Workplace Safety

What is ergonomics? It’s the study of the interaction of people, environment and work to create safety and efficiency. How do employees interact with technology?

Fitting Machines to People

Traditionally, machines and equipment were purchased and then work stations were created around them. The manufacturers have become savvy to ergonomics and do build in more comfort and flexibility.

Several factors need review and adjustment to fit the individual worker.

1. Elbows should be bent slightly downward from parallel to comfortably guide the hands to the working level. Wrists should be supported where applicable.
2. If sitting is an option, chairs should be designed with backs against the rest, knees slightly lower than hips and a foot rest or the floor fit to the employee’s leg length.
3. Standing positions should reduce bending or tilting of the head.
4. All tools and supplies staged within fourteen inches of the working station, in front of the worker.
5. Keep any monitor or work in easy line of sight without bending the neck.
6. Try to reduce repetitive motions, or allow the employee to take periodic breaks from their work to change positions or walk a bit.
7. Anyone using phones or other communication devices regularly requires a headset, Bluetooth device, or speaker phone to avoid repetitive hand motions or neck pain from pinching receivers.

General environmental rules include lighting the workspace properly, keep aisles or halls unobstructed and the floors level with non-skid surfaces.

So you’re not an ergonomic expert nor does your company have the money to invest in consultants, what can you do?

Begin with your own workspace. What tasks are uncomfortable? If you’re on the phone constantly, try standing up or walking every so often while on a call. Feel better? How about your desk height compared to the chair? Do you have good lines of sight where needed?

Interview the office employees to investigate any ergonomic issues.

Start with the beginning of your assembly line, site workflow, or process and interview each employee along the process. They’ve thought about these issues and can give great insight. Be open to the discussion. Be open to solutions.

Correct ergonomics, a comfortable workplace, lead to tremendous efficiency. That’s your payoff.

Any task involves thinking about what tools or materials will be needed. Next, the employee must stage the task by gathering these tools, equipment, machines and supplies to ready the work space.
Train your employees to keep the space managed so reaching for tools is unnecessary. They will avoid strains, muscle pulls and worse.

Some safety consultants suggest different rules for jobs requiring one hand or two. Use the shorter reach keep reaching down to fourteen inches.

If the reaching requirement is more than fourteen inches, move the entire body rather than leaning or stretching. If the body must move excessively, the staging needs to be reviewed.

Some typical scenarios leading to overreaching:

Stretching to High Storage Areas.

Heavy objects should be stored on the ground and not stacked above waist height. Medium weight items, around fifty pounds, should be stored at stomach and chest height for easy and less strenuous capture and carry. Only very light loads should be stored no higher than shoulder height. Step stools should be available for shorter employees.

Any additional storage above shoulder height needs access via a fork lift. Moving up or down ladders or movable stairs just adds danger to any job.

Reaching Over, Across or Around Obstacle

Shoulder strains, rotator cuff injuries and other muscle tears occur when the load or stretch exceeds the capacity of the joint or muscle structure.

Never store items in a hard to reach place. Always reach from the shortest distance or move your body to a more convenient lifting location. Keep pathways clear to any storage area.

Working from a Stage and Reaching Down to Pick a Supply

Your on the scissor lift and forgot that bucket of sheet rock compound, do you climb down or reach for it? Train your employees to climb down, lift it properly onto the stage and then remount.

Look around your facility, job site, storage area, even in the office for situations where dangerous reaching might occur. Rethink your layout to eliminate these situations and train your employees how to spot them.

Make sure everyone knows it’s alright to ask for help. 

Every safety program depends on each minor injury being reported so patterns can be found in the data.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires injuries to be reported and logged.

The goal of these reporting requirements is to find the problem areas within job operations.

Painters and roofers will have ladder related injuries, chefs have cuts.  Prevention science can suggest avoidance techniques and technology to reduce the number of claims.

An ignored data set which can reduce injuries is the reporting of near misses.  Whether the data involves trucks backing up to a loading dock while people are walking through the zone or window washers mis-rigging their scaffold, these incidents should be reported as potential injury-occurrences.

By reporting near misses, you improve awareness and find solutions before they become injuries – the best of all worlds from a prevention perspective.

Many safety engineers suggest this reporting is too subjective.  Would people report every time a minor change in floor elevation made for uncomfortable walking?

An airplane hard landing that sets off alarms is analyzed as a near miss.  Perhaps a near miss in industry would be a load shifting on a forklift, increasing the hazard of falling objects or crush injuries.

Certainly, if loads were shifting regularly without reportable incident, smart management would want to know to fix the loading problem before someone was hurt.

So, the near miss must be of substantial potential consequence to rate a report.  Slips and falls which do not result in injury might point to a poor floor wax application or bad choices of ladders.

A fall prevented by a harness might point to a poor choice of footwear or insufficient rails.

Aging equipment becomes dangerous and near misses can be vital in determining when it’s time to buy new.

Experts do not agree on the line between over-reporting incidents and reporting enough valuable information.  The naysayer position correctly argues that employees do not appreciate reports and paperwork completed that are then ignored.  Given the potential number of incidents, many more near misses than injury events, over-reporting might breed apathy.

Report near misses when serious injury might have occurred.  Do the reverse engineering to determine the proximate causes of these near misses.  Get back to the employee making the report and thank them for their participation.  You’d rather fix the process before injury.

Having the right insurance is an important part of protecting your business and managing risk, but if you’re like most businesses, you still want to keep your insurance costs as low as possible for the sake of your bottom line. Having a risk management plan in place is one important way to control your insurance expenses, but here are a few more quick tips to help you keep your costs as low as possible:

* Review your policy regularly. Make sure the deductibles you have in place still make sense based on the types and numbers of losses you’ve encountered during the last year or two. Also make sure the types and amounts of coverage you have in place still make sense for your risk profile.

* Make payments on time to avoid late fees and prevent a cancellation that could make it more difficult to get coverage in the future.

* Review your property values on a regular basis to ensure you’re not paying for too much coverage or putting your property at risk by having too little coverage.

* Perform a workplace health assessment to identify health-related risks and determine if you need to make changes in your health insurance plan and identify changes in your facilities that could help limit your risks.

* Consider physical upgrades like sprinkler systems or security alarms that could result in discounts on your premiums. When analyzing the return of these upgrades, compare the cost of installation with both the insurance savings you’ll receive and the potential reduction in risk to get the most accurate estimate of value.

* When a loss occurs, report it to your broker right away so you have a complete understanding of your rights as well as your obligations. Delays in reporting can result in a denial of your claim, and contacting your broker immediately also means you’ll have help in filing paperwork correctly and on time.

* Ask your agent or broker about potential discounts and be sure to keep your broker updated on any changes or improvements in your business, including loss prevention practices, that could qualify you for savings programs or reveal areas where your insurance coverage may no longer be adequate.

* Make sure to consider risk management in every business decision so you make the right trade-off between risk and opportunity.

* Finally, make sure you’re taking advantage of all the benefits your insurance company and brokerage offers, like free notary services or other perks. If you don’t ask, you could be missing out on some valuable benefits.

First, decide whether an outside professional group will plan the event or an internal group within the company.  The external group has advantages regarding reducing liability, but budget is a factor.

Regardless of the above choice, areas of concern include:

•             Is attendance mandatory or voluntary?
•             Are family members or customers invited?
•             Alcohol policy
•             Transportation policy
•             Conduct code – professional or fun
•             Events construed as sexual harassment or hostile
•             Social media aftermath

Mandatory attendance will be construed as work.  The company will be subject to hourly wages, workers’ compensation claims, and a variety of regulatory issues.  Opt for voluntary whenever practical.

Will employee’s families attend?  This question is the double edged sword.  Families love inclusion and self-govern behavior.  The bad news is families self-govern behavior.  What process is in place for a wild or disruptive spouse?  How about inappropriate airing of the family laundry?  Is there bad blood between a spouse and a customer?

The obvious answer is prohibition.  No alcohol permitted.  Sometimes, alcohol can be very appropriate as long as measures are in place to curtail excess.  One rule of thumb is to only allow work-like demeanor or behavior.  Under this rule, alcohol would be banned.

Not so obvious, suppose a spouse, child or customer is an alcoholic?  In some states, marijuana is now legal.  Does the alcohol consumption open the door for the pot?  Strictly from a liability viewpoint, drugs and alcohol should be banned from any company function.

Transportation can be arranged for group activities away from the work campus, but use caution.  Just as with mandatory attendance, the risk of transporting employees brings in workers’ compensation issues.

All the rules of the workplace, including sexual harassment and bullying, apply to the fun outings.  Communicate this fact to all employees prior to the event.

Posting reports and pictures from the outing is good for morale, but screen the social media for embarrassing or inappropriate content.

Think through these issues and decide what sort of outing is appropriate for your company.  Create a set of behavioral standards based on the event.  For example, competitive sports or team building may get rowdier than a night at the opera.  Communicate those expected behaviors for employees and their families.

Properly managed employee expectations will relax the group and put some fun into the company function.

Personal development pioneer Earl Nightingale once said, “You can measure opportunity with the same yardstick that measures the risk involved. They go together.” In other words, risk and opportunity are deeply interrelated, and learning to balance the two is essential to the growth and development of just about any business.

Types of Risk:

Both risk and opportunity can be divided into categories:

Strategic risk is devoted to identifying and evaluating new services, products or other opportunities and deciding which ones pose the most potential advantage with the least risk. In most cases, the most novel opportunities are associated with the least-known and least-understood risks, so the potential for loss tends to be greater.

Operational risk looks at the processes currently in place and decides how to maximize opportunities by identifying and implementing the best practices, best employees and other best-of-breed business elements through a fine-tuned policy of regulations and rules.

Growth risk involves managing the scale of your business with your company’s ability to meet expanded goals; many new businesses fall prey to the temptation to expand too rapidly, finding out too late they’re unable to meet greater demand or meet the costs associated with an ill-timed expansion. On the other hand, growing too slowly – being too afraid of risk – can result in the competition winning over your market.

Financial risk is closely intertwined with the other three types of risk and can include investor risk, the cost of debt, revenue potential vs. expenses, and investments in employees and promotion.

Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Learning to embrace risk usually isn’t an easy task, even for seasoned business executives, but it’s essential for competitive growth and continued relevance within your market. The key is to look at “failure” as an opportunity for learning and for identifying the changes that need to be made in one or more areas of your risk-opportunity balance.

One of the best ways of learning how to manage strategic risk is to become one of your customers; devote yourself to understanding the customer experience firsthand so you can identify ways you can improve your product or service and the way it’s delivered. It’s also a good way to identify potential areas for growth and development of new products or services.

Accurately balancing risk and opportunity is the key to success for businesses of all sizes. Instead of running from risk, learn to understand its value so you don’t wind up leaving potentially lucrative opportunities behind.

Automobile accidents are the number one cause of liability claims in business.  Automobile related claims, especially drivers under the influence of alcohol and youthful operators, are the most devastating to families as well.

Every risk manager and fleet manager needs to check drivers’ records frequently.

Quarterly is not too frequent.

Sounds overly intrusive or expensive?  Consider that good driving records not only reflect good driving habits; they reflect vigilance in these habits.

Fleet managers must view on-time deliveries and vehicle upkeep as major issues.  Risk managers view safety and long-term costs as major metrics.

Quality driver management and the reinforcement of vigilant, excellent driving habits support both sets of goals.

Set driving record standards for moving violations and accidents.  Limit drivers to a maximum number of points or moving violations and at fault accidents.  Be sold on the idea of intolerance for lesser histories.

Assign some intervention tactic for any moving violation or accident, even not-at-fault.  The fleet manager or risk manager can debrief the driver on the circumstances and measures of avoidance which were missed.  From this conversation, training can be assigned.

Emphasize the importance of excellent habits and vigilant execution of these habits.

The more touchy subject is checking driving records for spouses or children of employees who may access the vehicle, with or without permission.

In closely held corporations or partnerships, do not hesitate to perform this task.  Driving while intoxicated and youthful drivers are the major devastating liability issues for families.  Healthcare bankruptcies are not liability claims for these purposes.

Do you want your choice of partner dependent on your current partners’ sixteen year-old child’s driving?  For closely held companies, this scenario is real.

The child speeds through a red light and badly injures several people.  The claim exceeds the family coverage.  Next in line – the business.  The debts may be paid by liquidating that partners share, the victims may become the new partners, or a forced sale of stocks may occur.

For a public company, shares of stock or a garnishment of wages may occur for a personal automobile claim; but the company car exposes all the company assets.

Banning family members or unauthorized usage is one answer, but teens will be teens.  Check the records, suggest interventions for family members too before bad habits lead to disaster.  And it’s always possible to restrict car use to business only with the car left on the business campus; or take away privileges completely to at-risk employees.