Your ergonomics policy should tell a unified story with a thread all the way from the high-level vision down to specific responsibilities for the tactical elements of your ergonomics process.
Developing a written ergonomics policy is a crucial step for implementing a sustainable ergonomics process.
Having this document in place provides clarity and alignment for your current and future team. As team members come and go, your ergonomics policy is what allows you to consistently execute at a high level.
We recommend your ergonomics policy and surrounding documentation have the following elements:
- Ergonomics vision and mission
- Ergonomics goals and metrics
- Ergonomics standards and guidance
- Ergonomics roles and responsibilities
Ergonomics vision and mission
The vision and mission statements should be a genuine reflection of your worksite’s commitment to ergonomics and what you’re seeking to accomplish.
Both statements should be short, memorable, and aligned.
The vision statement is a high-level, aspirational statement of the purpose, direction, and values behind the ergonomics process. This is the future you are trying to create and why.
The mission statement is a roadmap for how you will realize your vision. It clarifies what you want to achieve in more concrete terms, providing the strategic framework your ergonomics process operates from.
Ergonomics goals and metrics
We recommend setting ergonomics goals for both your process and outcomes.
Process goals tell you how well your ergonomics process is reducing risk. These are leading indicators that focus on risk reduction metrics.
Outcome goals tell you how your ergonomics process is contributing to musculoskeletal health outcomes. These are lagging indicators that focus on musculoskeletal injuries and injury rates.
The ergonomics metrics that you select should primarily flow from your process goals and logically support your primary risk reduction goal.
Don’t go overboard with metrics, especially at a worksite with an immature process. Focus on a few key metrics and gradually add sophistication.
Ergonomics standards and guidance
Ergonomics programs are more sustainable when best practices are consistently applied according to documented standards and guidance.
Ergonomics standards make your expectations clear for each element of the ergonomics process. Your team members shouldn’t have to wonder what assessment tool to use or how to document the process or how they should respond when an industrial athlete reports early fatigue or discomfort.
Ergonomics guidance documents provide instruction on how to implement best practices in order to meet the standard.
Ergonomics roles and responsibilities
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are a complex problem with many causative risk factors.
For this reason, the roles you choose for your ergonomics team should be multidisciplinary in nature and provide the expertise necessary to address a diverse set of risk factors.
The responsibilities for each role on the ergonomics team should be clearly outlined. It is crucial that your responsibility descriptions include all of the core activities of an ergonomics team and align with the ergonomics standards you create.
The core activities of the ergonomics team can be boiled down into the following broad categories, which should all be part of the ergonomics standards you create:
- Assess risk
- Plan improvements
- Make improvements
- Verify risk reduction
- Manage discomfort
- Measure progress
- Scale solutions
As you know, accomplishing the standards related to these activities will require a broad range of skill and experience. You will need supervisors and industrial athletes who are most familiar with the work, engineering and maintenance, safety leadership/staff, and a qualified healthcare professional (our opinion is that Certified Athletic Trainers are best suited for this).
If any of these core pieces are missing from your responsibility descriptions, your ergonomics team is not capable of executing best practices in ergonomics.
The ergonomics policy tells a unified story
Your ergonomics policy should tell a unified story with a thread all the way from the high-level vision down to specific responsibilities for the tactical elements of your ergonomics process.
Here is a helpful framework for thinking about it:
- Vision: The future you are trying to create and why
- Mission: What is the primary strategic objective we need to accomplish in order to realize our vision?
- Goals: What are the goals we need to accomplish in order to advance our mission?
- Metrics: What metrics do we need to track to make sure we’re hitting our goals?
- Standards: What are the standards and best practices we must operate from in order to improve these metrics over time?
- Guidance: How do we uphold the standards?
- Roles: Who do we need on the team to accomplish this?
- Responsibilities: What are the specific responsibilities of each role on the team?
Each element should flow logically to the next. This is how you provide the clarity and alignment you’ll need to sustain ergonomics over the long term. Everyone on the team should understand their responsibilities and be able to trace them all the way back to the vision you’ve set for ergonomics.
Stay tuned for this series on sustainable ergonomics …
Upcoming articles in this series on sustainable ergonomics are going to provide more detail and step-by-step guidance on how to implement and sustain an ergonomics process at your worksite, so stay tuned.
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Need help?
If you’d prefer more help than we can provide in a series of articles, we’d be happy to chat! We have over 30 years of institutional experience helping clients implement sustainable ergonomics programs. Just get in touch and we’ll schedule an introductory call to see if it makes sense to work together.
