No best in class employee health program is complete without a solution for ergonomic injuries. They are the most common form of injury in the workplace and are responsible for 39% of all work-related ill health in Great Britain, according to Health and Safety Executive. Injuries force employees to be less productive and take time off work, which is costly for companies—ergonomics-related employee absence and sick days cost UK businesses £28 a year, according to a PWC report.
These injuries affect every employee across all industries, and they can be immediate or take decades to develop. If your company does not have an effective ergonomic program, your employees are at risk for injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, tennis elbow, among other issues.
There are different programs and initiatives that can help your company keep employees healthy. You can hire ergonomic specialists to oversee programs, create an ergonomic department, conduct employee assessments and evaluations, train employees, offer online resources, provide equipment (i.e. sit/stand desks), and so forth. Ergonomic programs not only reduce fatigue but also make companies more profitable. As a real-world example, the Cornell University’s Human Factors and Ergonomic department studied how to reduce fatigue from using keyboards. In the study, employees received alerts that told them to take breaks, assume good posture, and stretch. The results? They reduced fatigue risk injuries without reducing keystroke rates, improved keying accuracy by 13%, enjoyed a 1% productivity increase, and recovered costs in three months.
Do companies with ergonomic programs automatically experience fewer injuries? Not necessarily. Many struggle to overcome a variety of challenges with managing such programs. Below are some to avoid:
Advancements and use of the latest technology can assist in avoiding common pitfalls. An HSEQ software platform that encompasses an ergonomic solution can help you manage programs to reduce injuries, which reduces costs and helps maintain productivity; and help your ergonomic staff be more efficient, which gives them time to proactively help more employees and find new ways to reduce risks.
You can use software to track your ergonomic policies and procedures, collect data on employees, and justify your program’s ROI to management by showing its costs and quantifiable benefits. This helps management see the value in running these programs and the positive impact made on employees’ health.
Employees can fill out self-evaluations to assess their workplace for risk, and based on their answers, the solution automatically generates a risk score and recommendations for the employee. The staff can then look at these evaluations, triage employees to identify high-risk ones, and dedicate resources to support them.
Software empowers your employees to play a bigger part in ergonomic health. Online training and knowledge bases (i.e. wikis and libraries) reduce the number of employee requests that staff receive, which reduces your staff’s burden and provides them with more time for strategic work. Employees can also report hazards they observe to help staff identify risks that they were previously unaware of, which is especially useful in organizations with limited resources but many workplace locations.
In general, software helps you use data and streamlined processes to proactively find new and strategic ways to reduce risk instead of responding to situations in a reactive manner.
An ergonomic point solution may be good to tackle the issues, but to get the full benefits, you need to choose software that is backed by an enterprise level platform.
Such a platform helps you consolidate data across various locations and departments into one centralized place that can be accessed 24/7 on any device. Your staff can identify high-risk and injured employees, management gets real time ROI data, and employees can access their data without bothering staff with requests for personal information.
Since your data is consolidated in the same place and format, you can build reports with a click of a button and find key insights to make smarter decisions. You can a take a step back and contextualise your data across functions like occupational health and safety and integrate ergonomic data with other HSEQ data so you have a more complete picture of your operations.
Finally, you can use an enterprise solution to be more productive by building automated workflows and notifications to optimize your ergonomic operations and using embedded regulation and guideline content (ie REBA, RULA, etc) without leaving your solution.
Let’s look at how this works in action. A consumer software company incurred increasing workers’ compensation costs from ergonomics injuries and did not have streamlined ergonomics operations to mitigate these injuries. For example, their staff conducted in-person employee assessments that took one hour to complete.
Because of these issues, they implemented ergonomic software and standardised internal processes to reduce compensation costs. They provided support online, over the phone, and physically by triaging cases based on risk level. As a result, they reduced annual workers compensation by more than 50% in their first year, and up to 90% in their fifth year. Since they collected ROI data, they had return on investment in 10 months and reduced ergonomic risk factors by more than 30%.
To recap, ergonomics injuries affect your business and you can build ergonomic programs to mitigate such risks. However, not only should you invest in such programs, but it is also important to invest in software solutions to enhance these programs as well.
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
No worries about DSE Ergonomics as in an earlier SHP article suggested only around 10% actually, maybe, payed attention to the predictably high risks of visual MSD’s in DSE operators (58%) to physical main muscle group limbs and torso disorders (47% with MSK)) resulting from repetitive stress injuries. Even the HSL regardless of HSE RR 561 2007 continue putting back a review of the UK 93 Regs (now 2020) they themselves identified as “little or no benefit” in terms of reducing harm. Denial, omission and a blind-eye has also be turned to the WHO International Classification of Diseases 9th and… Read more »