Kate Stewart, Swewart and Associates
MS. STOCK: Our next speaker is Kate Stewart. She's a board certified Ergonomist. Her firm, Stewart and Associates provides consulting and training for many public and private organizations ranging from fortune 100 companies to small businesses. As a former faculty member at the University of Washington and Director of Sports Medicine at Seattle University, she has taught physiology, bio-mechanics and anatomy and has worked in injury prevention for 18 years.
She served a wide range of businesses providing ergonomic consultation, training and program development at all levels of management and for production workers. She's an instructor and consultant for the OSHA Training Institute and the National Safety Council. She teaches occupational ergonomic courses offered to safety and health professionals, production workers, compliance officers and engineers. She's also produced award winning videos, written numerous articles, created several handbooks and has been a presenter at many conferences representing a broad spectrum of industry and business. I'd like to welcome Kate Stewart.
MS. STEWART: Good afternoon. Good afternoon, post-lunch. One of the things that I'm aware is that I've been sitting all day, and you've been sitting all day, and it's post-lunch. And one of the number one rules that I try to do with training is to not let people sit too long and especially sit in the dark. So why don't you stand up where you are. Let's get a little blood in your brains.
Get your arms up over your heads. And as you have you have your hands up there, they really reach. Try not to take your neighbor's wallet. Okay. Now put your hands out in front of you and push forward until you feel your should blades come apart or your suit rip, whichever happens first. Now, spread your fingers. Really open your hands. This is a teaching moment, because what we're stretching is the nine tendons that run through the Carpal Tunnel or the corporate tunnel or the carpet tunnel, whatever you've heard it called. Now, make a loose fist. Do it again. I didn't hear anyone's shirt rip, so that's good. Okay. Now, let your arms hang at your sides and see if you can feel an increase in circulation to your hands. What hands? One hand, oh, dear. Okay. Do one more of these. Hands up over your heads and reach, and as you have your hands up there, you can stretch them, too. This would be a great picture, don't you think?
MS. STEWART: Go ahead and sit back down. Another training moment that you can use as you're starting to do training is ask people to evaluate their current workstation. For example, your workstation right now is this chair, this room, this lighting, and how conducive is that to your job description right now?
MS. STEWART: Right, it's terrible. Well, what can we do about it? We have three choices with ergonomic controls. We have engineering. We have administrative, and we have work practice. Which one can we apply in here? We just did it. I mean, we did kind of a work practice administrative control by having you get up, by reducing your exposure to what we know is a pretty bad workstation.
To talk about training, I'm one of the external consultants that we all read about that charge too much money, you know. But the challenge that I face when I go into a company or an organization is that I don't have the familiarity with the internal goings on, you know, the politics, which I guess in some regard can also be a good thing. But I'm really faced with not knowing my audience in a lot of situations. I do lots of training for the OSHA Training Institute which means that I'm meeting people for the first time when they come into that training room.
So I'm faced with two challenges when developing training. One is content, and the other is training style. Now content, we all have the fundamentals of ergonomics that we look at and that we want to try to teach. The trick is trying to make it relevant to what your audience needs. So your relevance to address your audience's specific needs as well as what is the desired outcome of your training? What do you want people to know when they walk out the door at the end of your training session? Keep this real simple. I mean, it doesn't have to be complicated. I try to stick with terminology, especially with hourly workers, to develop what we call an ergonomic eye.
If you can begin to look at things a little bit differently, if you can begin to use the knowledge that you have, the extensive knowledge that you have about your job and look at that from an ergonomic perspective, then I will have succeeded as a trainer. And you can pick up and get feedback from people throughout the training to understand whether or not that's happening for you or not.
The depth at which you teach is determined by what they need. I probably wouldn't come in here and talk about the basics of ergonomics to most of you, because my hunch is that you probably have a lot of fundamental information already. So style and content in terms of relevance and depth. In terms of style, you can have the best content in the world, and if your style is boring as can be, the content's not going to go anywhere. Or if the style is patronizing, I've certainly sat in on a lot of presentations where that can happen.
Being practical, I think, is really very helpful. Check your ego at the door. People don't come to hear you, because you're not Madonna, you know. You might want to be Madonna or you might, you know, think that there's a rock concert going on, but basically, what people are coming for is information. And if you can create a safe and comfortable and learning environment for people, that's really our job as a trainer.
Use your sense of humor and your intuition. When you've checked your ego at the door, when you've left your ego outside and you aren't going to get your feelings hurt because people want to change the course of what you're teaching or how you're teaching it, and you're willing to do that in mid-stream, that's great. Get a feel from what the people that you're working with want and make appropriate changes as you're going. Does that make sense? Again, because what you're trying to do really is to create a safe and comfortable working environment.
MS. STEWART: So here's some questions to ask, because these are the basic questions I ask myself or ask a group? Who are they? I'm trying to communicate to you information without any feedback from you until the end. I don't know who you are. I don't know why you're here really. I could speculate, but I don't really have that information from you. I don't know what your individual situations are, so what is it that you really need to know? And how are you going use what you learn at this conference? How are you going to actually apply that?
Now, in a training situation, if you have two days worth of training time, I will spend the first 45 minutes having everybody in the group talk about these questions. So it really helps to guide the direction of the course, and it also gives them a chance to open their mouth for the first time and kind of become part of the process, part of the group, which is pretty important.
How do they learn? When Paula did the exercise where you held your hand out and held on to the pencil, you learned something there, didn't you? You learned by doing, and you learned by experiencing. I'll give you an example of that. If you have a notebook or something in your lap, put it down like it's a keyboard. If you don't have one, just pretend like it's a keyboard in front of you. So you have your hands on the keyboard. Now, you're going to be a top flight data entry person. And as ergonomist, you know we get to do really fun things like count key strokes. So you're going to be a top flight data entry person which means that you're going to do 50,000 key strokes per finger per day. That's a little repetition there.
So you got your keyboard in front of you. Bend your dominant hand back. Bend your dominant wrist, extend your dominant wrist halfway and type, both hands, keep your other wrist straight so your hands look like this (indicating). Now, it's eight o'clock in the morning. You'll get a break at 10 for about 10 minutes, 50,000 key -- well, come on. Can you feel what's happening in the bent back hand? Now make your wrist straight, both wrists straight and put your hands out so that your hands are actually in front of your shoulders and type there. Now come to about here (indicating). Angle your hands at about 45 degrees, and you can feel the comfort level increase as you do that.
Now, people are going to remember that, because they felt it. Once you've felt something, it's a lot easier to take out of the room with you. So how do you learn? You learn by doing. You get people to do things as much as you possibly can. I think Susan's going to talk more about that at the end here. Why should they believe me, who am I? I'm your trainer so you should believe me. Just trust me, right?
It really helps, at least from my perspective, when I'm telling stories about myself a little bit. I've had the fortunate experience of having worked in a mill for two years. And I've been a grocery cashier. I was a house painter with a group of two other women. We called ourselves the Painter Sisters. You may have heard of us. We sold a few records. We actually attempted singing, too.
But anyway, I've done those kinds of jobs and can use examples for myself that helped to get buy-in, because I'm not just somebody sitting up here saying, "Well, I know what's best for you." That certainly doesn't work, but if you can share your own experiences that's helpful. It helps gain credibility.
But which common denominator up there is a challenge when you're going around the room and you have somebody who's just about to finish their Ph.D. dissertation in ergonomics, and you have somebody who's barely learning how to spell ergonomics. Who do you teach? Where do you aim? Where do you aim the level of the class? I don't know if this is a problem for any of you, but I run into it all the time, there's quite a range of knowledge and experience.
So again, I think it's boiling it down to simple concepts, because even someone who's writing a dissertation can benefit from simple concepts. I try to teach toward the middle and then check in with the people who are on either end at breaks. That's a good way to find out if people are getting it or not.
Another way to figure if they're getting it is to listen to them. Be sure that there's enough interaction that they're asking you questions. I've had the really unfortunate experience of standing up there thinking that I'm just doing the greatest job, and these concepts are really sinking in, and then somebody will ask me a question that I addressed like four hours before and that they've done a group exercise on. Where did that come from? To me, I need to revamp at that point and check in with the group if I'm being clear and if that concept especially was clearly communicated. So listening to them is really important in terms of knowing whether or not they're getting it.
MS. STEWART: So here are answers. Here are some road tested ideas. And again, this is just from me to you. It's not based on anything other than my experiences of other trainers that I've worked with. Number one, know your audience. Know as much as you can about them. And you can find that out by asking them in a lot of cases.
Keep it simple. Not stupid but simple. Keeping simple concepts so that people can walk out the door with two or three firm ideas, especially when you're dealing with hourly workers to help them develop what we call their ergonomic eye.
Keep it relevant. I had the occasion recently to interview a number of different safety directors and a number of different employees from all different kinds of industry, because I'm in the process of developing this video training for an insurance company, and they want to have it really be appropriate to their clients. So I went around to all these different companies with this little questionnaire that I had developed and asked all these different questions.
The answer that was the most consistent in terms of what's going to make this stick? We're talking about back injury prevention. We're talking about back protection that this specific video topic. What can we do that's different that's going to help you to change? And every single one of them said keep it relevant to me. Make it look like my job. Make it look like something I do. And I took that to heart. You know, it's like how do you do that when you're dealing with concrete and water bottle delivery and logging and all different kinds of things. But try to find a common thread. Keep it relevant to whoever is the recipient of the information.
Keep them busy, like we did. We stretched. Do that kind of thing. Keep people involved.
Back up your facts. Don't mix stuff up. You know what I mean?
Walk the talk, and use it as a teaching moment. For example, you've been sitting here for almost an hour. We did get up once, your spine likes to be moved. The compressive forces in your low back will increase with prolonged sitting. So walk the talk and have people get up and stretch, get up and move around. Really do what you say, what you're asking other people to do. Do it in the training, and then they can also experience it.
Timing is everything. Right after lunch like this. It's probably not a good idea to turn off the lights and throw up slides, but what choice do we have. Right after lunch is a great time to do group exercises.
