Worksite International Blog

As a supervisor or manager, you are accountable for the actions and productivity of your staff. One area many fall short in is helping employees with injury prevention and management strategies. Management can often be “the weakest link” in the safety and workers’ compensation program as it is your accountability to the organization’s policies and procedures that sets the stage for your employees.

If you walk and talk the safety program, your employees will step up to participate. If you are supportive of their work injury, they will trust and respond favorably to the assistance you offer in getting them back to work.

This past August, I presented my Chair Assessment Model at the International Ergonomics Association (IEA) Florence, Italy. Over 1700 ergonomists, most of whom were professors and academic researchers from more than 35 countries, were in attendance. This year’s theme was “Creativity in Practice”, the challenge of transforming the experimental, field research, and evaluation processes into the daily practices of the ever-changing working and living organizations. There was an over-abundance of lectures highlighting the latest research in ergonomics and human factors.

Everyone has a role and responsibilities when it comes to ergonomics in the workplace. To keep your process transparent, I’ve outlined my recommended procedure for supervisors and employees to follow when reviewing ergonomic evaluation reports. Supervisors should be familiar with ergonomic principles, attend Introduction to Office Ergonomics training, and understand company ergonomics process policies before reviewing the report with their employees.

Where does your company stand when it comes to transparency in sharing your individual ergonomic evaluation reports with employees? Are you transparent in your process or are you keeping the results to yourself? If you aren’t sharing the results of your ergonomic assessments with your employees, what are your concerns? You just might be missing a golden opportunity and here’s why!

In today’s litigious employment environment, it’s critical employers have ADA compliant job descriptions reflecting the way employees truly work. With so many new laws and regulations every year, it makes sense to review your job descriptions to assure they’re accurate and up to date.

Are your employees constantly complaining about their chairs? Are you routinely guessing at what chairs to buy employees, using cost to drive your selection? Or perhaps you’ve experienced a high volume of seated work injuries?

After many months of hard work and preparation, our member portal is ready! I’m so excited to bring our robust ergonomics process tools and strategies found in the Worksite International Ergonomics Process (WIEP) to employers who are interested to launch and use an easy, sustainable, organizational process designed to prevent injuries, improve employee productivity and save thousands in claim avoidance.

I know we have come a long way in ergonomic chair furniture design. The mechanisms are smoother, more intuitive to our bodies, improved fabric and cushion comfort, more sustainable, but when is someone going to make a "smart chair" for all us chair addicts?

We made it to 2017… of course! But what’s in store for us in the business world in the coming months? Just a few developments, predictions and trends come to mind:

The purchase and implementation of your ergonomic chairs shouldn’t be a guess! Yet, I’ve seen over and over how many employers seem to do just that… guess. Random selection based on pictures in a catalog or based on an arbitrary budget and no objective criteria seem to be the drivers behind choosing standard chairs at most workplaces.