The 30-Inch View

EU Recognizes Importance of Ergonomics and Safety

Recently I was on the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work website and there was a post titled European Week aims at cutting workplace accidents and diseases, and it made me think of the differences between the approach of the EU to ergonomics and safety versus the US approach. What drew me to this article was the statement from the Director of EU-OSHA:

"Every three-and-a-half minutes somebody in the EU dies from work-related causes and every four-and-a-half seconds an EU worker is involved in an accident that forces them to stay at home for at least three working days. This is unacceptable! We need a change, and this change starts with assessing workplace risks. We have to make employers, workers, safety representatives and policy makers aware that proper risk assessment is the key to good workplace safety and health management."

Last year, I spent 20 weeks in Europe rolling out a corporate ergonomics process and it allowed me to see first hand cultural differences between sites. The attitude of a lot of the companies I've worked with in Europe is "let's plan early and do it right the first time". If they say that Ergonomics and Safety are their number one priority, it is. In the US, I see a lot of advertisements at facilities boasting the importance of safety and ergonomics and how it is the number one priority, but in practice, it is only number one until something more important comes along. In the blog post Leverage Internal Resources for Safety & Ergonomics Communication, Cindy touches on advertising within a facility. This is very important, but national advertising can also be very effective and gives support to companies. Such was the goal with European Week for Safety and Health at Work.

We recently posted A Prescription for Carpal Tunnel Vision: Thoughts on an Ergonomic Standard which was a response to the recent news of an ergonomics regulation potentially coming into effect with the change in the US Presidency. Although labor unions tend to support ergonomics regulations to reduce workplace injuries, businesses in the US often feel that supporting ergonomics will be too costly. They do not want to invest the time or energy into something that may not show an immediate return on investment. They do not understand the long term value of ergonomics. This is in part due to the approach that companies take with their ergonomics process. As many companies do with their Lean Manufacturing initiatives, ergonomic principles are applied in a non-systemic way. By not seeing the whole picture and understanding all of the aspects that need to be considered, they end up unsuccessful. Successful companies understand that if you invest resources, time, and money early, it will save much more in the long run in terms of injuries, rework, and productivity. Being proactive and systematic in your approach is the key.

The European Union recognizes that being proactive means looking at risk and not injuries. Risk reduction starts with assessments. In order to fix a problem or reduce risk, you first need to understand it. Only after you have identified risk can you move towards implementing countermeasures to reduce that risk. All of this data needs to be tracked so that you can ensure that your countermeasures are making a significant difference. When done well, this is a process that will yield a startling ROI in both the short-term and long-term.

 

Safety Professionals and Respect - Part 1 - ROI

A recent post at the OSHA Underground blog relates that Safety Engineers feel that they get little respect, and we agree that the frustration many professionals feel is real and a burden to success, not only in construction, as was indicated, but in all industries.

OSHA Underground alluded to two of the major causes; one created by safety people themselves and the other by their employers. In this post, let's discuss the first:

"Efforts are not valued" - Many employers do not value the contribution and results achieved by their safety staff because no value is determined. Safety professionals have a tendency to fall back on the archaic measurement of injury and illness rate, and injury cost as their measure of success. This is a lagging measure of consequences. It is a traditional measure that allows one to focus on cost avoidance. As a result, most safety people demonstrate their value by subjectively projecting cost savings through injury avoidance, not actual measurement of their contribution.

In business and in life, value is measured in one way; MONEY. Safety professionals need to expand their ability and use of objective measures that demonstrate Return on Invesment (ROI). Simply put, what is the monetary return to the bottom line of a business from that investment in the safety program. This means breaking away from traditional safety measures that have been handed down for the past century and finding new ways of measuring contribution. Most importantly, the measures should be familair, common, and of interest to management. For example, the contribution of safety towards decreasing cycle time (production), increased employee retention, and improvements to quality.

When safety professionals begin to measure and demonstrate the value they offer (MONEY) then business leaders will value the efforts of programs and individuals.

People are flexible, but...

Wally Bock raises an interesting point in "Designing work as if people mattered" at his Three Star Leadership blog. Unlike the specs for say a carriage bolt, people's "specifications" vary and therefore job descriptions must take that variability into account.

As Wally points out, carriage bolts do not change after we buy them, and they are consistent in size and strength. People are not. That is why employers have an obligation to understand the capabilities and limits of human performance and ensure that work tasks and the work environment fit within the normal operating range of a person.

If you utilize a carriage bolt outside of it's tolerances, it will not perform consistently and will wear out. When a person operates outside of their physical capabilities for force, posture, frequency, and duration, they too will wear out. The visible result of wearing out is often not that visible. Wearing out may take the form of presenteeism (at work but not working to potential), absenteeism, injuries or illness. Furthermore, degrading human performance may show up in reduced productivity or quality. The most visible sign, injury, as akin to the carriage bolt breaking, and that is too late.

The bottom line is; base your expectations (flexible expectations) of what people can do on a solid understanding of human limits and capabilities. By eliminating stressors through a "best-fit" workplace, employees can concentrate on what they do best: make decisions, diagnose problems, inspect work, etc.

Where does one find the limits and capabilities of humans (i.e. operating specs for employees)? Anthropometric tables, static anthropometry, strength tables, and ergonomic design guidelines provide acceptable ranges for reaching, grasping, pushing, pulling, pressing, lifting, and more.

Two questions to ponder:

• Do you often put machinery into production without heeding the specs?
• Do you track your maintenance programs by how much of your machinery breaks or fails?

Just because a human CAN do the job as designed, doesn't mean the job was well designed for a human. People are flexible, but don't hold that against them!

30,000 foot success, 30-inch failure

It’s difficult to say which is the sadder situation; a county (community) hospital having excess operations (taxpayer) money in hand or the quality issues described in the Star –Telegram articles that Mark Graban from Leanblog discussed the other day.

That the Tarrant County Hospital Commission can permit either situation is galling. County Hospitals such as John Peter Smith are responsible for delivering quality care for those most challenged by caring for themselves, the local Medicaid and Medicare populations.

JPS is part of the Federal network agency Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS has a fully staffed and funded Office of Clinical Standards & Quality (OCSQ) that “Provides leadership and coordination for the development and implementation of a cohesive, agency-wide approach to measuring and promoting quality and leads the Agency's priority-setting process for clinical quality improvement”.

CMS is a key member of The Hospital Quality Alliance, a public-private collaboration “to improve the quality of care provided by the nation's hospitals by measuring and publicly reporting on that care”.

The goal of the program is “to identify a robust set of standardized and easy-to-understand hospital quality measures that would be used by all stakeholders in the healthcare system in order to improve quality of care and the ability of consumers to make informed healthcare choices”.

And if we’re to follow recent survey results, as of January 2008, JPS is performing well. Let’s look at one measure - the indicators for surgical infection and complication prevention that reports on the hospital's overall performance for improving patient safety by reducing post-surgery complications.

JPS, in spite of the newspaper’s findings, outperformed the national average in six out of six categories.

Core Measures	JPS Health Network January ‘08 Preliminary Results	National Average*
Prophylactic antibiotic received 1 hour prior to incision	89.8%	82%
Prophylactic antibiotic selection	97.9%	90%
Antibiotic discontinued within 24 hour post surgery end	91.7%	78%
Surgery patients with VTE prophylaxis ordered	92.2%	79%
Patients received appropriate VTE prophylaxis within 24 hours prior to surgery to 24 hours after surgery	84.3%	75%
Patients on beta blockers PTA who received beta blockers perioperatively	86.7%	83%

^*Source: Hospital Quality

Alliance

The national situation for Medicaid and Medicare patients must be a tragedy on a very large scale if, in the eyes of some, JPS is a profitable, above average quality performer.

Just shows that elaborate oversight, frequent benchmarking quality surveys and all the mission and value statements can not substitute for the one key ingredient of knowing what the client (patient AND staff) wants (needs) and committing to its delivery. Execution means succeeding at the 30-Inch level!

Band-Aid or Inoculate?

This morning, I got my regular email from Get to the Point (from MarketingProfs - a marketing information source) and the article got me thinking. It's focus was a study from the Georgia Institute of Technology on how companies should respond when they receive negative online feedback.

It suggested two approaches:

Invite and Engage Strategy: "entails giving customers and employees a forum where they can air their grievances, be heard, and reach a resolution."

While this works, its reactive. Another problem with it is that you probably only hear one/tenth of the complaints.

Inoculation Approach: "endeavors to put in place the sorts of systems that prevent the injustices that lead to disgruntled employees and customers."                               

What does this have to do with The 30-Inch View?

It seems that most companies take the Invite and Engage Strategy when it comes to workplace injuries. So, not only are companies allowing people to get hurt, they're missing the people that are partially hurt and don't complain.

Hurt people = High Costs

Bad Work Designs = Hurt People, Poor Quality, Low Productivity

Wouldn't it be better to take the Inoculation Approach and look for high risk situations before they hurt people and drain productivity? Even better, design the risk out in the first place.

Is your company treating sick patients or are you inoculating your workforce against injury?




photo credits:  zmxncbv.com,  ninjapoodles

Lighting the Way to Lean

One of the main reasons that we started this blog was that it would be a central place for people with different backgrounds to meet and discuss how the workplace can be improved by concentrating on the intersection of people, work and the work environment; in other words, by taking a 30-Inch View. Last week we found Josh Kerst commenting on Lean in the field of pharmaceutical manufacturing. Today, we came across an article from late last year that has application well beyond the audience of the publication.

The article discussed an often over-looked factor when it comes to workstation design: lighting.

Josh pointed out that 85% of the information that humans gather comes through our eyes.

Poor lighting not only affects the quality of work and overall productivity, but inadequate lighting forces the worker to adopt awkward positions that may lead to back pain, eyestrain, fatigue, headaches, and other ailments.

Click HERE to read more on the subject.   

Opening Day, top-down decisions, and safety as a value...

We were intrigued by Mark Graban's post in LeanBlog.org today, and the SQDC correlation of baseball's recent safety steps and similar applications observed within Lean business applications. Are major league sports suffering from some of the same pitfalls faced by North American lean initiatives?

Two thoughts come to mind...

• It's the people...Ask any company that has ventured down the lean path what its key to success or failure was and most will say it was employee engagement. Just as the NBA found out with the failure of their new ball introduction, durable gains in productivity and quality only come when your workforce is engaged in a continuous improvement culture. NBA commissioner David Stern's attempt to improve the game failed, not because the intitiative was poor, but simply because it was mandated. The contract that requires organizations to respectfully engage the operator as the expert was broken.
• It's the process...The simple proactive act of respectfully engaging stakeholders and equipping them with the right toolset can make all the difference. It was author Timothey Gallwey (The Inner Game of Work) who made that connection for both sports and in business. He said "if you encourage someone to simply notice what is going on during the performance of the act (where they strike the ball relative to their feet in tennis, the lie of the ball in golf, or the important circumstances of the work environment), the person will quickly and easily find their own solution to becoming more effective"

As with many top down mandates, Major League Baseball's new rule is a reaction to a tragedy. Many safety initiatives (and their subsequent integration within Lean) have also been the result of similar catastrophes. A proactive perspective into the real issues viewed with a 30-inch view will almost certainly exceed those done as a reactionary response.

In the end, safety cannot be a priority...it must be a value. Priorities change but values endore.

Check out the latest from Pharmaceutical Technology Magazine

While most of you aren't in the Pharmaceutical sector, Josh Kerst's recent article in Pharmaceutical Technology's online newsletter speaks broadly to anyone interested in Lean.

Manufacturing Improvements Begin with the Operator

By Josh Kerst

When seeking to increase productivity, companies must consider worker–machine and worker–materials interactions. These factors are easy to overlook, but they affect workers’ performance and health and a company’s bottom line.

Click here for the full text.

TSA and the Double-Diamond Lane: Are Behavioral Solutions Enough?

Recently, the TSA announced that it would be trying a new system to speed up the security check-in process at airports. The process will use different lines for travelers with varying degrees of travel expertise; similar to the labeling of ski runs. So, if you are an experienced business traveler that has already designed a system to  pull your laptop out with one hand while simultaneously kicking off your slip-on shoes, flipping them into the air and catching them in a bin with the other hand, and then adding your baggie of 3 ounce toiletries, you can enter the double diamond line. This will free you from having to sit on line behind the family vacationers who cannot fold their stroller to fit through the x-ray machine and whose children are afraid to walk alone towards the friendly screener (many of you have fit both of these profiles at one time or another).

Everyone in our company travels a lot, so this is a welcome improvement, if it works. I say IF because this strategy has a flaw as it will depend solely on people's choices and behaviors to speed things up.

If you travel as much as we do, you've had a lot of opportunities to observe the security process and have probably come to the same conclusion as I have; the lines aren't caused by behavior - they are a product of the poorly designed equipment that screeners and travelers have at their disposal.

Since the flow of people through that system is no different than products through a manufacturing plant, the application of ergonomic and industrial engineering principles could help immensely to minimize the cycle time required for each traveler and screener to complete their duties.

• Have a post-screen assembly area - how many times have you had to wait until someone finishes getting dressed before you can grab your bag and go? Removing assembly from processing (screening) allows those that need less assembly (dressing/bagging/etc.) to get through in real time.
• Have a pre-screen prep area that has a constantly replenished supply of bins - how often do you find yourself rushing to get all your stuff into bins because the table in front of the screener is too short? How easy is it to forget to remove something in that short period of time and therefore needing a rescreen (rework)?

Any other improvement thoughts?

More Brain!

"If you wish to enjoy even a small percentage of the success that technology has brought us in agriculture and industry, or a tiny fraction of Toyota’s economic strength, then you must appreciate that muscle is good but brain is better."   -Franz Schneider, CEO, Humantech

More on this subject from the Lean Blog: Skill Development Critical to Success

Are we preparing our kids for success?