Why Ergonomics Still Hurts—and What EHS Can Do About It

Hilary: Good morning listeners, it’s Hilary Framke, host of the Elevate EHS podcast, back here for another episode with an amazing EHS guest. I’ve got Evelyn Parks with me, hey Evelyn! 

Evelyn: Hello, Hilary. How are you today? 

Hilary: I’m having a great day. I’ve got a cup of coffee. 

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and taking some time out of your busy schedule to be with us and our listeners. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Evelyn. How did you get into EHS and why do you stay? 

Evelyn: Those are two very interesting questions. So I’ve been doing EHS now for about 26 years and I just love the function. I love the field and one of the reasons that I stay in it is because of the changes I’m able to impact and to make. It’s all about our employees, how we can make things better for them and how we can improve operations and functions at our companies. So that’s why I stay. 

Hilary: It’s that positive impact, isn’t it? There’s just nothing better than that. Being able to look at something and see that the changes that we’ve made have positively impacted the lives of our employees.

Same for me. We share that. The first time that I realized that an employee came to me and said how big of a difference, like something we had done, a change we had made in their workplace and how much it meant to them.

I was like, Oh my gosh, I can never leave this job. It’s just, it’s too transformative. So Evelyn, obviously with all your years of experience, there are so many topics we could hit. But I think where we found a shared passion was ergonomics. So I want to double click on that a little bit for our listeners.

This is a very hot topic, high trend. Obviously since the pandemic has really come to the forefront. Understanding home workplaces, office workspaces, how much more we need to do for this program, and that we’re continuing to see this trend on the injury side of things. So tell us a little bit from your point of view. Explain what is ergonomics? How does it fit into organizational wellbeing programs?

Evelyn: Okay, so that’s a lot. So let’s unpack it a little bit. So when we think about ergonomics how I perceive ergonomics, we have a lot of definitions out there, right? But it’s really the design of the workplace and the interaction with the employee. It is an applied science. So there is a science behind it and how we do the calculations and how we look at the interaction of the employee to the work area in the work system and processes, but that’s how I look at ergonomics, right?

And that’s one of the areas why it can be very hard for employees to really dive into and wrap their hands around because we’re working with really finite pieces of equipment. So how do we modify that has been there for 30 years to interact with our employee or employee base now? And our employees change. It’s like you may have an average of employees who’s 5’2″ in an area, a hundred of them.

And all your equipment requires somebody who’s like almost six feet tall, or it could be a reverse, you know. So things are always changing and you just have to really keep that open eye on it. So when I look at ergo and to summarize all of that, it really is a fluid based applied science to me. You have to always be relooking at it, always revisiting it and approach it with a methodology of how to solve for the problem.

Hilary: I think we’ve found, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, Evelyn, with ergonomics. In the past, when we would design processes, we would almost figure out how to fit people in, right? Like we could put a person here and they could apply a label to this package and they could stand right here and do that.

And then this person over here can pick up that box and put it on this line. We almost found places to put people in, not thinking about that is highly repetitive, difficult to do, high frequency. Or like you said, the heights and how much that’s going to impact how comfortable that is. We almost designed people in and we need to make a shift now and do an evaluation of designing people out. If it’s highly repetitive work, that should be automated. 

Evelyn: What’s the impact of the employees as they’re interacting with the work? That’s a key point that we have to focus on. And it’s not just about the repetition. It’s about the repetition of the body part. So you just can’t say I had them applying stickers for four hours, and then I’m going to move them over here and I’m going to have them moving boxes for four hours where they’re still using the same hand motions to do that.

You have to look at that as well. So it’s about the repetition within the body part, not necessarily just at the job function, ie. putting a person into their one workstation and then rotating them out. 

Hilary: I love that you brought this up. I hope listeners are listening up because this is something that you can find. This is one of those as you evaluate your production environments. It doesn’t matter what you make, any type of production environment. And I would always ask this question, I’m like, great, do we do work rotation? And the supervisor would say, yes. I go, great. Do we do ergonomic rotation? And he’s like, I just told you, yes. I’m like, those are not the same things. So moving your people to a different station for a production reason. So that they’ve got a little bit of variation in their day. So that you’ve got cross training, knows how to do the job. That’s a work rotation. And ergonomic rotation is what you said, thinking about the body part that was just used at the last job and asking ourselves, are we now impacting the same body part with the next work rotation? And if the answer is yes, and all I do on this line all day is use my fingers and my wrists in a repetitive motion, then we have no ergonomic rotation.

Evelyn: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it’s a matter of just making sure that our teams understand it. Like our supervisors understand that difference. But when, it really got very popular, a lot of energy was put behind it.

We would say everyone do rotations, but we didn’t explain that you have to go beyond just moving a person from one job to another, because, I always assume positive intent. The intent that they have is, yeah, we’re rotating them, but let’s go a little deeper because you’re not really rotating them.

What are you rotating? You just move their feet from one area to the next and that’s not the problem. It’s like you have to really look at it deeper and do the proper assessments. 

Hilary: Oh, I love that. I think that’s such a good call out point for those who are starting down this journey and trying to figure out, I don’t understand why we’re still having injuries when we feel like we’ve put controls in place.

So I think you’ve named a really good challenge that an organization can face when kick starting their program. What are some other challenges that you’ve either experienced yourself, Evelyn, or you think, should be top of mind for those organizations that are trying to build out a formal ergonomics program?

Evelyn: There’s several. You hit on the one, where do we start? That’s usually the biggest struggle. They look at it, there’s nothing we can do about it. They feel helpless. You have to always go back and define the guardrails of where you want to start and where you want to focus. Lay out the guardrails for that. You want to make sure you have the right teams engaged. So you want to have your employees engaged. You want to have the supervisors and other functions engaged and key functions is operations, is your quality sanitation department, is engineering. Make sure you have all those key players engaged in your process. Just don’t roll out something from an EHS perspective and you haven’t engaged them the right way because you want it to be sustainable. So you have to look at all those key factors. And then, the other thing that is really important to me, you have to have clean data.

So you have to understand where your injuries are coming from, where your first aids are coming from, not just the ones that are recordable or reportable incidents. You want to look at all of them and make sure the data that’s going into whatever system you have is clean. You put good data in, you get good data out. You put garbage in, you get garbage out. 

Hilary: Yeah, tech doesn’t fix your process. Your process has to be sound. 

Evelyn: You’ll go down a path that, it’s like you’re solving for hand injuries and that’s not the problem. They’re having strains and sprains, but why are they having them?

Are they really having strains and sprains? So you want to make sure that you understand that information as well. Then you take all of that back and you work together as a team and solve. I think anytime you have it as a silo of just the EHS department looking at ergonomics, it fails. Absolutely every single time and you take it in small bites.

You have to prioritize it, and that’s based upon the data and your team, but you have to prioritize you can’t solve everything at once. It’s just impossible for a business to do that. You want to take it in priorities and make sure you’re steadily working on it. Just don’t ever let off the gas 

Hilary: Absolutely. And I think, too, to your point, biting it into smaller chunks is something that not enough organizations do it doesn’t have to be this whole, we launched the whole ergonomics program for the entire site and everybody’s got to participate. Do a pilot group. Look at your data, as you said.

Find who’s got trending ergonomic injuries or find that supervisor who’s a huge champion or a manager who’s a huge champion of EHS is willing to do something, kick off something new and innovative, and work within that smaller subset to figure out here’s how we’re going to analyze ergonomics.

Here’s the assessments we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to work through control application and finding if we need to do more controls and, whatever programs you’re looking to put out. Launch it in that small pilot group. Show that it works. Work out all the kinks. Then expand to the larger business, showing the results from the pilot group and getting quotes and feedback and because this is one of those really transformative programs for employees. When we fix and improve ergonomics in a workplace, talk about something that’s very popular.

Evelyn: Oh my goodness. They love it. They love it. And anytime you do a fix, you don’t involve your employees and you just stick something new out onto the manufacturing floor. They may not use it and the reason they’re not using it is not because they’re being obstinate it’s because it doesn’t work for them.

We didn’t talk to them to see, Hey how would this work in your area? I love to always talk to the employees in that area because naturally as humans, we will find a way to adjust the work. Oh, man, this is really hurting my wrist I’m gonna take this up. I’m gonna move this way. They want me to move this way, but I do it this way. I like to sit in on the onboarding training for new employees because then you find out the way to really use it. And so it’s beyond the SOP. It’s like, this is what you do. And it’s instead of yelling at them and going, Hey, you’re not following the SOP.

Yes, they should follow the SOP, but you have to challenge yourself back. Is it the right SOP? Should it be updated? Should it be modified? And the way they’re doing that work? Then you bring the engineering team in and okay, this is how they’re doing it. How can we fix this so they’re not causing another hazard? They’re not going to hurt themselves worse because they try to solve it.

So it’s meet them in the middle and then take it over to finish line. That always lands so well. Employees love it. They get completely engaged. And that’s when you have them just wanting to join different various committees that are dealing with ergonomics or putting it on the observation programs.

It just helps your culture. I think ergonomics is really tied heavily with the culture as well. So how do those two things interact? And are you putting good things into your culture to get good things out? 

Hilary: There’s so many things that you said that I’m a huge fan of, like I could just double click on all those, but I think one that stands out to me, you talked about Human Organizational Performance concept called work as imagined versus work as done

and that work as imagined is that SOP. The work is done is what’s actually occurring and what should be transpiring and the difference in between. And I think this is a very important thing for us to understand with how organizations perform. There’s gonna be a gap in between those two things.

And it’s very important for us to always be looking at that and trying to bridge those closer and closer together, either by updating the SOP or changing how the work’s being done to align if the SOP is actually how we want it accomplished. What this really takes and I think this is what you’ve dug into. Engagement. It’s that going out on the floor, having the conversations, discussing it with employees. I have a good story about this. I was evaluating a site, one of my first site visits, and I’m watching this process where manually creating a medical device right through 12 different assembly stations.

Slowly building it step by step. And I’m watching, and I see a lot of employees with band aids on their fingers. I’m like, interesting, cuts? I’m like, what are they cutting themselves on? This is not sharp. I’m trying to just taking it in. And so after I have a couple conversations, I ask about the band aids.

I’m like, I noticed you’re wearing six band aids. On your fingers. They’re like I get so many like blisters and contact, injuries on my fingers that, if I wear the band aids, then I don’t have any injuries. 

Evelyn: They’re really cushions. 

Hilary: Yes. I’m like, so interesting. I’m like, okay. All right. That shouldn’t be something we have to do. So if you had asked me, why are we going through band aids in this area? I would have said, wow, we’re having a lot of cuts. But that’s not the situation, once you actually go out into the field and you talk to the employees. The other thing that was interesting is I asked the supervisor, I said, so at these 12 stations, which one is the most ergonomically challenging?

Which one is the most difficult to do? He goes, that’s a great question. I have no idea. And I said, do me a favor, ask your employees. Let’s go one by one. Let’s ask all of them at each station, which one is the worst one to do? And we go to station one and they go, Oh station six. Station six right there is the worst. Sensor two and I hate it. It is so hard to do. I dread it. I sit here and in my mind, mentally dread getting closer to station six and the sensor two station because of how hard it is to do and that two hours is so difficult, of my day. I’m like, wow, I’m so sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing.

We get to the next station. Station six. I hate station six. I dread it. They’re all saying the same thing. The supervisor was blown away. He was like we do toolbox talks. We do pre shift meetings. I talk to you every day. I feel like I’m, I really care and I didn’t know this, right?

And no one has ever brought this up. He’s like, how did you uncover this in such a short amount of time? I’m like, sometimes it’s just asking the right question. I saw the band aids. I started to think, why? These are the things you have to think about. It’s very clean slip trip fall. It’s very organized for 5S. On outset, it doesn’t look like an unsafe area an unsafe department. It looks very, low risk just in watching it happen, but it’s that deeper dig.

Evelyn: You have to ask the question, you have to listen. A lot of times when we do safety talks or we do toolbox talks, we are talking at them cause we want to, you know, transfer our knowledge of information.

Hey, this is what we didn’t know about ABC, but how often when we do that in our five minutes or ten minutes, however long it may be. Do we pause and say, okay, what do you have for us today? Not what do you have by this one particular subject because they may be okay with that, but what is going on?

We have to listen. And I think that was the difference. You ask the question and then you listen to the response. Then you started to dig and it’s like you can dig all day. It’s just ask the questions. Sometimes just be quiet. 

Hilary: Yeah. Maybe ask why all of your employees are wearing band aids.

Evelyn: And without even knowing that area, I bet you productivity was really high at station six because no one wanted to do it. So they probably were doing it very fast and getting it done very quickly. And so efficiencies may have looked great. Yes. That’s because they didn’t want to do it.

They dreaded it. It’s like sometimes that’s also anytime I see an area and it’s high efficiencies, I’m like, oh, let’s go look there. They either really, really love it or they really, really dread it, but something is going on. It’s but these are good flags. 

You talked about how to get started. And I want to chat a little bit about this, right? They don’t know where to get started. They don’t know how to kick it off. Obviously, looking at the data, great suggestion. That’s a place where you can find places to go look. Another thing is looking at trends outside of EHS. Where do we have poor quality?

What stations have the poorest quality results? What stations have low productivity or very high productivity? Look at the outliers, and investigate that a little further. What stations have a really high turnover? What roles have a high turnover, right? Because as ergonomics, that slowly wears you out.

If a job is very heavy from an ergonomic perspective, people might be leaving the role because they’re in pain, they’re in so much pain, it’s too exhaustive, they can’t stay but looking at retention, a lot of sick leave in a department. Also could be an indicator of poor ergonomics potentially, worth an investigation.

Absolutely. I agree with all those. It’s like it’s always good and you just gotta go GEMBA. You have to go and see. Go and look and go and talk to your employees and see what’s going on. Not get so tangled up and never get hitting the production floor.

Hilary: Yeah, and it’s amazing too, I think just doing a blitz, like to call them blitz, where, okay, there are a thousand things I could look at when I walk the floor today, but I’m going to choose to just put on my ergonomics glasses and all I’m going to look for is ergonomic issues for this GEMBA.

I’m going to be looking for things like this, and things like this. I’m going to be looking for those really, for awkward postures, the highly repetitive things. The overexertions, the people on their knees, the crawling. We know what those risk factors are. I’m going to try and identify those, hone in on those, have those conversations with the people who I’m seeing experiencing those.

And I’m not going to assume that it’s a problem. I’m going to ask, I’m going to say, Hey, I noticed you’re totally like this looking over the workstation. Could we have you sit up? Or is it that you can’t see it? Why do we feel we’ve got to be hunchback of Notre Dame over the assembly station?

Help me understand. Like you said, go and process and have the conversation. And because sometimes it is behavioral, once you retrain people that this is really hard on your soft tissue, I really need you to think of it like, a block and don’t be the Leaning Tower of Pisa, be a good skyscraper and once you like retrain those behaviors, you actually reduce the risk just on the behavior side.

Evelyn: Yes, and I just want to hit on that really quick. When you talk about behaviors, you want to also make sure that you put the proper tools in there to help them with those behaviors. Because sometimes, just telling them over and over. It doesn’t necessarily always work. It’s not as effective.

And they’re not doing it on purpose. It’s like they’re an adult. And so they’ve been doing that for years. So you telling them for five, ten minutes. Yeah, they do it for five, ten minutes and they automatically go back. There are different tools, ergo tools that are out there that companies can look at that can help them. Whether they’re braces, little monitors that you can put on the waist, all these little different things that kind of maybe buzz out of Hey, you’re in an awkward posture.

People don’t realize it until they get to having that correction. And then after maybe 60, 90 days, They got it, but it takes a long time to break a habit for an adult. 

Hilary: And that’s where the engagement of leadership, you talked about that, that it can’t just be EHS. Because how many eyes does EHS have?

Not that many. And how much time can we spend out in process? We know how difficult that is. So it’s training that those operational partners, those facilities partners, whoever it may be in your organization. That I need you to look for these things when you’re walking around. It’s not just about slip trip falls and the hazards you’re aware of.

Ergonomics is a hazard category too. And these are the call outs. These are the things I need you to see and to address with your teams and to get them talking to each other so that we can reduce the risk here. Speaking of which, I would love to hear your thoughts about the best way to conduct assessments.

This is always such a difficult thing. I think there’s qualitative. I’m just looking and I’m seeing that you have this type of risk to this body part. But then there’s also quantitative assessment. Do you have a preference? 

Evelyn: I like both. 

Hilary: You can have it all, Evelyn. You can have it all.

Evelyn: That’s just me. I love data. My life is driven by data. What does it say? Clean data. But I actually prefer both. So it’s like I do like to do the assessments where we’re looking at the numbers, we’re looking at how they’re engaging in that work environment, how many bins they do, how many twists and turns do they do. We need to have that kind of information. At the same time, you also have to go out and look and then talk to the employees and incorporate that in.

I think doing just an ergo assessment just simply based upon someone going out and do an assessment with the naked eye. It has room for error. 

Hilary: It can be very subjective. 

Evelyn: It can. I really do like the tools that use like the AI overlay that kind of look at, yes, I love those because then you can actually see, Oh, that’s just like a five degree. But guess what? That over time gives you this impact. 

Hilary: And it’s mathematical, right? It like, it’s not up for debate. It’s built into the system, automated into the system to read those results. 

Evelyn: Exactly. And I love to do that. But at the same time, I like to also go back and, have those discussions because it could have been on a person who is, I’m very tall. So it could have been on a person who’s five, ten, six feet. And so they may have to bend a little bit more. And then you’re like, Okay, what’s going on? How can we adjust the workstation? Or can we not adjust the workstation? Or it could be on a person who’s five foot, those kinds of things, they do make a difference.

And you have to look at the data, what the AI is telling you. And then how does that fit into that whole overarching picture? So that’s why I say I like both.

Hilary: I so agree. No, I so agree because if you have one without the other then you don’t, it’s just like any risk assessment I would say the same thing about any other type of risk assessment process.

It has to have a good holistic qualitative, quantitative piece to it. So the ergonomic AI, agree, so obsessed with that process. And if you are struggling in your ergonomics program, you’re struggling with resources and getting assessments done, wow, what a way to execute that in a customized fashion.

Two minutes, here you go, I have my risk score, I know what body parts, it’s making suggestions about how to fix that. You just can’t beat that. But here’s where I think the drawback is. Here’s what concerns me about that technology is I see organizations haunching all of their hopes and dreams into that technology.

 You can’t do that either. Technology is nothing without people and process. And I’m big about this people, process, technology idea. So you can go buy the thing on the market, but if you don’t have a strong process about who does those AI assessments, who’s behind the camera doing that, making sure that’s accurate, adding in that human element of, like you said, This employee happened to be very tall.

So that’s gonna adjust, our assessment results or very short, shorter than average. So that changes how we should look at this assessment result. We might want to go back and do it again or do it for a few people based on that element. Technology can’t tell you that, that’s a people based approach. 

But what process do you have for who’s doing those assessments, who’s evaluating them, who’s looking at the results and trending them on the back end, who’s managing the corrective actions, really, that are coming out of each of these assessments? Okay, we’ve decided that this is high risk. What are we going to do about it? Who’s that assigned to? Who’s gonna track to make sure that gets done right? Who’s going to look at these things and move that process in our business? And if the people who are using this technology don’t understand it, they don’t understand basic ergonomics, they don’t know how it got to that result. This will slowly degrade over time. 

Evelyn: Yeah. Oh, I agree. I agree. People have to be confident in certain skills. They need to be confident to know what they’re doing. Did you just say, Hey, here’s a device, go out and measure. Do they understand why? You always have to have that training and build up that capability. Of all your team members in the fashion in which they’re working. So as I agree. 

Hilary: Awesome. I’m so thrilled to finally see this technology because ergonomic assessments, bane of my existence, doing those on paper and trying to get people to understand how to do them correctly.

And this is such a slow process when you’re trying to build that from scratch. So really thrilled to finally see an innovation in ergonomics with this tool. 

Evelyn: But I agree, it’s not the be all end all, it’s a part of the clock, you just have to put it in and then watch it work with everything else. It makes one facet of the work easier. 

Hilary: Exactly. 

Evelyn: Yeah. 

Hilary: Let’s shift gears a bit, what are some automation type ergonomic improvements that you tend to lean on? 

Evelyn: So we do several. There’s several different types of engineering solutions that you use. Cobots is one of them that comes top of mind for me. When I think about other different solutions that we have from an engineering perspective, it’s really just engaging our engineers and making sure you understand all the different scales of AI. 

AI is so big. Along with it is safety rules and regulations around that AI. So it’s making sure you understand that. And that is not creating another problem just because it improves ergonomics. So that’s one thing. The other thing I want to hit on is other technologies I think that are really impactful. Because cobots are expensive. So every company may not be able to afford different cobots and different things of that nature. Is going out and seeing what technologies are out there that you can use that you have to have an investment. You got to invest in this.

So that’s one thing. Let’s say that. But there are some that are not as expensive investment as others. I love the little monitors that you can put on your waist. I mentioned that before. And it measures like your body all day. So all your little movements and it’ll buzz when you get out of range to say, Hey, that’s not okay. Adjust yourself. So because it’s giving real time feedback, it’s one of my all time favorites. And I’ve used that at several companies I’ve been at. It’s been very effective. Yeah I like some of the different braces that they have as well. The only concern I usually have with those is, is it gonna make the back have fatigue or is it really building up muscle memory or is it making. 

Hilary: Or is it deconditioning the muscle over time?

Evelyn: Yeah. So I like the ones that give the self correction right away. And so you train the employees, you fix the area, but then there’s little things that they can do. Those are also good in areas that may not be in manufacturing, that you don’t have a set design workplace every day could be used for your sales teams. Those different type of things are also very good. 

And then the last thing I would say is when you have tools that are, this is also engineering, you may have a cart that you’re loading and unloading things on how are you doing it? Are they doing it with a hoist? Are they doing it with an old fashioned hoist where they’re still struggling with it to put it on the hoist? Does the cart have really good castor wheels on it? Or do they have like little itty bitties and you’re trying to roll around, 1500 pounds, it’s like it’s all those type of engineering solutions.

Does it have a handrail to grab it to move it around all those different type of engineering solutions are also very applicable, but we tend to not value them as much. It’s like we want to go from, and this is not just safety professionals, but I think a lot of industry, we want to go from 0 to 100.

So we just need cobots everywhere. We just need this automation here. We can’t afford to do this right now, but is there something we can do? Can we put different lift tables in the areas? Can we put in some modular lift tables? What can we do that can help our employees and then work with other functions?

You don’t want to create like quality issues, but you want to make sure that you’re looking at all those different type of things. Not just one thing.

Hilary: I’m so excited that you said this. I see this too because they say, To fully automate it is 1.1 million dollars and we’re not going to do that.

I’m like, I don’t need 1.1 million dollars. 50,000 would be great for a barrel loader. Like there has to be something in between.

Evelyn: One little piece I do want to hit on is like it’s important for the EHS function, whoever you may be, whatever your level is in the organization, you have to engage with your engineers, you have to engage in the design.

So as you’re putting in new lines or modifying lines, make sure you’re engaged so you can put this feedback in because sometimes if you just ask the question, is there not another way that we can do this? They’ll come up with an answer. If you haven’t seen it already out there. I love these type of podcasts because you hear about new different technologies as well and going to the expos. It’s about working together and feeding off each other to get that best solution.

But you have to engage. You have to have some type of management of change process to do that. All these pieces just they bleed out and they work together, but you have to have that to have great ergonomics. You got to have great management of change. 

Hilary: And, as an EHS leader, I can’t stay up on every new innovation and every topic. I’m looking for lockout tagout improvements. I’m looking for confined space improvements. I’m looking for fall protection improvements. It’s just not possible to pull this all in. Getting a Kaizen together with engineering, facilities, maintenance, operations, quality. Getting all these heads in the room and saying, this is the problem.

It happens to be an EHS problem, but I need your brain. I need your help. Like, how could we 3D print a new station to put this in? Do you have any ideas about equipment we can buy? I don’t care if it’s totally off the wall. I want to hear your weirdest ideas. We need to put our heads together creatively and have the shared ownership of this problem and come up with a fix. I need your help. 

And I feel like sometimes EHS leaders don’t do that enough. I know I didn’t, you think this is my problem. It’s an ergonomics problem. I need to figure it out. Our team needs to figure it out, but there are people who have such passions outside of work and who have the greatest ideas. So just surveying and getting that group together, I think makes such a big difference. 

Hey listeners, this is what this community is for. So if you have a great ergonomics improvement that you want to share, drop it in the comments, share it with our big Elevate EHS community. We would love to hear it.

Share the links. We’re all better together, so thank you for that. Evelyn, looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping the future of ergonomics in the workplace? Where do you think we’re going to go from here? 

Evelyn: That’s a really good question. And it’s one that I always ponder. I feel like we still have the problems of old. It’s hard to predict where we’re going from here when we still haven’t fixed the problems that are behind us.

A lot of companies have stopped looking at ergonomics as closely. They still capture the incidents, of course, as a regulatory requirement, but they don’t really focus on it because it’s so hard to solve. And we have to go back and you have to fix it. And then we start to look at the future of where we’re going.

But we have to fix what we didn’t fix in the past. And I think that’s something that we have to all acknowledge and deal with. 

Hilary: I think you’re so right. It almost became this is the cost of doing business.

Evelyn: And no one would ever say that. They fix the one task versus looking at it holistically, looking at the strategy of it, the end to end, you have to look at ergo the same way, end to end.

If you’re solving any big thing. That’s how I approach it, whether it’s fire or whatever it may be. We’re going to look at it from end to end, all the pieces into it. And how do we solve for that? And then you can set out your right strategy of where you need to go for the next five, ten years and what’s in future, because you’ve cleaned it up.

 You have to do that. And that would be my one challenge is, it does concern me about ergonomics in the industry, because I feel like we’re just not all leaning in enough to fight the battle. 

Hilary: Oh, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I have to say I agree. This is just a problem that really needs to be put back in the forefront and pushed. And we need to get to that next level. I agree with you. I think, I don’t see us really far better today than we were even a decade ago. Still same problems, issues getting investment, not putting it on our strategic roadmaps, not planning for it, just waiting and seeing how many injuries we’re going to have and then dealing with it on a lagging basis.

Evelyn, this has been so great. Thank you so much for your insights, for your perspectives on ergonomics. For sharing that with our listeners today. I think we dug into a lot. We talked assessments, we talked placement, we talked tools and technology, controls. So I just can’t thank you enough for joining the podcast today. It was a pleasure. 

Evelyn: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. This was great. 

Hilary: And we hope listeners that this helped you and we know you’re all dealing with ergonomics too. So share your thoughts and come see us for next episode. Bye everybody.