Driving to Zero
Workplace Injuries & Discomfort
Five Keys to Reducing the Cost of Workplace Injury and Discomfort
Achieving a zero injury rate in the workplace is difficult, but maintaining it can be even more challenging.
These five key tips will help you get there and stay there:
- Identify Leading Indicators
- Translate Data into Usable Information
- Turn Information into Action
- Establish Standards and Drive Accountability
- Develop a Robust Health and Safety Culture
As you strive to increase profitability in this challenging business environment, more focus than ever before is being placed on reducing health care and workers’ compensation costs. As a safety professional, you are doing your part to cut costs. One of the best examples of how to make a big impact is in office ergonomics efforts, which can prevent widespread injuries and discomfort when executed well.
Although many executives do not realize it, preventing injuries and discomfort is theoretically very simple, straightforward and within the grasp of every company in the world. Sustaining that rate of zero injuries is also achievable, by instilling a culture of safety throughout the entire organization.
The five tips below will help get you to zero and ensure that you stay there.
1. Identify Leading Indicators
Identifying leading indicators of injury is the first key to driving to zero. Before you begin to develop a program to achieve zero, you need a more insightful view of where your risk exists – discomfort is a great example of a leading indicator that can provide valuable insight into the risks in your organization.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, musculoskeletal disorders account for 28% of all reported workplace injuries and illnesses requiring time away from work1. A recent article on ConsumerAffairs.com noted an OSHA administrator conceding that “work-related musculoskeletal disorders remain the leading cause of workplace injury and illness in this country…2”
In addition, my own years of experience in the industry have taught me that more than 20% of employees have constant or frequent discomfort while working. These employees are the ones at highest risk of becoming a group health cost, and keeping you from your zero goal.
Discomfort comes in many forms and frequently goes unreported as a safety issue at work, because it is often difficult for employees to identify the cause of their discomfort. Employees may experience leg discomfort, arm and hand pains, lower back pain, neck and shoulder discomfort and more, any of which could be caused by a number of factors, including the height of a desk and chair, placement of keyboard and mouse, lack of breaks from the computer, or the improper use of a phone or headset.
Identifying leading indicators, such as discomfort while working, will provide the insight into where intervention can have the biggest proactive, preventative impact.
So now that you’ve taken that first step, what’s next?
2. Translate Data into Usable Information
Hammering management with raw numbers might inform them of the level of performance, but it does little to show what actions need to be taken to prevent injuries from occurring. As a health and safety expert, you are responsible for analyzing the data, and then utilizing that analysis to prioritize and set the direction for organizational efforts, to ultimately cut costs.
Technology is key to effective analysis. While ergonomic assessment data on individual employees can assist in identifying the best intervention to help that employee, extended value comes from digging deep into aggregate numbers to identify patterns across the entire organization. Through the analysis of larger data sets, you can begin to pinpoint the specific causes of discomfort and potential injury. The key is to look for non-obvious correlations and ask, “What are the most common, easily resolved issues with discomfort that are not reported?”
A colleague recently conducted a thorough analysis of ergonomics data in an effort to identify the characteristics of employees most likely to get injured. She learned that the employees with high-risk ergonomic behaviors, such as not taking frequent breaks from the computer, or sitting improperly while working, were 17 times more likely to develop an injury. By comparing data related to high-risk behaviors with the resulting injury rates, she was able to draw conclusions that drove the reallocation of resources to focus on high-risk employees and address their risky at-work behaviors. This data-driven shift in resources ultimately saved money and increased productivity.
3. Turn Information into Action
It is not good enough for you to know that poor ergonomics is causing discomfort and costing your company money. You must go beyond just knowing and also use concrete analysis to design interventions, and educate management and employees on what action to take to drive desired changes.
Once you’ve gathered the data and conducted a thorough analysis, you will have the information you need to develop a program to proactively intervene and make employees aware of what they can do to stay healthy, be comfortable and work productively. This is yet another area where technology can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your efforts – by allowing monitoring of program progress from afar, providing a centralized system to manage communications, and constantly collecting and analyzing data that sheds light on the effectiveness of your interventions over time.
4. Establish Standards and Drive Accountability
Change is possible, but in order to jump-start that change, you must give your leaders the tools they need to assess their workforce and educate their employees. You must also empower your employees with knowledge, and foster a sense of accountability for their own health and safety – you can drive towards this sense of accountability by providing them with training, and a feedback system to easily report their problems. When employees know what actions to take when they feel discomfort, it is easier to intervene in time to eliminate the variety of potential injuries that might otherwise develop.
5. Develop a Robust Culture to Get You There and Keep You There
A culture of safety is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety program. Simply put, culture sets the norms of behavior for the organization.
Culture is far more impactful than the smartest safety team, most supportive management, top of the line safety management system, and most robust data analysis tools. Culture is the glue that holds all of these things together and amplifies the effect of each. Your employees are far more likely to do the right thing and feel accountable for their own actions when they see:
- The company doing its part by providing safe facilities and the tools they need to do their job.
- Management being supportive and consistently holding everyone accountable to the established standards.
- Their peers doing the right thing consistently and holding each other accountable.
Getting to zero is possible, but staying there, while lowering overall costs, is something that all safety professionals should strive to achieve. While many of us work hard to get to zero, we must not forget the importance of looking beyond zero. Beyond zero is all about sustainability and making sure that, once we have achieved this goal and created a culture of safety, we continue to reevaluate and reassess so that we stay accident and injury free for the maximum benefit to our organizations. Sustainability requires ongoing monitoring and feedback systems, and a commitment to data tracking and analysis.
There is no greater justification for future investment than concrete evidence of past success. Creating a system that collects, monitors and analyzes the constant flow of data will provide the numbers to support continued investment in your safety initiatives. It will also empower those involved to be accountable for their own health, and hone the efforts to enable a sustainable zero injuries and discomfort rate year after year.