NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Suzanne H. Rodgers, Ergonomic Consultant
DR. RODGERS: I'd like to start the Plenary Session, Focus on Effective Programs in Small Business.
I'm Sue Rodgers, and I'll be speaking first on a general basis.
Carol Stuart-Buttle is a consultant in ergonomics out of Philadelphia, and she is going to be our last speaker.
David Carroll from WoodPro is going to be our middle speaker. David is a small businessman who is going to be talking about his program. Carol is going to be discussing three projects that she's worked on in small businesses as well.
I have a handout for my comments that is copied on two pieces of paper with eight pages of text. This means that you wouldn't be able to read it in this room, anyway, and, therefore, I set it around the sides of the room. There are 300 copies, so I'll watch the stampede at the end to get the material. It's also, of course, going to be included in the proceedings when those are available.
Some of you may look at me and say, "Well, why is she talking about small businesses?", because I mostly work with large corporations. But what I've found in my own practice of ergonomics is that the large corporation is made up of a lot of small plants. Each of them has to deal with budgets. Each has to deal with resources. The difference, perhaps, is that the large corporation can provide corporate resources, and the small plant doesn't always have that luxury. What we decided to do is to make sure that we covered the things that are common to small plants and large corporations and to small businesses, generally.
I had asked Carole Hunter if she could speak on the program because she has a unique approach, I think, to small business ergonomics. She was kind enough to say yes, and then, when we thought we had too many speakers, she was kind enough to pull out. And now she's here, but she said go ahead. So I want you to realize that she is not missing from the panel because she's not willing to speak but because she's giving us some more time for questions and answers. We want to leave about a half hour at the end of our comments so you can ask questions and share your own experiences with us, particularly the small business people.
If you look at the handouts you got with the program, one of them is the Meat Packers Guideline, the original Guidelines for Ergonomics in the Meat Packing Industry. I know this isn't new to any of you. What I'd like to do is to go back to this and take a look, particularly at Parts I and II. As you know, the first one is management commitment and employee involvement with some subsets. The second one is program elements, which includes worksite analysis, hazard prevention control, medical management and training education.
Roger Stevens and the OSHA group put out their straw man (I call it) back in July of '92. It was a general ergonomics guideline and Roger very intelligently put on the top "Not for Circulation, Do Not Distribute," which meant that within a week every company in the country had a copy of it. I would like to go back to that particular document because I think it has the ingredients that all of us agree ought to be in a good ergonomics program.
What I thought I'd do this morning is just take the two that I find the most challenging -- well, actually, one I find most challenging -- and this is, getting management commitment; and, two is: getting real employee involvement. I'll share with you some of the things I've learned over 28 years of trying to get people to buy into ergonomics in small as well as large plants.
Let's Start with management commitment. We had some good comments yesterday about how to get that. I'd like to share with you an approach that has worked very well for me. It takes no money, is done in a meeting or session where you may be able to get the management team together, such as in a morning meeting. It works very well in large groups, so I'm going to make you do it, too.
If you could all stand up, please. Thank you.
The best way to get commitment is to feel it, to feel what it feels like. Now, if you could take your left leg, please, and raise it 45 degrees. Quality performance is keeping this leg at 45 degrees and not holding on to anything to do it. Okay?
Now, while you're doing that, I'd like to talk a little bit about management commitment and things we can do. Keep it up. Your quality is falling there. Get it up. Get it up. Right.
Essentially, what I did in this particular situation was a spur of the moment idea. There was a speaker before me who was from the corporation and was telling a group of managers in a large subdivision why they should be doing ergonomics. He had all the statistics, and he was going through them.
The trouble was that it was 1:00 in the afternoon. We were in Europe, and they happen to have nice big lunches in Europe, and everybody was sort of, you know, looking as if they'd never quite make it through any talk, not to mention the one with statistics. He finished his talk, and turned the audience over to me, and here I am now supposed to be talking about ergonomics.
Larry, get that foot up again, there. Thanks. Come on, front row. Get those legs up.
I said to myself, let's get them up because they've been sitting for a half hour. So I got them up and asked them, to raise a leg like you are doing now.
I had five benefits written on a transparency that I was showing, talking about "Why Ergonomics?". I spent a lot of time on the first two points on accident and illness-injury prevention, and on peoples' improved ability to perform. Then, I had three more points, which I finished up quickly about things related to reducing errors, increased flexibility, and better utilization of peoples' skills.
I finished my five points. Then I said, "Okay, You can put your foot down." So you can put your foot down.
And then I said, "Can you tell me the last three points I made?" Absolute silence in the room. I said, "Well, why can't you tell me? Weren't you listening?" They said, "No, we were concentrating so much on the discomfort of holding that foot up, that we weren't listening.
I said, "Well, you're telling your people to do quality work, right? You say, do good, quality work; and you've got them sitting around with one foot up in the air all day. How can they do quality work?"
And all of a sudden I could see the lights go on. It's the same thing that was mentioned in yesterday's session by Eric: Quality and ergonomics are directly related. If you hurt, if you're uncomfortable, there is no way you can put all of your attention to quality work; and that hit the chord. That was the thing that they needed to hear. From then on, we had clear sailing.
You can sit now.
The point is that they knew they were weaving and bobbing; it wasn't me telling them they were uncomfortable, it was them feeling it, and they understood what was going on.
Another time, I was talking to a plant manager who had just been berated by the corporate safety director because he had a lot of injuries in his plant. When I say "a lot," this happened to be a good safety program, and a lot to them was three.
Again, after being told that he really hadn't done a good job on safety, and he had to get busy, he was getting madder and madder. You could see him holding his anger in because his job was get the product out and to do it as safely as possible. He was not happy with being raked over the coals by the corporate safety director in front of other people. This had gone on for 15 minutes and he was really quite angry, which I could tell because his ears got very red -- he was sort of a fair complexion, and his ears just got totally deep red.
The safety director turned the meeting over to me. It's sort of like having a bad warm-up act, you know. You're sitting there saying, "Gee, how am I going to get his attention?"
So I changed the discussion over to quality, and I said, "You know, one thing that ergonomics really does for us is to make it easier to do quality work.", and I talked a little bit about examples that we had seen in the plant of things that made it hard to do quality work.
The ears got whiter and whiter. Not white, white, but they became less and less red, I should say, again showing me that we had hit a point. He could understand how ergonomics interacted with what he was being asked to do, which was to get a good product out the door.
So, again, management commitment to a large degree comes from understanding how ergonomics can positively influence all of the goals of the company; not just the health and safety goals, but the performance goals of the company as well.
I haven't met a manager yet who wants people to get hurt. It's just that they've got to understand why some people get hurt and some don't. It comes back to the word "cause", the job causing the injury. If the job causes the injury, then why doesn't everybody get it? And that's in the back of their heads when they're trying to understand why suddenly, after doing the same jobs for years, we've got a lot of people getting into trouble.
They really don't understand that if the job causes injuries why there aren't more of them around. As you know, even when you have a problem, the injuries/illnesses are seen in just slightly over 10 percent of the workers.
So that's my basic message on management commitment. Get them to feel it, get them to understand. I like to spend about an hour with them the first day I get there and just ask them questions about what they have to accomplish that year, and what are their goals. What are the things that get in the way of meeting their goals?, and how can ergonomics help them get there. It's very much a partnership when you start getting into the ergonomics program. It's not all injury and illness. A lot of it is performance related.
For the same reason, I talk about fatigue rather than causing injury. The reason I talk about fatigue is that's performance related. Everybody knows that you can be tired on some jobs, that you have to stop and break in order to get recovery on some jobs. Those are the ones that they can very often do something about through a management policy or a management process that makes sure that we don't have jobs out there that create a quick fatigue, a muscular or a mental fatigue that may lead to an injury, or error.
What we see there, too, is that they can identify this themselves, particularly with the meaner, leaner things going on with downsizing and not adding staff but rather trying to find other ways of getting the job done. They feel this themselves, and they'll talk about it. Once they take ownership of the fact that those are problems that need to be addressed, they're very good about supporting the process.
I'll have to say that OSHA citations have always been an effective way of getting management commitment. I guess I'd rather not get to the point where they have to get a citation because I'd like to think that they were good enough before that, but it certainly is a form of clout.
One thing I noticed, and maybe you noticed, too, was that after the failure in March of '95, of the proposed standard, there were some people who said, "Let's coast for a while now." Fortunately, the ones who had been doing some ergonomics, generally realize that it has benefits that make it something that we want to continually do. But, there was a pulling back by some people who thought of this as a necessary evil. I'd rather do it because it's the right thing to do, rather than because you're going to be punished if you don't.
The main thing I've learned also, and this is both management and employee involvement, is to be teach people to ask a lot of questions. I know somebody could probably argue that a consultant's job is to provide information. I find that my major effort is to ask the questions, to have them find their own information, to help them structure what they need to do and to help them structure the information, or find the information that will help them know how much they need to do.
These are things we were talking about yesterday, how big a problem is it? what are the problems you need to address first? and things of that sort. I think it's sort of neat to be able to go in, just ask questions, and get paid for it.
I was told, by the way, also, by the engineering teams that I've worked with (and it was mentioned again yesterday in some of the sessions)that the hardest thing is getting into proactive ergonomics. It's the most effective way to go, but it's very hard to do. Now, if you're a small company and you're getting some engineering done, often that's by contract. In some of the areas I've worked in we've actually had the contractors come in for the ergonomics training so they get that training, the same training that the teams are getting on the floor; they are wonderful, especially in the class, because they have ideas on how to solve some of these problems that may involve more mechanical skills or more technical skills.
You definitely need to involve the contractors in the ergonomics program or else you're going to spend all of your time reviewing what they are doing and telling him not to do that.
When we had trouble getting engineering commitment inside a company where we were building the ergonomics teams in the plants, we wrote a policy that the engineer had to go talk to the inside team about anything that was going to appear in their area. This was whether it was a workplace rework or a line rework, or a choice of major equipment they'd have to work on, and that would include the maintenance group as well as the operators. That has been very effective where it has been implemented. Again, it's still a matter of getting the process set up to be sure it happens.
Number 2 of the Ergonomic Process Needs: Employee Involvement.
What I am going to show you here is the importance of the employee's input. Mark Johnson used this in his presentation in the worksite analysis session yesterday, and because I didn't bring any transparencies, I'll put it up for you. The basic steps in the problem solving part of the work analysis that we do are simply to identify where the risk factors are by body part, and then the second column is what's called Causes on this form, is the "Why?" column. If I see that somebody's bending over, and I've identified that that's more than just a short duration bend, in other words, it takes maybe fifteen to twenty seconds or even more, then the question is "Why are they bending?".
The first thing that I do when I have a lot of people looking at and analyzing jobs is, "What do you see?". And they say, "Well, the workbench is too short or it's not tall enough." That's not what you see, right? That's what you're inferring from what you see. What you see is somebody is bending over. It's very hard to get that process going where they describe what they see first, and therefore, define the risk factors for the body parts at risk. The risk is continuous or sustained bending. Now, Why do they do it?
It's not just because the bench is too short. It may be because they can't see what they need to see, and therefore they have to bend over to get within the right distance to be able to see it. It may be because they can't reach what they need to reach or can't use a tool properly without bending over. They all may have a relationship to the higher workbench, but they aren't necessarily only related to the workbench height.
If you can define the posture and the risk, and then you look for all the possible reasons why they might be bending, you begin to open up a very global way of approaching these problems.
In the final column are strategies or methods to reduce the stress of the risk factor. Those are our strategies for making it better. How do we make it better?
In a generic sense, the risk reduction strategies for physical effort are: reduce the effort intensity; reduce the time of the effort before I get a rest break from it (i.e., a muscle rest break); reduce the frequency of doing it; or reduce the total time I do it before I move to some other activity that does not use the same muscles in the same way. So there are several generic ways of reducing the risk.
This is where we begin to generate our solutions. As we are analyzing our job, we are also identifying strategies that will begin to reduce the stress. What you will find is that when you do this for the body parts, even the ones you don't think are affected, you often emerge with some generic ideas for directions to go that will fix the problem in many parts of the body, not just one place at a time.
I'll walk you through the video that Don showed yesterday using those basic concepts.
This is a gas stove manufacturing line. What do you see as you watch people working on this line. What strikes you as you see it? I need some of you to volunteer here. The thing you notice the most as you watch this?
AUDIENCE: She has her head in the oven.
DR. RODGERS: Yes. It's been a long day. Yes. She has her head in the oven. Fortunately, the oven's not connected.
So how would you describe that in terms of risk factors?
AUDIENCE: Bending over, bad light.
DR. RODGERS: Bending, poor lighting is a potential problem. Why is there poor lighting, by the way?
AUDIENCE: No light in the oven.
DR. RODGERS: You're right. Okay. And they're not even hooked up electrically. This is a gas stove so we don't need to have electricity, right?
The point is that she is having to reach in. It's really the reach, isn't it? What she's installing is the coil on the back side of that oven. And she has to reach in because she's doing it at this point on the line, for one thing.
When we first showed this, I asked, "What do you see?"; and what do you suppose they said?
AUDIENCE: The conveyor is too low.
DR. RODGERS: The conveyor is too low, right? Yes. Why is the conveyor too low, because she's having to bend over. Right? If she isn't bending over because the conveyor's too low, why is she bending over? Because the reach in is so far that she has to bend over to be able to reach the back side. That's one issue. The reach in.
And you can say, "Well, why does she have to bend so far?" Did you notice the cardboard in the front of the conveyor? That projects another four inches out from the conveyor side. It's moving, as you may be able to tell. That's part of what keeps her away, too.
But the other thing that keeps her away is the fact that she has to reach so far and she has to be able to see what she's doing. She can't do this blind.
We use these tapes in training courses so that when we finish the training course the teams have five projects that they can proceed with. We expect to have their solutions implemented within about one to three months. In this case, it was implemented in about a day.
We identified this as a bending risk, and there is repetitive motion, too. There is vibration and there are several other things, too.
Give me another part of the body that you might be concerned about here.
AUDIENCE: Wrist and hands.
DR. RODGERS: Okay. What's the risk?
AUDIENCE: Strong wrist angles.
DR. RODGERS: Okay. Awkward wrist angles. There's vibration, too. So you would like to find something that would help resolve those issues. As you can see, she has a slight twist in her back as well in order to reach that point with the air gun.
Next, we went through the "Whys", and we came up with the fact that the basic problem is the reach to the back, which is what is driving a lot of the postural elements, so we said, "How can you avoid reaching so far?" Some people looked at the cardboard and said, "Let's not have the cardboard stick up; bend it up, and put clips on the edge, so that won't be a problem." What would you have to evaluate that against? Is it really better? We evaluated that against standing forward reach capability at that location, and it turned out that we really had to get the reach within 12 inches to avoid bending. So it wasn't going to work just to bring it four inches closer. We had a 28-inch reach on that job.
We could look at it in terms of the time of bending. What would you do there? What strategy could you use to reduce the time of bending? It takes 17 seconds of bending out of every 30 second cycle now.
There is more than what determines how long you have to stay bent over? Just think generically now. Type of fasteners, right? How long does it take to shoot a screw? Only a few seconds; but she has to be there longer. It has to do with locating and finding things. So anything you can do to take time off that would reduce the bending time and risk. A lot of people wanted to tilt the conveyor to fix this job; but there is other work going on that would be impossible to do with a tilted line.
The final result of this was when the team whose job this was -- and, believe me, I didn't suggest this -- came in with their solution. They said, "There's no reason why we can't put that coil on before we assemble the oven. So they moved the operation up the line about five places, set up a fixture, put the part on the fixture, and put the coil on at a perfect working height. The oven was assembled down the line, and none of this awkward posture was required in this assembly. The fix cost them $47, if I remember correctly, the cost to build the fixture. That was it.
So for small companies, without big budgets, that's not really going to wipe you out, is it? That's something you can put into your regular operating budget. It's the need to identify why there is a problem that I'd like to have you think about. If you don't really analyze why that problem is there, and you simply look at it and say you need to raise the conveyor, you are going to miss the inexpensive and very effective fixes.
I use anthropometric data and reach guidelines to compare what the job requires to what I'd like to have. I use the NIOSH lifting guidelines and the version I made of those for the Kodak books that goes into the percent of people who would find a lift acceptable for my assessment of how serious a problem the job is for a lifting task. I use force guidelines, from Keyserling's studies and others that are published in the literature and again in the Kodak books. I use those to evaluate the job forces I measure and to determine the degree of risk for given muscle groups. You can identify how much of a problem it is and how much you need to change it from the comparisons. Once you've done that, it's very easy for the team to come up with very creative ways of fixing the problems.
Believe me, you have no trouble with employee involvement when you are asking them to use their expertise to help in problem solving. My final point on that is, that if the employees are working together with the engineers, and with the mechanics to solve these problems, there is a wonderful interaction that can't be beat. It's much better than having a consultant come in, frankly.
As a full-time consultant, let me say that your use of a consultant, to my mind, should be to help you understand what the problems are and to help give your team some basic knowledge about ergonomics and risk factors for overexertion injuries. A consultant should facilitate your own talent or work with your contractors to be sure that they build these things into their designs as well.
I'm going to stop here, because I don't want to cut the others short. Just a final observation: empowerment comes from both having knowledge and from having support from the support part of the staff, if you're a person who works on a job like this. What I call it is control; that I feel that I have control of my ability to work safely. That's what I shoot for when I'm trying to explain to management the importance of having the teams be the primary people who do the job analyses; the support personnel are needed to help them to achieve the best solutions.
It's wonderful to see the teams take ownership. I had an opportunity to teach a class where one person had an M.D. degree and a few others had third grade educations and were functionally illiterate. The functionally illiterate ones were actually better at problem solving. They didn't have all this clutter in the way of all the things they knew!
So group problem solving of ergonomic issues really equalizes and builds respect for each other that is needed to solve these problems that are both production problems, business problems, and health and safety problems.
Thank you very much for listening to that.
My handout, by the way, includes -- I'll just tell you in case you don't get one right away -- two lists I made up. One is the components of successful programs and the other is things that retard the ergonomic programs and processes. I want to thank OSHA and NIOSH and the other sponsors for letting me get up here and explain that I have made all of the mistakes that are under the second category.
Finally, Carol pointed out to me when she looked at the handout that I had a human factors problem here. If you get one of these, this is the first page. And then what you have to do is open it up and turn it over to get the second page, okay? And then you have to turn it back this way to get the third page, and then you have to turn it this way to get the last page, and this is a test.
The other material relates to securing management commitment and employee involvement; it was part of a talk that I gave at Pat Devlin's CARE conference last year in Dallas.
And the final one is just a one-page thing I sometimes give to clients who are saying "It's all so confusing; just give me one page." And I put that on the last page.
Thanks very much.
