NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Question and Answer Session
MS. STOCK: Thank you, Susan. It's always great to put her at the end of a panel. Everybody riled up. Ready for questions. I'd like to ask anybody who has any questions for any of us, our panel, to use the microphone.
Q : I have a question that relates to evaluating effectiveness. And I want to describe a scenario that I see over and over again, but we've run into it quite recently. In our current cooperative agreement with NIOSH, we have a participatory team of orderlies who have implemented training programs. We can look at workers' comp data and see decreased injuries and lost work time and that kind of thing, but that team is now questioning, are we doing what we should be with the education?
How do we know that our education program is working? Are there things we could do better, and I'm curious what kind of methods you all use to quantify effectiveness of education programs for workers?
MS. STOCK: This is called the "E" word. Nobody likes to talk evaluations.
Q : Actually, I'm asking for help.
MS. STOCK: Uh-huh.
MR. GUTMANN: Oh, boy. We actually have shyed away from quantification, and we actually are much more interested -- at least this is our bias in 3M in qualitative results. What we essentially have been doing over the years with our team training, for example, has been to let it evolve. Based on the feedback from the people who were involved in the teams, based on the managers responses is that you can test the effectiveness of your training in theory.
But you have to be careful, in my estimation, to also make sure that you have a program base that is going to support that. You could have the most wonderful training in the world but if you don't have the management support or the engineering support there in place, it's going to go nowhere. So I'd be very careful about how you measure effectiveness and make sure that you also have those other pieces in place.
Q : How are you measuring effectiveness is my question?
MR. GUTMANN: How are we measuring the effectiveness? We use feedback and evaluation forms from participants during the various training exercises, engineers and the teams especially, because they're really crucial to identifying and resolving the issues. And from that, then, we're also looking at how effectively they are addressing issues in the workplace. So it's a very qualitative approach. But essentially, we feel most comfortable with that. And really, it's adapted to the individual location's needs.
Q : Could you also address in that follow up evaluations 'cause most of our literature review has really focused on evaluating like content, but not whether or not they're actually performing the things out in the workplace or the applied portion of it. Do you do follow up evaluations on effectiveness, and what kind of time frames and that type of thing?
Q : I want to say one thing before to follow up with what Steve just said. That one way to evaluate if people are doing things differently is if they've signed a two or three item commitment to check in on that and to see where they are with it in a month. You know, have some check-in times at safety meetings and whatever. I'm doing that with a company now, and that seems to be really working in terms of what some people are and some people aren't. And the ones that aren't, we can try to figure out why.
MS. STEWART: I was simply going to say that one of the things we've done in the past, and this is not with ergonomics, but with other health and safety issues, is find out -- we did interviews, surveys. Did people try and take action? Whether they were successful or not really wasn't the measure. It was whether they felt that they had been empowered enough to try and get a change made. And we -- anybody who tried, that was a success.
MS. COLEMAN: And the other thing, I was just going back up something Kate said and that is we use wrist maps as a kind of on-going assessment of the changes people are making. You know, we do it by those areas that have been improved 'cause people took action, they change on the map. And they become green instead of red, you know, however you measure it.
MR. GUTMANN: I'd like to echo that. I think evaluating what people are attempting to take action on is important and certainly that can give you some indication of whether they understood and processed the materials well. At the same time, you need to see if the organizational changes have taken place that can take that information and process and make some actual changes out there which is again another level or two at the very least. And also, see if you have a receptive organization.
How is it percolating throughout the organization? Are people beginning to bring up these ideas? Are people beginning to form new structures to deal with them effectively?
Q: Jordon Barob, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Just to also add something to that last question. We go on course at the meeting center for our staff reps and activists every year, and our main means of evaluating the effectiveness is whether we ever hear from them again. And, you know, some of them, we do and some of them, we don't. And the ones we do, we --- successful like Paula said. You know, at least they've tried to do something or they're trying to do something. But I had a question, actually for Steve Gutmann.
I thought it was very interesting that you actually do train all the levels, all your levels and departments and everything. Because we have a lot of trouble with that. We train our members, but, of course, if management isn't training, it only goes so far. The question, though, it was interesting, I was listening to Paula talk about getting so many of these good ideas from the workers. You talked about training your engineers and then training your front line staff. Do they ever talk to each other? I mean, do the engineers actually meet with your workers and get their ideas of what's going on or do they just sit there and do it?
MR. GUTMANN: No, within our organization -- and I'll speak just to that. Essentially, the way the team structure works or the program structure works in our facilities is that -- we try and keep management out of those teams. The employees sit down and prioritize the issues, maybe do some rudimentary analysis, perhaps pull us in to help them with analysis. Once they have prioritized and identified key issues that they feel comfortable with, then they might talk to an engineer as to what's feasible in this particular circumstance. I mean, that's one scenario.
During discussions and prioritization, they may also pull in some of the engineers who are actually at the site. Also our locations tend to be fairly flat organizationally. We really try and break down those barriers as much as we can.
MS. STOCK: Other questions?
Q: Paul Snate from IBM. I have a question on the -- most of you have touched on training. Susan, I think, came the closest to what I would call education. And if you look at training in its absolute simplest form, you can train a four-legged animal to do tricks. But education on the other hand would teach somebody how to make decisions about what's right for their workstation. And I guess I would ask each of the panelists what their view is, and when does education become more effective than training?
MS. MOIR: Who invited you?
MS. MOIR: I think training's the safe word, right? I mean, that's -- we do more training than education, because training is safer than education. And training is really -- I mean, fundamentally, training is most often -- and if I may generalize. There are exceptions to this, but training is designed to change the behavior of workers. It's training for safe behavior. And it's really pretty radical for a company to support education.
MS. STEWART: I think that in order for someone to make a behavior change to actually -- to be trained, the education has to come first. I mean, once a person is educated about the why's and the how's then it's -- for me anyway, it makes more sense they will motivated to change. I mean, I don't have to teach my Golden Retriever why she should give me her paw for a cookie. Do you know what I mean? Because she'll do that, because she's motivated to please. But for humans, I think -- I have to understand why and how before I'm motivated to make a change. And so, the educational piece comes in that part.
Q: I think I would agree with you, and that's exactly the problem that so often we're doing training first. The people that were training have no education in ergonomics. So we jump in and we do the training, and it gets to a few others who were asking efficacy question of how effective is the training, whereas, if you do provide information that will educate them first, the training may become more effective. That was the point of the question. Thank you.
MS. STEWART: That's a good question.
MS. STOCK: I just want to make one other comment myself. It seems like a lot of this stems -- in terms of setting your objectives of training from a definition of what you think the cause of the problem is, I think that traditionally training role that Steve was saying defines the problem as if it's a result of the worker's fault or worker's behavior.
And, therefore, what you're trying to do by training has changed that behavior. I think that it particularly, in ergonomics, is ideally suited for this multi --- view that it's not the worker's fault. That it's many, many systems that need to be changed. Then you need to design a training so that you can have impact on all those systems, not just on worker behavior. That's where you need to get more into education. Yes, another question.
Q : Mine isn't really a question, but it deals more with the global issue of training. I work for chemical manufacturing facility on the south side of Chicago, and we recently acquired a training specialist who truly, truly is a training specialist. We had someone in that position before that was hired because they used to teach school but really didn't -- they taught -- this gal that we have now was brought in and was told, "We want you to develop some training." And she said to our plant manager, "Okay. What level do I train?"
We have hourly workers. We have Ph.D. engineers. We have para-professional staff. Where do I begin and where's the learning curve here, you know? Am I teaching at a third grade level? Am I teaching at a college level? We have very complicated process steps that people have to follow. The people that write the process steps are Bachelor or Master prepared, scientists, the people who have to perform the tasks, some of them have a third grade education. We have discovered that we have people -- and we went through - thank goodness for our management.
They decided that we should do what was called a "TABE" which was Test of Adult Basic Education. It was done totally confidential. Every person in our facility went through this test, including the plant manager, and we are now in the process of having feedback. Individuals are getting their results, and they're finding out. We've discovered that we have people who are dyslexic. We have people who have short-term memory at a four-year old level. Now, think about this, those of you have children.
We tell people, you know, I want you to shut this valve after you do this, this, this. When a kid is little, you say to that kid, well, you know, they just won't do what they're told. Then as a kid becomes a teenager, you say to that kid, you know, that's just a rebellious teenager. Then the person becomes an adult, and this might never have been diagnosed. It might never have been identified. And what the problem truly is the person has short-term memory problems.
I'm an occupational health nurse, and when this training gal -- occasionally, she needs somebody to bounce things off of. Can keep a secret, and she doesn't give away the farm, but she knows that I'm a person that have secrets of my own that I can't divulge. I mean my professional life. So she will come to me and she will say, "You know, what are the implications for this with Alzheimer's research?"
Maybe the folks that developed Alzheimer's never really had memory to begin with, you know. Short term. Short term, you know. Because the person with Alzheimer's loses short term memory. They don't lose long term memory, and we're identifying people with those kinds of problems. It's amazing. And I would just encourage all of you to really, truly -- if you have someone in a training function, make sure that that person is qualified to do what they're doing, not just somebody who applied or bid on the job because they worked in human resources or they had an interest in training. It really, truly is a profession. A nurse couldn't become a chemist. An industrial hygienist could not function as a nurse, and I truly believe that, now that I've met this woman, there are people who cannot function as trainers.
MS. MOIR: There's a great page from a magazine, a trade magazine, specializing in manual materials handling we use in our training some time. It was a one-page primer. I've never used that word before, but I heard it this morning, primer. On how manual material handling companies should deal with ADA, American Disabilities Act, and adapt manual materials handling work to people with disabilities in order to comply with the law. There wasn't a single thing on this page that couldn't apply to every single worker. It was a whole thing on how to adapt for people with disabilities. And, in fact, these were ergonomic adoptions that should have been available to every worker who works in manual materials handling.
So, in fact, I think, you know, people do have specialties. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. We cannot design every job for everybody's individual strengths and weaknesses. We need to design for the worker, and to make all work a lot easier than it is.
MS. STOCK: Yes, sir.
Q : Yeah, I'm glad these last couple of questions came up. I appreciate them. In my industry, especially -- I guess the question I have is about training abuse, I guess, for a lack of a better word.
MS. MOIR: What's your industry?
Q : Sorry?
MS. MOIR: What's your industry?
Q : I guess it's really low, but in the printing industry. I'm with R. Donnelly & Sons Company. And training abuse in the terms that if there's a problem, people like to throw training at it. Oh, this guy isn't lifting correctly. Why don't you go train him, Mike. I'll go take care of this guy. My theory --- and I don't know if this is true, but theoretically, I'm thinking, if you can hold a gun to this person's head and say lift this box correctly or, you know, handle this correctly, or do this correctly. If they can do that holding a gun to their head, is it a really a training issue or is it something else. That's kind of my question.
MR. GUTMANN: To me, in a way, that also says that perhaps you may not have some of the players on board that you need higher up in your organization. There may be circumstances where you may wish to address some of the training to the workers and make sure that your refresher training is appropriate, this, that and the other. But why is it that you're training this person or this group of people repeatedly? In terms of lifting techniques and that's all that you do. You Should have a system in place so you are actually looking at what the underlying issues are.
Again, I refer to back to the Liberty Mutual study. You know, some of these problems are very difficult to resolve, but some of them are not. So I would really look at the receptiveness of trying to understand what it is that these people are dealing with on the floor.
How much of it is a person's decision to do something, but also, really more important in my mind is the underlying design, the underlying approach to the process and understanding the process as opposed to just doing the operation.
MS. STOCK: I just want to make one other comment also, 'cause I've often had the experience when I go out and do training and I come back. We talk about interventions and you see people not doing what you told them to do. They're continuing to do things wrong. And the impulse, particularly those of us who go out and do work station evaluations. Why aren't they doing what I told them to do? I'm the expert, and I know what they should be doing. And when I stop to talk to people, I almost always find out that there's a reason. It's not just that they're stubborn or they just kind of don't remember, though sometimes that might be an issue.
But often it's because the intervention is wrong. And it goes back to what a lot of people have been saying about the importance of involving workers in choosing what the solutions are. They say why aren't you using this particular chair? Why aren't you sitting up in this position? Why aren't you using that document holder that I gave you? There's an often a concrete work related reason that whoever designed the control didn't take into account. It's just another reason to analyze further and involve workers in figuring out what the solution should be.
Q : I have one question --- since nobody else is on line. And it kind of relates to this occupational nurse was mentioning which is the issue of knowing your audience which a number of people have said. But we at LOHP have been doing a lot of work about designing training materials that are appropriate for low literacy populations and trying to recognize it when you go in and do training. You have to see not only that adults have different learning styles but also that people have different levels of literacy, not to mention different languages.
And I'm curious in the training programs that you've described whether you have anything to offer about how you would address that issue, or techniques you use to uncover that, or how you modify your training to allow for people who, in fact, can't read or have limited reading skills?
MS. STEWART: One of the things that I like to do is use video for some -- it depends on -- I mean, if I'm dealing with a group of employees who need to have -- and understanding of fundamentals of ergonomics, what ergonomics is. And again, to help develop their ergonomic eye. There are a couple of real short little videos out there or little vignettes that are quite good that communicate the issue, and then you can talk about it. So I think, not limiting it just to reading and using a lot of examples, getting people to teach antrapalmetry.
You get a tall person and a short person up in front of the room and you ask people to identify what the differences are that they see, you know. Somebody will say, oh, he's a lot fatter than she is. You know, that kind of thing. You know, using more practical examples.
Q : I would say that certainly in ergonomics training, we find that we --- most of the information comes from the students. You know, they bring their tools. They describe what's wrong. They figure out what needs to be change. You know, ergonomics is easy because it's so physical. That way, you can teach through illustrations. You can teach through drawings. I find that ergonomics is probably the easiest ---
MS. STOCK: I want to say one more thing. We designed an analysis, work site analysis package that is all illustrations, and there's a, you know, green light, yellow light, red light kind of thing. And each one of them has a picture. If you're looking at back flexion, for example, you know the green light is straight up to 15 degrees, that kind of thing. And people can circle whichever one it is that is appropriate to them. And it was reviewed by literacy and adult literacy expert to satisfy someone with a seventh grade education. And it's primarily graphics.
MR. GUTMANN: Let me throw a little extra twist in here just to have a little fun. All right. We referred to literacy and those types of issues. Now, the issue that we face many times is not only that, although we have certain reading requirements that people have to fulfill in order to be hired, but we deal with a tremendously diverse population. For example, in the State of California, we're dealing with Vietnamese. We're dealing with Hispanic employees. We're dealing with any number of different languages.
They're excellent workers, but in order to communicate any kind of safety and health information, let alone ergonomics, is a real challenge for us, especially because a lot of it is under state mandate or federal mandate to train in their language. If I'm not mistaken, I think that there's some attempt in the company to actually get them some remedial English training and to also have those who perhaps had better English skills to help in communicating to others some of the basic information they need and also to deal with some of the cultural issues that we come across. But it's very difficult and not always easy to deal with.
MS. MOIR: Let me add something to that. I was consulting last week with an adult educator who works with a health care unit in Boston. And she works with largely immigrant populations, and the politics of the workplace and the power relationships -- if I can generalize again, often much better understood by immigrant populations than they are by American workers. We live under the myth of the classless society and the quality at work. People come from places where they fully understand what it means to not be able to exercise power to change their workstation.
But I deal with what I would contend is one of the most challenging populations to teach ergonomics to and that's undergraduate students in engineering.
MS. MOIR: These are the folks who are really dead from the neck up, because they learn in extremely rigid ways. They cannot participate. They cannot talk unless they know they have the right answer. They can't go from sector to sector, because their conception of these problems is so narrowly defined. So I think -- literacy cuts across a lot of different sectors and a lot of different levels of education.
MS. STOCK: Okay. One last question.
Q: I'm Rosalind Edson. I'm an Industrial Hygienist with the Public Health Service. And I wanted to get the panelist's feedback as to computer-based training. I know a lot of employers who feel that computer-based training will solve all your training needs. And I very much disagree with that, especially in the area of ergonomics where I think you learn by doing.
MS. MOIR: From an ergonomics point of view, sitting workers at a workstation with computer-based training is putting them in a hazardous situation. It's really dead. It's lazy. It's expensive. It's inaccessible. I don't like it.
MR. GUTMANN: I respectfully offer perhaps an alternate explanation.
MS. MOIR: Good. Let' have a debate.
MR GUTMANN: No, no, no. Not necessary. Actually, for the most part, we've been looking at computer-based education, and there's certainly the issues of hardware. How do you get enough units to really train people and this, that and the other. But we've made a decision that the primary education that we provide to employees is going to be person-based. That is someone standing up in front of the class. And what we're looking at right now, we haven't made any final decision, is for the one's, two's people who have not attended, perhaps someone posted into a new area, you're not able to pull them into a class in a timely manner, then you might sit them down in front of a computer-based training to at least give them some basics and then get them into the class that they should have been in the first place. So we see it as an ancillary tool. And we're approaching this, at least in our organization, very cautiously.
MS. MOIR: I agree totally. One of the programs that the Center to Protect Workers' Right is funding is a researcher in Florida who's developing a computer-based training. And I've differed with him on this computer-based training on hazardous materials. It's in many languages and it's voice activated. I've disagreed with him and his use of this as a primary training methodology, but in the way we used to teach children to use encyclopedias, if these can be available in the workplace so the worker doesn't have to spend weeks exposed to a chemical before they can an MSDS, if they can go to a computer and reference what they need to know, or if they need some supplement to training, I think that it can be effective. I'm not opposed to the Internet, and this can operate in that way. I just think it's lazy as a primary training methodology.
MS. STOCK: Okay. I think we're out of time. But thank you very much for your participation. And thanks to the panelist.
(Whereupon, the Training session was concluded.)
