A series of frightening statistics make it impossible to ignore ergonomics at work. Every year more than 7.5 million working days are lost to British industry due to more than a million people being affected by musculoskeletal disorders as a direct result of poorly designed workstations. This costs the British economy a staggering £5.7 billion annually.
But, the dangers of poor ergonomics don't end there. At a more local level, a poorly designed working environment can devastate the lives of employees by causing debilitating injuries, and the company by leading to crippling damages claims and loss of productivity.
Valuable lessons can be learned from the 1979 disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when radioactive water and gases were released into the atmosphere. The main lesson was that employees can be set up to make mistakes through a badly planned environment.
At Three Mile Island, two identical knobs were placed next to one another. One was for fine tuning, the other shut down the plant. But this was not the only ergonomic mistake. Dials were positioned so that they could only be read by standing on a stool, an obvious danger in a crisis. Two duplicate consoles were mirror images of one another. Switches on the left on one corresponded to switches on the right on the other, confusing operators who swapped between the two.
However, in a factory setting, most losses (for example, damaged stock and equipment and downtime) result from non-injury accidents. Hence the common, but dangerous attitude: we've never had a death in this factory, and we rarely have accidents so we must be safe. This sort of complacency is potentially disastrous and the financial impact of non-injury accidents can be significant. In short, it is poor business practice not to take ergonomics seriously.
Costs arise for a whole host of reasons – absenteeism, sick leave, managers' time spent writing accident reports, fines, higher insurance premiums, civil actions, legal costs, the list goes on. But it's deceptive because a lot of these are low level; you don't even realise they're there.
There are, however, more positive, but equally compelling reasons to think ergonomically. Ergonomics is a production as well as a health and safety issue: traditionally, there has been strong demarcation between the health and safety and production departments. This tends to result in the 'safety police' approach where health and safety is perceived by production to be interfering and to stop them doing their jobs properly.
Ergonomics should bridge the gap between health & safety and production. That means getting the best of both worlds – for both the company and its employees – because an effective ergonomics policy produces real paybacks in terms of higher quality, better productivity and lower costs.
However, ergonomics means more than designing effective rigs and assisters. Ergonomics is certainly about fitting the environment to suit the person, but it doesn't just concern the environment to the exclusion of human factors.
Most accidents at work are caused by people. For example, you can fit a guard on a machine but it's useless if the operator doesn't use it, or misuses it because he or she is late, in a hurry, tired, wants to get off early, or can't be bothered.
That means addressing the safety culture. Is a commitment to good health and safety ingrained in the workforce? If not, why not?
It also makes sense for an ergonomics audit to form part of a wider assessment of risks at work, which means:
• Identifying the hazard (anything that has the potential to cause injury, damage to plant, stock or equipment).
• Evaluating the risk. People confuse hazard and risk. Risk is a scale used to measure and assess a hazard. So hazard can, for example, be low, medium or high risk. You need to assess the risk associated with a hazard and then make a judgement about whether it is intolerable or acceptable. You can't eliminate all risks, only the significant ones.
• Identifying measures to improve the situation. There is a hierarchy of steps: remove a hazard completely of possible; reduce the risk as far as is reasonably practicable; introduce engineering methods to minimise risk; mitigate the consequences of a disaster if it happens.
• Training and informing the relevant people.
Bosch Rexroth has produced a useful free guide to ergonomics containing sections on body height and working height, the work area, reach zone, parts presentation, range of vision, lighting, the adjustment of work equipment, and planning and design tools. You can download it here: http://bit.ly/1wBSLNy
See also www.hse.gov.uk/humanfactors and www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg90.pdf