and as a result you have high job turnover. This may also result in training and retraining costs. Or you might even have unusual absenteeism patterns.
We also wanted to look at the impact on other issues such as marketing demands. Marketing in our organization has sometimes come down with some interesting decisions. "Well, we want to package it this month in this particular format with these inserts", and it's completely the opposite to how you had it last month. It offers some very interesting challenges as well as dealing with some of the vendors that we have to deal with.
We also emphasize the need to have formal systems in order to handle issues such as encouraging of early reporting. There needs to be a system in place, to handle the increased reporting. Yes, perhaps their incidents rates will go up at first, but and that isn't necessarily all bad. You need a system to process those cases effectively and appropriately. You also need an effective case management system for actual medical cases that take place. Systems to identify and prioritize issues, and work at the team level to find out what are the real issues here.
Instead of trying to do everything all at once, let's try and hit some of the higher priority issues. Systems for handling ergonomic projects and resources to handle those projects, such as engineers, so that they understand what's being asked of them and they have the tools to resolve them. And finally, the inclusion of ergonomic issues and a prioritization process by management so that this is a concept that they're looking at all levels of the prioritization process.
As far as the engineering organization, this has been one of our favorites. In 3M, we've been looking at the corporate engineering group who tend to get a lot of the capital investment projects as well as location based engineers. The emphasis is on getting them to understand the impact a design may have on people. And very few of these engineers have had any kind of formal training in this area. I believe it was Stover Snook with Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, if I remember his numbers correctly, stated that of all engineers, something on the order of two to five percent had any kind of training at all in safety and health, let alone, ergonomics.
And something like 30 percent of industrial engineers may have some training in ergonomics or safety and health, and that's traditionally where the academic ergonomics programs tends to be. So we've been attempting to educate these people in topics like anthropometry or the NIOSH Lifting Guide or other information they can use as a part of their normal tool sets. And we make a distinction between the reactive projects for existing issues as well as pro-active approach, especially for projects early in the design phase that are still on paper when changes are really fairly easy to do.
Next are supervisors. We emphasize to them the importance of employees reporting issues early. That employees need to be encouraged to report things even if they consider it fairly small. Then we can deal with it and hopefully management will have established a system to process these in a timely manner.
Working with employees, we can define and prioritize issues. Again, because they understand where the issues are and by sitting down with them, hopefully we'll be able to find out where these issues really do exist, which are the more important ones.
Working with engineers and employees on implementing solutions so we do so effectively. Ensuring proper follow up is done to make sure that it worked as we intended and perhaps didn't introduce some other types of problems. Assisting in communications with management, as well, so that we minimize mis-understandings that may take place.
Probably one of the key things in our ergonomic program, we feel, are the ergonomics teams or committees. Our teams are comprised mostly of the hourly employees, in the facilities. We sometimes will introduce a new team structure or actually add to the duties of an existing safety and health team or committee if they feel it's appropriate and we are comfortable with that as well. Sometimes during normal walk-throughs or evaluations of safety and health issues, inclusion of ergonomics issues is a relatively simple thing to do. The training that we emphasize is basic recognition and analysis skills, and the need to identify and prioritize issues for management to be able to deal with.
If management is going to spend the money to solve these things, what do you really want to have solved? How to assist with the implementation of solutions? In an earlier session, I believe, a gentleman showed some examples of the rubber workers and some manipulators. There was the discussion that some of the employees didn't appreciate some of these manipulators at first. The teams can assist a great deal in discussing with fellow workers exactly why these things are there and how they will improve the operations and also the need to conduct proper follow up. Again, employee to employee communications, I think, can be very effective and perhaps, you get better feedback that way as well.
Finally, we get down to the hourly employees. We provide these employees with basic information on ergonomics which is usually fairly brief in nature, and if they want to get additional training, we can look into that. We emphasize the importance of reporting issues early, recognition skills with signs and symptoms or risk factors that they may see in the workplace. And that people will not be penalized for doing so. Again, by training management up front, they will hopefully understand that these issues need to be dealt with and can be done so effectively.
Also, we emphasize that it's important for the success of the program for the employees to work with the teams to identify and resolve issues and also assist with follow up.
In conclusion, this is a synopsis of some of the data that Tom Albin reviewed. Between 1990 and 1996, we did have an initial upturn in the overall incidents rates for ergonomics cases. But over time, we've seen some very encouraging results, including a 58 percent reduction in the number of loss time ergonomics cases. Roughly a 50 percent reduction, if I recall, in the number of lost work days associated with that, which to me says, yes, we have a higher number of cases being reported, we're getting at the more severe ones and making sure that those are on the down slide, and we'll deal with the other issues as we can.
We've had a 22 percent reduction in the number of OSHA recordable ergonomic cases, and in 1996, we've actually had for the first time in memory a rather sizeable decrease in the workers' compensation costs that we've paid overall in the company to the tune of about 6 to 8 million dollars. Now, even with these good results, I'm very cautiously optimistic. There have been many things happening in the corporation. For example, we're going through a new case management process. But I think it also gives us information that we can use in pushing our programs in the future.
Even with these results we feel we have a lot more work to do. We've made a good case with management and certainly their response has been very encouraging. The initial results, I think, speak for themselves. To use the term that a number of people have used, this really represents low hanging fruit. We have to realize that these are some of the easier issues that we can identify and deal with. And then we're going to have to dig down to the next level which may not be as easy to resolve or to justify. We're going to have to do a little more homework.
But looking at the low hanging fruit, hopefully we've justified that if we do our homework, if we construct these things properly, we can effectively resolve these issues. We now have a systems approach in place, we feel, to achieve further meaningful results, including identifying issues, justifying solutions and documenting effectiveness.
And that concludes my remarks. Thank you very much.
MS. STOCK: Thank you, Steve.
