NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Dave Alexander from PROGRAM EVALUATION
MR. ALEXANDER: First, there were three people on the program; myself, Bill Holt from DuPont, and Mike Fleming from Sara Lee Knit Products.
It's very interesting, when you look at ergonomics one of the fundamentals is the science of measurement; we measure everything we can about humans and very little about the business aspects of ergonomics, and I think it's important to do that.
Interestingly enough, if you look at science "Quality", you'll find that they would say "we've been there and done that." For many years quality was unsuccessful simply measuring the product, and became successful by looking at business issues. I think ergonomics has a similar opportunity.
You can evaluate a number of different ways; this is one method of evaluation that is simply based on stages of implementation of an ergonomics program. After you've seen a lot of these programs be implemented, you realize it's not that much different than building a house or raising a child. There are certain predictable stages that occur; you can measure those and monitor those, and you can see where you are. In fact, it becomes a useful way of monitoring programs, multiple plants within a corporation.
Another effective way of looking at programs is to look at the costs. These are annual workers compensation costs on your left and total incidents per year on your right. They correlate; you see a drop in both of them. Cost is a very good integrative measure; it's not a very good detail measure. If your costs aren't in line, you don't know what to do. On the other hand, they tell a compelling, a very short compelling story if they're going in the right direction.
There are other ways to evaluate; and several examples were provided. In fact, you can look at the maturing of an ergonomics program and find that initially you may measure activities, eventually moving to outcomes or results based -- which is a healthy place to be; many programs are moving to that. Ultimately you move to a systems base for very mature programs. We would measure or monitor a mature quality program on ISO 9000-type management systems principles.
This is a slide that Mike Flemming of Sara Lee Knit Products provided. Mike has the unenviable challenge of providing guidance for ergonomics program implementation to approximately 50 plants. I've heard many people say they have trouble figuring out what's going on at one plant, or five plants or ten plants; so you can imagine the chore, we're trying to track fifty. Yet Mike has done this with ease and grace.
One of the ways he does this is by simply using Gantt charts and good management tools. In this case, he has a line, Annual Activities; he's got the activities listed on a time schedule, and is able to track these and follow this very good system.
One of the things Mike does, he uses a tool assessing the ergonomics program. He asks the individual sites to fill out so it becomes their score, not his. He serves as a calibrator or an accuracy gauge to make sure that they've done it correctly. In fact, he reports that many plants will provide lower scores than they actually earn, and part of his job is to help them say "you're doing better than you may think."
But by having them score and score in different areas, things can be tracked and improvement objectives can be established; and again this is done with ownership at the local plant level.
Finally, he asked each plant to create a targeted action plan, based on their assessment, and as you can see there are a number of activities. There are descriptions of those, there are deadlines, timetables reporting and accountability things, all built in. So Mike's job becomes one of monitoring, reinforcing, praising, and following up, which is the role that a modern program manager should be following.
Bill Holt of DuPont has been managing his ergonomics program for a decade now; he started in 1987. So he's approaching a long anniversary. You might think back, what were you doing in 1987 and were you familiar with ergonomics or not.
In this case, you can see a substantial decline in the incident rate. It's kind of interesting, because if you look at this you may think, "Well, I also see the familiar hump that occurs with an ergonomics program." Actually, that is not due to the awareness training; that occurred much earlier in their program. This was due to a downsizing and people moving to new jobs, and also having more people working more overtime and perhaps being overworked just a bit.
But it's interesting, when you look at this, it's relatively easy to make a 5 or 10 percent change in your numbers. It's difficult to make an 80 or 90 percent change in your numbers, and that's what Bill was able to do and was able to report on. And it's interesting because there's a fundamental change in activities that occur in order to get those major step changes in performance.
Bill described this, it's been discussed I think in the earlier session, about how they changed from a being taken care of approach, which was a dependent environment: "You do what I say, I'll take care of you" to "I'll take care of myself" an independent approach; and now going to a "caring for others, an interdependence; we're in this together, let's help each other." I describe that as a culture change, a significant culture change, and I think it's one of the only ways that you can get these major changes in numbers, really getting down into the fractional levels and incident rate.
There is an ergonomics culture; each of the presenters talked about this. This is one version that I have of it, others have similar things but not identical; but in this it's easy to describe business as usual, where ergonomics is an expense, ergonomics culture where ergonomics is an investment. Business as usual, where we do it because OSHA says to do it. Ergonomics culture where we do it because it's simply good business. You can see the other contrasts and these will be reported out in the proceedings.
Finally, what is an effective ergonomics program? There are two points that are important; the first is that you do need to demonstrate a step change in performance; you must show that in fact these things work, and that may be comp rates, ultimately incident rates, ultimately lowering of risk factors, and in addition there must be systems which influence changes in performance. That's what separates it from a Hawthorne effect or simply trying, or simply getting lucky, simply manipulating the numbers of those other kinds of activities.
So relative to ergonomics program evaluation there are a lot of tools, there are ways to do it, it's something that's important.
So I'll conclude on that.
What I would like to do now, and I think this is the most fun from my standpoint is, open the floor for discussion questions, and those kinds of things. I would ask, given the lateness of the day, that perhaps we keep our questions short. I think most of the presenters will be available for a few minutes afterwards if you want to discuss any topics at length.
If there are questions or comments, we can have those.
