How manufacturers can move an ergonomics initiative forward

You read about modern manufacturing, about how shops aren’t the dank, dirty, dangerous places they used to be. It’s all true, for the most part. But even in the cleanest, most well-organized plant, people need to twist, reach, and bend repeatedly. It’s still common to see two or more press brake operators lift a large panel as it swings up during the bending cycle. They may need to lift a sheet onto a hardware insertion press, perhaps bend or squat repeatedly to screw in hardware for a sheet metal assembly, or weld awkwardly overhead. It just comes with the territory.

Or does it? It’s Brian Roberts’ job to ask this question. The Dallas-based risk control director, manufacturing and ergonomics, at CNA has spent decades in the trenches, training manufacturers of all types on how to implement good ergonomics. He’s also led numerous sessions at various industry safety conferences, including those organized by the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association Intl. (FMA).

Companies large and small call on Roberts for advice on how to implement better ergonomic practices. Occasionally the company is proactive, calling on an outside ergonomics expert to help design a new fabrication cell or assembly line in the right way. But usually companies call on Roberts to help them fix an ergonomics problem, one that has resulted in a significant number of workers’ compensation claims.

When it comes to ergonomics, why are most companies reactive instead of proactive? As Roberts explained, it goes back to how ergonomics issues are communicated to management and others with the power of the purse to make the investment needed for positive change. Roberts helps people frame ergonomics issues in terms of efficiency, productivity, and quality. He talks about ergonomics from a broad and specific perspective, anchoring both in the language of business.

The Broad View

Fabricators should not take the institutional knowledge possessed by baby boomers for granted. Fabricators need to keep the baby boomers on the job, so they can help educate and train the next generation, including the largest portion of today’s workforce: millennials.

“Ergonomics is about designing the job for the people, the employees,” Roberts said. “That’s the simplest explanation, but it also involves understanding how people interact with equipment, tools, and the work itself.”

He added that the aging of the boomer generation has brought a renewed emphasis on worker ergonomics. “You have some job limitations now. You have people who have been performing a job for 25 years. A worker who is 52 years old has likely lost 50 percent of his strength [from when he entered the workforce in his 20s]. The way that worker does the job needs to change. If you make changes to that job now, and do it the right way, you make jobs easier for all workers. And for the young people coming in, the job automatically becomes so much easier and efficient.”

Many young people just aren’t willing to work at the expense of their bodies. A fabricator that is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for talent will have to scrape down even farther if they expect employees to work a job rife with ergonomic problems. They end up recruiting people without basic skills or any semblance of a work ethic; they leave the job after a few weeks and force the fabricator to hire again—and the vicious cycle continues.

Roberts conceded that ergonomics is only a piece of the puzzle, alongside worker pay, shop culture, and management strategies. But ergonomics remains a critical piece. It’s where the rubber hits the road—or, more aptly, where the worker touches the work.

Roberts doesn’t stop with the broad view. If he did, he said that most ergonomics problems in the workplace really wouldn’t change. That’s because the broad view doesn’t connect ergonomic problems with day-to-day business challenges: quality, productivity, and return on investment. What specific changes are needed? What are their costs? And most important, what are the returns? In fact, Roberts gets so specific, his approach resembles the classic who, what, where, when, why, and how behind every good news story.

Who?

Roberts can recall many plant visits where he has seen a hoist or other material handling aid sitting in the corner, gathering dust, while assemblers and packagers strain away at their jobs, picking up and manipulating heavy or large parts or equipment. What gives?

Sometimes a material handling aid isn’t used because it doesn’t suit the job. Other times it fits the job just fine, but the people who actually do the work weren’t consulted. Managers and supervisors observed them, decided to buy a material handling system, then told them to use it.

“This has happened so many times,” Roberts said. “I’ve seen hydraulic pallet jacks in the corner, sitting there. I ask why people aren’t using it. They say, ‘Hey, nobody asked us about it, and we don’t like it. So you know what? We’re not using it.’”

It sounds irrational, but the workers have a point. Everyone has different heights, reaches, strengths, and work styles. A change forced upon employees without their input, even if it’s made with the best intentions, has negative connotations. It implies that managers don’t value their voice. They’re not people but instead a “resource” to be optimized—a core ingredient for a bad company culture.

For this reason, Roberts recommends giving front-line personnel a voice from the very start. They need a seat on the committee that will spearhead the ergonomics initiative.

Roberts added that fabricators need buy-in from the very top of the organization too. At the beginning, the argument for ergonomic change can involve rising workers’ compensation claims and the broader problem of retaining and attracting talent. The argument also can draw from nationwide statistics, including the fact that soft tissue injuries, many caused by repetitive motion, represent the largest portion of workers’ compensation claims in the United States.

For an ergonomics initiative to be successful, Roberts said that specific business arguments need to come into play (covered later in the “How?” section). Before this, a fabricator needs to form a committee. The committee should comprise a human resource representative, a safety manager or representative (if the company isn’t large enough to employ a dedicated safety person), an engineer, as well as a few key people from the floor. The committee should have between six and 10 people. If the committee is any larger, it becomes difficult to make decisions and move forward.

Involving people on the floor helps get that all-important worker buy-in. So who from the floor should serve on the committee? “Say you have a person who is always grumbling and fighting,” Roberts said, “the one who always says, ‘They didn’t ask me!’ Those are the people who should represent their department. Instead of complaining and griping, they can work with a group of people to come up with an answer. In most cases, they will stop complaining. And when they help come up with a solution, they become your biggest ally. They understand the process, and they become vocal in a positive manner.”

What and Where?

When talking about learning the basics of ergonomics, Roberts never uses the term training. Someone is trained to weld, to operate a press brake or laser cutting machine. Everyone is trained to follow the same procedure. But a fabricator can’t train someone in just one “ergonomic” procedure. Again, ergonomics is about designing the job for the people—and everyone is different. What’s comfortable for one person may be painful for another.

Roberts said that, instead, fabricators need to educate people on ergonomic principles. Some may require just a basic knowledge of ergonomics to learn when they’re overreaching, overlifting, or performing certain repetitive motions that might cause pain later.

Grasping the basics, workers can fill out surveys generated by the ergonomics committee. Roberts said he likes to use one that shows a human body, where people can mark the level of pain they feel in different areas. In most cases, it isn’t difficult to find out where people hurt.

“In fact, if you have the right people from the shop floor on the committee, they’ll probably know the hard jobs, the ones where they hear people complaining about pain,” Roberts said. “It’s usually not a secret.”

Committee members require more ergonomics education than others. “They’re the ones who will be making the shop floor observations, looking for repetitive motion, heavy lifting, and other red flags,” Roberts said. “They need to understand biomechanics and what’s going on from a physiological standpoint, so they can come up with the right solution in the right place. If they don’t have a good understanding, they may make a situation worse.”

Roberts recalled one instance in which an assembly worker had trouble reaching a certain component on the line. To help her, the ergonomics committee decided to build a short platform so she could access the work comfortably. That seemed to be a straightforward solution—until she fell off the platform and injured herself. In retrospect, a lift table should have been used to lower the work for the employee. This solution reflects a basic tenet of ergonomics: Design the job for the employee, not the other way around.

Like risk assessments for safety hazards, an ergonomics analysis starts with finding ways to eliminate the manufacturing step altogether. If this can’t be done cost-effectively, the committee tries to “engineer out” the problem. Perhaps a sheet metal assembly can take advantage of a tab-and-slot fixture technique so assemblers need not twist or contort themselves to insert so many screws.

If this can’t solve the ergonomics problem, then the committee should address a way to design the task differently. The most “ergonomic” environment keeps people in a neutral posture while exerting as little force as possible. Roberts said that there’s a lot of science that goes into this, but essentially, a neutral posture involves standing or sitting without reaching, twisting, or bending.

Most if not all work requires people to move, of course. When analyzing a task, committee members observe how far a person must deviate from this neutral posture to get the job done. They then analyze the pushing, pulling, and lifting force required.

Repetition and recovery time are also considered as part of an ergonomic evaluation. A job that involves only minor pushing and pulling of a lightweight part may not present problems if workers perform it for only a few minutes or hours a day. But repeat that same motion over and over for an entire shift, and people can be in a world of hurt. The repetition creates stress, and the problem only gets worse if their bodies aren’t given time to recover.

Roberts added that the more people know about ergonomics, the better they can assess how a task should affect employees. This brings up a sensitive issue: Is a person’s pain work-related or not? “I hear this question a lot. People say, ‘Well, I don’t know about Joe. He’s complaining about pain, but his job doesn’t seem too difficult. And you know he races stock cars on the weekend.’”

This is where ergonomics research can help. Decades of studies have scrutinized worker motions, from posture to the precise position of an arm or elbow, how and when certain motions occur, and how they affect the body of a given male or female employee of a specific age, weight, and height.

Roberts conceded that ergonomics goes beyond analyzing the tasks a person performs at work. “This is part of the education process. We need to talk not only about the occupational, but the personal, what people do during their time off.

“People need to ask themselves four questions: What do I do at work? What do I do at home? What’s the recovery time [after stressful motion, be it at work or home]. How can I help myself? If you want to make a living in certain areas of manufacturing, you need to consider what you’re doing during your time off as well as what you’re doing on the job.”

He added, however, that this situation remains extremely rare. “Most jobs, when you look at them, it’s very obvious why workers are hurting.”

How?

Roberts returned to the assembly line incident where the worker injured herself falling off a platform. Why did the company build a platform instead of using a lift table to lower the workpiece to the worker’s height? It was about money. Lift tables required an investment management wasn’t willing to make.

In many cases, managers have no trouble dedicating a few thousand dollars, often enough to buy a simple vacuum lift or hoist. But these may be short-term solutions. Solving a problem for the long term may require more money.

A maintenance team can sometimes build a device that might solve an ergonomics problem on the cheap. But usually capital investment comes into play, and this is where Roberts uses CNA’s “Motion is Money®” strategy. He tallies the costs of the current situation (injury rates, workers’ compensation claims, lost productivity, poor quality) and calculates a return on investment (ROI) for equipment that will help make people’s jobs easier.

“On my cost-benefit analysis, I look at the average injury cost in an area, the number of injuries per year, then what kind of injury reduction we can expect from an equipment investment,” Roberts said, adding that he always errs on the side of caution, rarely predicting a reduction of more than 15 percent. This makes the ROI estimate very conservative.

Roberts goes into the detail, taking the net present value (NPV) approach to ROI. He incorporates not only the initial and recurring costs of the equipment (like annual maintenance costs) over its expected life, but also the inflation rate and a discount rate, or a return the company could expect if the money were invested elsewhere, like the stock market.

“If the ROI doesn’t happen for three or more years, the request probably won’t go through,” Roberts said, “but if I can get a piece of equipment paid for in the first year, then it’s usually a no-brainer.”

The ROI exercise illustrates the importance of mechanization. Too often, Roberts said, manufacturers fail to improve worker ergonomics because they feel that the nature of the job makes it impossible to automate. “But we may not need to automate. If an ergonomics committee recommends a job be automated with a $3 million machine, it’s not going to fly. But if they recommend a vacuum lift for $4,000 or $8,000, it may be a different story. In ergonomics, it’s often not economically practical to automate, but quite often mechanization can be enough. Mechanization, including the hydraulic lift table, the hoist, and the sheet lifters and sheet followers, helps people stay upright in a neutral posture.”

When?

When should a fabricator tackle ergonomics issues? In a word: always. As with continuous improvement, ergonomics improvement never stops. In fact, the two should be intertwined. After all, a job that takes ergonomics into consideration is usually more efficient than one that doesn’t. When people move under less stress, they work more efficiently and make fewer mistakes over long periods.

Focusing on ergonomics also helps improve worker safety, considering most injuries in the workplace originate from some soft-tissue, ergonomics-related problem. As Roberts put it, “If you look at your operation from an ergonomics perspective, you’ll solve a lot of your safety problems, because you now understand the interface between the human, the machines, the tools, and the processes.”

At its very core, metal fabrication is about people moving to make products better, faster, and more cost-effectively for customers. The more efficiently they move, the fewer mistakes they make, the less rework they have, the faster products flow, the more capacity a fabricator can sell, and the more that company can grow.

CNA provides business insurance for metal manufacturers. “CNA” is a registered trademark of CNA Financial Corporation. Certain CNA Financial Corporation subsidiaries use the “CNA” trademark in connection with insurance underwriting and claims activities. For more information, visit www.cna.com/fma.