NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Tom Albin from OFFICE
MR. LeGRANDE: Our last presenter, Tom Albin from 3M, cochaired along with myself the Office Ergonomics Workshop.
Tom.
MR. ALBIN: I'd like to recognize the participants, Dave LeGrande, who was the cochair of the Office Ergonomics session; Nancy Larson of American Express, Bob Morency of L.L. Bean, and Chris Plott of US West, and Nance Ballman of US West and the Communication Workers of America.
What I thought I'd do is just briefly hit some of the highlights of each one of those presentations, and then make a quick summary at the end of that.
The American Express experience was remarkable in it's a multiple site program, so the office program, there needed to be flexible and portable and adaptable to several different sites. Initially that program was driven by the occurrence of musculoskeletal disorders; but it moved to a more macro ergonomic approach, which emphasized all factors or the enhancement of all factors of human performance in the workplace.
Some things that experience taught them was that a coordinator was necessary for day-to-day bird-dogging of the program, to keep things moving, to keep it from losing momentum. They developed standards for their offices for furniture, accessories, computer monitors, et cetera, that were then, as the term implies, standard across the whole company.
Training was mandatory for all employees in office ergonomics. This training addressed such issues as symptoms of cumulative trauma disorders or musculoskeletal disorders, whichever term you prefer; where to get help if they were experiencing these symptoms. Guidelines for how to use your computer workstation: How should you sit? How should you position your hands? How should you position your monitor? Et cetera.
An interesting thing that was done was an individual profile of heights, such as heights of monitor, heights of the keyboard tray were established for each individual; and that this profile then moved whenever the person moved. It was said that the people moved once about every six months, so this profile gave the facilities people setting up the workstations a good idea of how to set the workstation up. This movement also was the cue for training, that people would be trained when they moved.
The outcomes of this type of effort: increased comfort reported through comfort surveys, decrease and worker's comp data in worker's comp costs, a caution that some extraneous variables may influence these. Life in the real world, we're not able to factor out as many of the, and control for as many of the factors as we might like, so some other things may have caused some effect.
Moving on to L.L. Bean, this is an interesting situation in that 60 percent of their business occurs during the holiday period. Their process was to develop first an idea of what kind of risk factors were associated with the work that they were doing, and then to develop an action plan for those facilities. And some of the things that they came up with were setup guidelines, how should a work station be arranged, what kind of arrangements were necessary, as well as development of what was referred to as a toolbox of accessory items for people to use.
I really liked the analogy that was given of a carpenter and a hammer, that if you take the carpenter's hammer away, they can't work; and if you take a computer user's tools away, they can't work very effectively, either.
Emphasis was given on sit/stand work positions as providing more comfort. The employees are also tracked at L.L. Bean, and the profiles for heights and such also move with them. They use Ergo-reps, which in my terminology would be ergo-lead users; these are line workers trained in ergonomics techniques. Products that go into the toolbox are available for demonstration use as well as being immediately available when they're requested and required.
The results again, increased comfort and reduction in cumulative trauma injuries.
Finally, looking at US West, a large company encouraged a lot of early reporting of symptoms, all across different work groups, and found that in terms of results that they saw a decrease in the number of cases and I believe also in costs.
A quick summary of these; I'll try to go in order here. What seemed to me to be consistent about these three reports was that the program started as initially being driven by worker's comp cost data and comfort surveys. The second common theme tended to be that these programs needed to be flexible and portable; that you need to tailor the program to your individual setting, and we might expect this because as ergonomists we always say "one size doesn't fit all, it needs to be tailored to fit."
A third common theme was the establishment of guidelines for offices. That is, what should an office setup look like? What should your workstation setup look like? To make the equipment available for demonstration use, so that people can actually touch and try out the items that you encourage them to use. And certainly you need to train them in the appropriate use.
Now another theme that came up in these presentations was that when you set up these guidelines for offices, you need to allow for and I would say encourage movement and posture in the workstation. As we heard earlier, sit/stand workstation seems to be the way to go.
If you do that, what kind of results would you expect to see, based on the experience of these three programs? First of all, you would expect to see lower incidence of musculoskeletal disorder, you would expect to see lowered cost and you would expect to see enhanced productivity.
I would encourage you all to go out and replicate these kinds of programs in your own settings. Thank you.
MR. LeGRANDE: Thanks, Tom. I think we can see that clearly, regardless of which industry was represented and which occupations were represented, clearly the development of a comprehensive ergonomics program including a component involving workers in the process works. That is, we see not only will there be worker involvement, but there will also be a reduction in the occurrence of ergonomic-related injuries in illnesses.
