Video Transcript: An Insider’s Guide to the ErgoPlus System
The good news about musculoskeletal disorders is that even though they are the most common and costly injuries, they are a solved problem.
They have known risks and known solutions.
If you’ve followed us for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen this slide before.
The field of ergonomics looks at the interaction between the work and the worker, and we know from the research on MSDs that both the work and the worker bring risks into this interaction.
Workplace risk factors are things that put increased stress on the musculoskeletal system: so risk factors like high force requirements, awkward postures, and repetitive motion.
We also can’t forget about the risk factors the worker brings into the interaction. For one, they are bringing their unique musculoskeletal system into this interaction and so their age, gender, and overall musculoskeletal health are factors. It’s their musculoskeletal system at stake and so how well they can prepare it for work, how well they use it at work, and how well they can recover it when they go home from work are all key factors in musculoskeletal health outcomes.
So what your ergonomics process should be doing is looking at these very well-known and researched risk factors, and putting control measures in place at each stage of the interaction.
Engineering controls address the physical worksite and equipment.
Administrative controls address how work gets done.
And Industrial Athlete Controls address how workers prepare and recover from work.
Engineering controls ensure the workplace is designed to fit the worker’s capabilities and that the correct ergonomic equipment is provided to do the job well.
Administrative controls include things like job rotation, team lifting guidelines, and proper body mechanics and work methods.
Industrial athlete controls include things like warm-up stretching programs, early intervention, and work recovery programs.
Implementing control measures at each stage of the interaction between the work and the worker is the key to addressing a problem like MSDs, which are multifactorial.
This is the ErgoPlus approach.
You can also represent the approach of having a full range of control measures vertically and it looks a lot like the hierarchy of controls but applied specifically for MSDs.
So, like I mentioned earlier, the good news about MSDs is that they are preventable. There are known risk and known solutions. The known solutions are represented here in this hierarchy of controls.
The hard part about MSDs is that putting a process in place to actually implement the known solutions is quite a challenge. It’s one thing to intellectually understand the research behind the solutions, it’s another thing entirely to get the job done consistently and well.
We know because for over thirty years, we’ve been helping safety teams implement MSD solutions, and we have the battle scars to prove it. Over that period of time, we’ve codified what we’ve learned and what we consider to be fundamental principles of MSD prevention into what we call the ErgoPlus System.
And it’s not just a theoretical exercise based on the research, we’ve been able to implement the ErgoPlus System across many different clients in many different industries to great effect. In fact, the average ErgoPlus client lowers MSD-related costs by 76% in just three years, so this approach to MSD prevention has a long and proven track record of success.
The reason it’s so successful is that the ErgoPlus System takes the fundamental principles of MSD prevention (the known solutions to the MSD problem) and wraps them in a management system focused on continuous improvement, and then we layer in software and services support so that your organization has all the capabilities you need to be successful.
This continuous improvement process and support model allows us to customize the ErgoPlus System for each client so that it fits your unique culture, your unique needs, and your unique budget. You can adopt it all at once, which is ideal, or you can adopt more and more of it over time as your process evolves and you gain more support and resources.
So here we go, let’s walk through the ErgoPlus System.
The first step is getting your custom implementation of the ErgoPlus System established.
It all starts with a consulting engagement where we work with you to review the current state of your ergonomics process against the desired state.
Based on this Gap Analysis, we’ll work with you to develop a custom-tailored program that includes your vision and mission, goals and metrics, standards and guidance documents, and team roles and responsibilities.
This strategic and organized approach ensures you will meet your goals and makes sure your process can survive changes in leadership, shifting budgets, and ergonomics team members that come and go.
As I mentioned before, you can simply adopt all of the best practices from the process review and implement a full range of control measures right away, or you can choose to start with a partial implementation. Maybe you just want to start with ergonomics and then add a more robust industrial athlete program down the road. That’s okay, just know that the more controls you have in place, the better your outcomes are going to be. So over time, you’ll want to improve your process and we would want to see this spider chart fill out more and more every year.
The second step is education and training.
This is a critical step and can be one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when it comes to MSDs.
MSDs are multifactorial in nature and require a full range of controls to prevent them in a predictable way. This full range of control measures spans multiple disciplines and this presents quite a challenge. To actually implement all of these control measures requires a cross-functional group of people at your worksite who all need to add ergonomics to their plate. You need engineering, you need maintenance, you need safety, you often need HR, you need buy-in and compliance of shop floor employees, you need management buy-in, you need a healthcare professional, and you need all of these people to have some amount of expertise and skill around ergonomics and musculoskeletal health to get stuff done and get control measures in place.
Because of this complexity and how many parties are involved, it’s quite a challenge to build this amount of expertise into the organization and you do need to have it to be effective, and so it helps when you partner with someone like ErgoPlus who has over three decades of experience and lots of training options available. And not only do we have that experience, but we have a huge library of resources we’ve built out over a long period of time. So it really helps to partner with someone like ErgoPlus so you can get immediate access to all this infrastructure so you don’t have to create all of it on your own. It’s a huge time saver.
Now that you’re clear on the process you want to establish and you’ve trained the MSD prevention team, you’ve laid the foundation. Now, it’s time to start executing and getting into a weekly rhythm of assessing risk and implementing control measures.
It’s important at this stage to view it as a continuous improvement process for both the workplace and the worker.
To improve the workplace, you’re assessing risk, planning improvements, making improvements, and verifying that risk reduction has taken place.
To improve the worker, we’re conducting industrial athlete training, we’re making sure your industrial athletes are ready to perform work with their warm-up stretching program, and we’re monitoring and responding to any early reports of discomfort to make sure industrial athletes are practicing the right work recovery habits.
Just one other point on the execution step. I’ll talk about how software supports the whole process here in a minute, but I’ll also mention it here because this is where you’re going to start generating a lot of data and if you don’t manage that data well it can quickly become a mess and it makes everything harder down the road. So make sure as you start executing the process, you’re managing it the right way with software.
After the execution step, you’ll want to regularly evaluate your process and look for improvement opportunities. We recommend an annual audit as a check to make sure the policies you set in the establishment phase are being followed, and we recommend an annual process review to again compare your process against best practices to see if you want to add more best practices over the next year.
At that point, we’re back at the beginning. You would want to add the new best practices you’re adopting to your policy and program documents and then, if necessary, conduct education and training programs to properly equip your team before you start executing on those new elements.
So that’s the continuous improvement process part of the ErgoPlus System. We have our known solutions wrapped in a continuous improvement process.
As you can see, it is relatively simple, but it is not necessarily easy. In fact, I’ll be honest with you. This is pretty hard.
And that’s why we’ve created a support model that fits nearly all use cases and nearly all budgets, so there is something here for you. I’m positive we can help you and support you in some way.
The first line of support we offer is our cloud-based software platform, ErgoPlus Industrial.
Inside ErgoPlus Industrial, you can train your team, assess risk, plan improvement projects, and measure progress every step of the way. We’ve taken over three decades of consulting experience and packed it into an all-in-one solution, so you can be sure you’re using a best practice set of tools and training.
Not only is this the best way to manage your data, but it’s going to streamline your whole process and help you get more done in less time. This is your team’s Ergonomics Operating System and it serves to keep you on track and speed you up.
The next line of support we offer is a solution we call an ErgoLaunch. An ErgoLaunch delivers all the infrastructure you need to implement a sustainable ergonomics process for a fraction of the time and resources it would take to put it all together on your own. We’ll walk with you step-by-step through the Establish and Educate parts of the ErgoPlus System so that you’re ready to execute at a high level.
We’ve got the process review, we’ve got the standards and guidance documentation, we’ve got all the training you’ll ever need, so don’t try to cobble it all together on your own, it’s already done for you. The deliverable here is a best practice ergonomics program, and not only that, but the ErgoLaunch service culminates with a two-day launch event where we’ll come onsite to work directly alongside your team for two days, so you’ll know you are fully capable of executing this process.
Now you can choose to execute the MSD prevention process on your own using internal resources (the ErgoLaunch will equip you to do that), but if you don’t have the bandwidth for this or you’d like this taken off your plate or you just don’t have the capabilities inside your organization for this, we have several options for you to choose from.
The first and best option is a dedicated onsite resource. This is where we’ll place an ErgoPlus Injury Prevention Specialist directly onsite to work as part of your team on an ongoing basis. We’ll report directly to you and we’ll take on the heavy lifting of the MSD prevention process.
If you are a smaller worksite or have a smaller budget, we have another option for you we call an ErgoBlitz. This is a service where we come back onsite for just two days at a time to help you take on your toughest projects or just make fast progress on your high priority areas. If you do choose this option, we recommend doing multiple events over the course of the year to keep your process moving forward. It’s a continuous improvement or CI process and so these CI events can be extremely valuable to keep your organization moving forward.
So that’s an overview of the ErgoPlus System and how we can support you. If any of this sounds interesting to you and you’d like to learn more, we offer a free consultation and demo of our solutions. We’d love to meet you, learn about your situation, and see if we can help and support you in any way. So that’s it, we’ll talk soon.
