NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Nancy Larson, American Express Financial Advisors
MR. ALBIN: I think it is fitting since this is an office ergonomics session to talk about glare filters, which those of us up here could really use from these lights. My name is Tom Albin, and Dave LeGrande and I are co-chairing this session.
I have the pleasure of introducing our first panelist this morning, Nancy Larson, M.S. and C.P.E., certified professional ergonomist. Nancy is the corporate ergonomics manager for American Express Company. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a masters degree in industrial engineering from North Carolina State University. She obtained her Board certification as a professional ergonomist in 1994. She has five years experience consulting as an ergonomist for a number of industries, including manufacturing, meat packing, medical and office environments, and for three years she has been the ergonomist for American Express Financial Advisors in Minneapolis. Nancy is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and sits as a member of the HFDS ANSI-VDT 100 Revision Committee. Please welcome Nancy Larson.
MS. LARSON: Good morning. The information I am presenting this morning is from a subsidiary of American Express where I was the ergonomist for American Express Financial Advisors. Two years ago there was a company name change. Some of you may recognize it more as the former IDS Corporation.
American Express Financial Advisors is located in Minneapolis. We have an employee population of about 10,000 employees, 5,000 in our corporate headquarters located in downtown Minneapolis and approximately another 5,000 located in various financial planners offices through the United States. We needed to have an ergonomics program that didn't just address a one-site location concern, but also one that we could very easily transfer to remote locations which might have only be a couple of employees rather than a large concentration of employees.
A full time ergonomist was hired in the spring of 1993, and the need for the position was created or recognized from the corporate real estate department. They had a lot of issues regarding work-related muscular skeletal disorders. What we are going to do today is talk a little bit about my approach towards the program, what we have done from within the corporation for the last four years at American Express Financial Advisors, and some of the results that we have seen.
The staffing for the ergonomics program at American Express Financial Advisors was a one full-time ergonomists manager in 1993, and it was expanded in 1995 to include an ergonomic assistant that helps with some of the programs. There are currently two full time people working on the program. We take the approach of macro ergonomics and deal with ergonomics not just as dealing with work-related muscular skeletal disorders, but trying to address and enhance human performance throughout the company and in all aspects of all our jobs.
In order to achieve this, we have created some departmental partnerships internally. First, is the corporate and field real estate. Corporate real estate is responsible for creating a setting for proper work to be produced within our headquarters in Minneapolis. Field real estate provides a setting for all of the other locations throughout the United States. Collectively, they have the task of making sure the stage is set so employees can do their job, and we have a strong relationship with them. We also have collaborations with the individual business units. Some of them are small; some of them have several thousand employees. It is their responsibility and job to make sure the products and the company's goals are met in an efficient and timely manner. We have good strong relationships with them, and they understand that we can help them with that process.
Property services is an area that is near and dear to my heart. The original champion for the program was in property services. He went up against upper management who did not feel that there was a need for an ergonomics person full time, found the money in his own budget and got permission to hire someone, even though they weren't going to formally put it on the record. I came in through the side back door.
Risk management monitors our workers' compensation claims. Many of the traditional things that you have been hearing about ergonomics within our organization are under the umbrella of Risk Management, the medical care and those types of things. We primarily provide them assistance in performing workers' compensation job assessments. We will talk more about those in a minute.
We also work with our legal department regarding regulations and laws. The Communications Department helps us with developing our training materials, making sure that any communications that we have are well done and are effective. Finally, technology's job is similar to real estate, only theirs is not to set the stage physically for the work space but to provide the appropriate software tools and hardware for the people to do their jobs. We provide them information and services as well in the area of product evaluation.
So those are the primary collaborations, and on any given project, we collaborate with one or more of these groups. So the key elements of what our program has been is there is a coordinator. I strongly believe that you have to have someone whose job, whose responsibility, whose pay check is based on the fact that they do ergonomics on a daily basis. Ergonomics will be something that will be acknowledged as important by lots of people and maybe even get on many of their to do lists. Unless you have someone that is primarily devoted to doing this in a large corporation, it will always end up on the bottom of the to do list. I don't know about you, but I never get to the bottom of mine. So I believe that it is very strong that you have someone to be a coordinator to be a catalyst, to be a communications person, to help interpret what is going on within the company and set priorities.
You also need management commitment. In my case a little bit of that management commitment was a double edge sword. One week after I started my position, they were almost through deciding which furniture standard to purchase for over 1,000 employees, and I was called into the meeting with the facilities people. The vice president for the Facilities Department after 10 minutes into the meeting of the discussions said, "I have to leave, whatever Nancy says, I agree with." Well, that is an interesting position to be in the first week in a new job. We did change the furniture standard, and as you will see as the program evolved, that was a key piece for having some of the results that we have had.
The other thing that you need management commitment for is for allocation of resources. Our upper management didn't feel that there was a need for a full-time ergonomist. Someone in that middle upper management did, and he stuck his neck out.
Let's go back to those internal partners. We don't have a formal ergonomics team. We don't have a schedule where we meet every Tuesday on the fourth week of every month. We pull together teams based on what efforts we are working on. We draw experts from the areas that we are dealing with. We concentrate on a project, and then we all go back to other things that we work on. That seems to be working very well for us.
Early on we recognized the need to establish some baseline information, and that has allowed us to have some sense or feeling of how the program is progressing. Then we determined what measurements were needed to make sure that any individual project's success. We needed to figure out what kind of measurement procedures were important to those internal partners and finally what was important to management, what was necessary for compliance to any regulations.
There were several Initiatives over the last four years. One was in the area of furniture standards. I have talked a little bit about that already. First, the work surface standards. Previous to that timely meeting right after I was hired, the work surfaces were set at a 28 and a half inches and the surfaces were stark white. They had identified some problems with the standard. We changed the standard to a maintenance adjustable work surface, we also changed the color from white, which was creating some vision and headache problems, to a cream, taupe color. They were also just completing a chair usability test, and we were able to tag onto the very end of it. Again, after evaluating the chair standard changed. We were now prepared to address a large reorganization of the company that was going to happen in six months.
So, I came in at a very timely and opportune period in the history of the company. What was going to happen? In November of 1993, our client service organization called the GSTs, the geographical service teams, were reorganizing. These were approximately 1,000 of our highest computer use employees. Our highest "at risk" people for developing aches and pains.
We were able to create a process where we could customize work stations and provide training. We were able to make training mandatory because before they moved they had to attend. So, the two furniture standards decisions that were made in March of 1993 came back in the fall to help define the ergonomics program to have great impact on what we do.
We also at that time evaluated ergonomic computer accessories, wrist rests, copy holders, and foot rests. We standardized some basic products and made those available to every employee out of a budget from facilities. It was not up to an individual unit's budget to plan for accessories. It comes out of a central pool of funds. This process is maintained today as well.
Then another standards decision that happened two years later was monitor size for the GSTs. The technology group was evaluating changing from 17 inch computer monitors to 22 inch computer monitors. There was a huge problem with integration into the work space. There is a lot of extra cost involved in that. The service that we provided to Technology was to take a very good hard look at all of those different client service jobs, and, based on criticality, and on information needs at any given time, whether they really needed the larger monitors or not. We provided that information back to those teams. That information helped them with their cost effectiveness and made sure that the people could perform their jobs. If they really needed the larger monitor, they got it. If they didn't need it, then they stayed with the 17 inch monitor.
The next category of our initiatives was the workers' compensation program. We quickly partnered with Risk Management to address people with workers' compensation problems to provide them an analysis of their work station and assure that appropriate accommodations were made from the ergonomics side. Again, we were working with Real Estate on this because they actually made the accommodations. We determined them. They made them, and then we developed procedures for follow-up. In this particular arena, Risk Management owns the problem. We provide them services within part of the whole issue of trying to address work-related issues contributing to musculoskeletal disorders. They do the medical management part. They do the record keeping and all of those types of things.
Going back to the client service reorganization that happened in the fall of 1992, we were able to tag on mandatory employee training in ergonomics to that process. Business Units, another internal partner, provided us with two hours of time for every employee to attend training. Over the last years we have managed to streamline that training to an hour and a half. We would tell the people about what ergonomics is, that it was there to help them do their job better; it was there to help them be productive, it was there to help them be comfortable, which will also help them have higher job satisfaction. We discussed what work related musculoskeletal disorders are. We gave them some background information on different types of symptoms. We talked about where to get help within the company if they started to develop any of the symptoms. We talked about ergonomic guidelines for computer use, how they should sit, where they should put things, and then we created an individual profile on each one of these people.
Now, they are going to be moving workstations, they will have furniture that is adjustable, accessory items, and it is going to be a total breakdown and rebuild of the work space. So, just as you can do in engineering changes on the manufacturing floor when you are changing out systems, we were able to do that within our office environment, as we changed our furniture systems. We provided the installers with the appropriate height for installation of the different work surfaces. We provided tags on the work surfaces so that when telecommunications came in, they knew where to put the phone. We provided information about where the computer should go so that it didn't have to be lifted two or three times. It was put in the right place the first time. We provided information for the work station services for all of the other accessory items. If there was a fax or fisch it was positioned appropriately from the very beginning. That process is maintained today. Every time someone moves within our organization from one work station to another, the work station is customized.
The other thing that happened at the same time was that the accessories were provided to the employees. At the training they heard about symptoms. They heard about what to do. They heard about accessories and what they could do for them, and then they were given the opportunity to choose which accessories they felt would help them do their job. There was some fear and trepidation that everybody was going to take everything. That didn't happen. People took the one or two accessories that they felt they needed, and they didn't take something that they didn't need. Our average cost ended up being about $80 per person for ergonomic accessories during this move time.
So what did we achieve by this? We took our highest risk people because their jobs are the most intense. We were able to provide them with information about furniture and work station layout so that they could use the information we gave them during training. We didn't just train them and just send them off to the same place. We were able to give them the tools to actually use that information that we gave them.
The second thing that we needed to do within the office ergonomics area was to address the ergonomic needs of all those people in the remote locations. Again, we partnered with our field real estate people, along with communications, and we created an ergonomics video and training guide book. Now, the plus on that was that those products have come internally to corporate as well. We use those products in our internal training as well. We also established with an external vendor a listing of specific ergonomic products, just as we did in-house. They are available to all Amex employees, regardless of their location. It is a small select set of accessories, but available to everyone. We distributed all of that information through the office manager system in the spring of 1994.
We have recently added manual material handling and back care training. We started with identifying our highest at risk jobs. About 90 to 95 percent of our people spend most of their day working on the computer. However, we do have a print shop. We do have a loading dock. We have a cafeteria, and we have a mail room. We have manual material handling risks associated with those particular jobs. So we developed and implemented that training program in 1996.
What did we measure? How do we figure out if we are doing something that is going to be beneficial to the company or not? Originally we started with a comfort, discomfort survey that was distributed to all of those employees at training. It is still distributed to every employee at training, but we use the 1,000 surveys from the fall of 1993 as our baseline. These were people who have not had previous ergonomics training, but they have been doing their job. We felt that it was a valid baseline. That is where we started. Then we did an annual randomly administered survey. Those are some of the numbers that we can compare base to our baseline survey. In the annual survey we gather information about how people are feeling about the ergonomics program and any work-related discomforts they may be experiencing. We also asked them some specific questions about how ergonomics has been of value to them or not of value to them. So we add a little bit broader feedback to our program.
We gather workers' compensation data. In our case, some of this data was difficult to get because we had one insurance company that gathered information in one way, and then it got transferred to our broker and our broker had different categories. One type of claim in one area often was transferred into another claim area in another report. It was very difficult to find out what was really going on and to have some consistency. What we ended up doing is going back through all the records for several years and reclassifying cases ourselves so that we had consistent classification of cases.
The annual survey is done on a random basis. We usually get between 300 and 400 responses every year. We start to have a nice pattern of what is going on.
Here are some of our results. The blue line is the 1993 fall survey, our baseline survey. That is directly comparable with the redlines. When we did our first annual survey, we only included employees who had been part of that GST training and the move process. That shows within the categories of headaches, neck and backs that we managed to make some nice progress.
The next year, the yellow line we did a full company survey because by that time we had started to address a larger and larger percentage of people within the company. We have a workstation move rate within our company of about 65 percent per year. So the odds are that if you work for American Express Financial Advisors in Minneapolis, you are going to relocate your work space every year, and it is mandatory that you go to ergonomics training during that process. As we were getting a bigger population base attending training, we felt that we could start to survey the whole company.
The green lines are from this last year, and we have implemented a different type of survey process this year. We wanted to try to capture the data in a little bit broader sense, so we have revamped our survey. It was part of a survey that is tied with corporate American Express. The green lines may not be as close of a comparison as what the other three are. I think they are fair, but what we have done is gone from a three-point scale to a five-point scale. There is a little bit of shifting in there, and it needs to be more strongly analyzed. I haven't had the time to do it because we just got the data last month. The green line I am not as confident about. It looks fantastic. I would love to say that this is exactly what it is. I don't think that they are going to be significantly different, but there may be some differences, and I don't want to mislead you.
One of the things that you do want to be aware of is if any of these particular types of measures was influenced by external factors to what we were doing within our program as what we were doing within the program itself. For example, changes in workers' compensation law, changes in job availability in the community. Some people would be more reluctant to leave a job if reemployment is difficult. What other types of psychosocial factors may be going on within your company and organization and reorganization issues. Any of those things at any given time can come in and make all your efforts look worthless or they can enhance your efforts so much that they are almost unbelievable. One of the difficulties we are experiencing within the role of ergonomics is that so many other factors feed into these issues as well. We can't just say that it is a work station. We can't just say that it is a tool. There are a lot of other things that we need to make sure that we are addressing or at least taking into consideration. The assumptions that you make, the questions that you ask, they all will influence how your responses come around later.
Three more categories are for shoulders and elbows. Again, you can see that for the most part we have been making some really nice progress. We have some hiccups here and there. We also have this information stratified by job categories so we can actually go back and pull out our client service people. We can pull out our programmers. We can pull out our administrative assistants and get a little bit more information about what specifically is happening within a specific job category. Maybe we can customize our efforts a little bit better that way.
Finally, hands and wrists.
One other category of measurement is the all mighty dollar, cost per claims. These are just for upper extremity cumulative trauma disorders. Total claim dollars per year, and we have had a nice drop in there. This goes up and down and up and down. This one is very interesting because one of the problems with workers' compensation dollars is you have to wait years to see whether it is going to happen. These are all undeveloped dollars. So they are subject to great change. The more recent years are more subject to change, but what I have done here is go back through the past years, back to 1990, and at the end of every year what was our data point?
Unfortunately, right there is a very small green dot. That is last year, which is not a real promising start. We will wait and see what happens, but it may be an indication that we need to refocus some energies. I would much prefer to see it down lower again. We don't know what is going to happen over the next two years, and we will just have to wait and see. As you can tell by the pink line, as those dollars develop and mature over the years great changes can happen. Sometimes they go up and sometimes they go down. Most often they are going to go up. Just for comparison purposes, this is our total dollars for musculoskeletal manual material handling problems and strains.
One other measurement that I said we took was asking people the value they had gotten from ergonomics during our various surveys. As you can see, between 80 and 90 percent of our employee population across the board said that it was a valuable use of their time. It means that we are doing a decent job of meeting their needs, giving them information, and making good use of their time. Everyone is working harder and harder these days, and no on has time to waste. I am very proud of that particular response, and the fact that we were able to get them to change behaviors. I don't care if all they did was change the height of their chair. It made a difference and helped things get better for them. That is what we were trying to do.
In conclusion, the things that I would say were the biggest promoters of our program and helped us to have some effect is the fact that there was a champion, that we did have management commitment. It was uneven. It will never be even across the board. You grab it where you can find it, and thank them heartily. Next, we developed Cross-function initiatives, I don't own the furniture issues within American Express. I don't own the risk management issues. I don't own the technology issues. I provide them services and information so they can do their jobs better. That is the key piece you have to get across to them. You have something to offer them. You are not just taking from them or trying to make them do more work.
Our measurement procedures have been very helpful. Most of them are dollar related. It is pretty tough to find productivity measurements within an office environment when your productivity is determined by how many phone calls come in that day. So that is a difficult one for us. We are still struggling with that issue. We have a couple of things we are trying, but they have not matured yet.
Take advantage of opportunities. If I had been hired a year later, this program wouldn't have happened. There was that timing with the reorganization, the new furniture, new standards that allowed a lot of these things to happen.
Finally, we are finding out that we need to do some refresher training. We are going to be working on that in '97. We need to take very careful consideration of what is called those ODAM issues, organizational design and management, how the program is incorporated with the corporate culture, how the people are feeling they are valued and how the jobs are designed. Thank you very much.
