How to Engage Your Industrial Athletes in a Proactive Ergonomics Process

Learn how to engage the industrial athletes throughout your organization and embed proactive ergonomics directly into the culture.

The importance of engaging your industrial athletes in ergonomics

Your people are the heart of your organization, so engaging them early on in the ergonomics process is essential to implementing and executing a proactive ergonomics process. There are several benefits of doing this.

Engaging your people in workplace ergonomics will:

Heighten ergonomics awareness

An engagement process around ergonomics will heighten the awareness of the program and bring ergonomics top of mind. This gets your team members thinking intentionally about the way they work and generates workplace improvement opportunities.

Build knowledge and increase skills development

Ergonomics training builds knowledge and increases the skill set of your organization. This empowers your people to accomplish their role/responsibility in the ergonomics process.

Ensure team members will embrace improvements

By engaging shop floor team members in ergonomics from the beginning, you greatly improve the chances they will embrace improvements when they’re made. Just feeling involved in the process is a big deal to them.

Embed ergonomics into the culture

Engaging team members in ergonomics is a perfect opportunity to shape the safety culture of your organization. The ergonomics process is about lessening fatigue and discomfort for your team members. It’s an action you can take to improve their work and life, and actions shape culture faster than any safety slogan ever can.

5 tips to engage industrial athletes in ergonomics

1. Invite them in

The first step is to simply invite your team members to the table. Be intentional about inviting your people to engage in ergonomics and create a marketing plan to establish buy-in. Your invitation should be a genuine expression of your desire to help make their lives easier through the ergonomics process. Tell them how ergonomics can benefit them and cast a vision they can get behind.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate

A general announcement, a new policy on the bulletin board and one training session won’t be enough. Constant and ongoing communication about ergonomics will be necessary to get the kind of engagement you need to be effective.

In fact, there is no such thing as over communication here. Use every communication channel you have early and often. Communicate, communicate, communicate!

3. Train team members in ergonomics

Equip your team members for success with ergonomics awareness and skills development training. When feasible, use real world examples they can relate to. Take pictures of workstations and illustrate the ergonomic risk factors present. Show case studies and examples of how ergonomics made someone’s job easier.

Training is critical for engaging your people and equipping them for success. Take every opportunity you can to develop the ergonomics skills of your workforce.

4. Celebrate wins

Celebrate successful ergonomics projects. If you don’t, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to gain traction for the ergonomics process. Highlight a team member who came up with the solution and communicate how the project made their life easier and added value to the company at the same time. Celebrating wins shapes culture and creates momentum.

5. Respond quickly

When a team member submits a contribution to the ergonomics process, respond quickly with over-the-top enthusiasm. Supervisors should escalate the issue as soon as possible and keep the team member in the loop on where their idea is in the improvement process. If the improvement will take a long time (or isn’t feasible) set a clear expectation and provide evidence for why. Always thank them and make sure they feel appreciated.

Remember, industrial athletes are the real experts

Your industrial athletes are the ones doing the work day in and day out. They are the true workplace experts and they’re an invaluable resource for your ergonomics process.

Involve them throughout your process, from the initial ergonomic assessment to the final improvement implementation, and your workplace will be much better because of their involvement.

Need help engaging your industrial athletes?

If you know you need to have better engagement with your industrial athletes but you’re already stretched too thin, we’d be happy to help. ErgoPlus Injury Prevention Specialists spend most of their time out on the shop floor engaging industrial athletes, forming relationships, and constantly working to reduce MSD risk factors.