So, you’ve completed PCDAs (Physical and Cognitive Demands Analyses) for the jobs in your workplace. You can check this box on your annual safety or HR audit. PCDAs contain a detailed accounting of all of the lifting, pushing, pulling, gripping, and pinching, and all of the repetitive body movements. They are often used by healthcare providers and insurers, to understand how the demands of a particular job relate to a particular worker’s capabilities. These documents are extremely helpful with accommodation and claims management; companies cost-justify the time to do them based on the savings in claim cost that you reap by having readily available, objective data about your jobs. They have a lot of additional utility, which I’ve talked about before.
On their own, PCDAs do not help you to reduce strain/sprain injury risk. We have clients who hire us to do PCDAs, but are not (yet) interested in risk assessment. Our ergonomists do hundreds of PCDAs. And while we’re out there, workers tell us about their concerns and their ideas. And we see things and have our own concerns and ideas. But if the client is not ready for ergonomics, we quietly pass the concerns and ideas to our contact person. Sadly, these valuable insights are often lost.
How can you leverage PCDA documents, to start making improvements to jobs, so you can stop experiencing strain/sprain injuries in your facility? How can you get “buy-in” from management to take the next step? It’s useful to know where the “heavy” and “repetitive” demands are, but if you stop at PCDAs, these demands will never change. The injuries will continue to happen. We need to show the value of ergonomics.
When communicating with managers, we need to translate our language into their language – convert “strain/sprain injuries” into dollars and cents. We encourage you to start by asking questions – talk to supervisors, managers, engineers, team members, claims managers, and safety.
Meet up with Human Resources at the water fountain
Check in with HR to see if any particular jobs are associated with higher-than-average turnover or absenteeism. Turnover can be converted into dollars and cents when you look at how much it costs to train a new employee – how long do you have to assign extra help on a job, before the person is fully independent? Many HR departments also have a very good idea of the cost of recruitment – advertising, reviewing resumes, interviewing, and onboarding. Even if they can’t identify a specific job as a target, they might point you to a specific team, or department; can tuck that information aside for later examination. Is there any relationship between jobs with strain/sprain injuries and jobs with high turnover or absenteeism?
Have coffee with Quality
What about errors that keep happening on a job? Have coffee with the Quality Manager, and ask which processes in the facility are associated with errors or defects that cost the organization money. These could be obvious quality metrics such as “returns” or “customer complaints”, but more often the bigger costs are “rework” or “100% inspection”. Sometimes the cost of “quality” problems would be measured as a productivity issue – the worker can’t get two pieces to fit together properly so it takes longer or the supervisor has to assign extra help.
Go and look at the processes identified by the Quality Manager. These jobs often involve awkward, heavy, or repetitive demands. Perhaps the solution is a tool with a better grip, or a jig that would improve accuracy. An “ergo” project that has the support of the Quality department is more likely to get approved.
Lunch with the Production Manager
Productivity is almost always top of mind for managers. Have lunch with a department manager, and ask which jobs cause a process or line to back up? Do certain operations frequently require overtime? Which jobs take the longest to train on? Again, look for overlap between MSD hazards and productivity issues. What manager isn’t supportive of an initiative that will improve their numbers?
Survey your production employees
A safety professional (or ergonomist!) could distribute a survey to learn about tasks that workers find cumbersome. Not only does a survey harvest insight from ‘the experts’ on the job, but it can also prioritize where to focus your time and effort. Baseline surveys with quantitative scales can be really useful later, to allow you to compare your pre- and post-intervention “scores”.
Tap your ergonomist
If your PCDAs were completed by an ergonomist, that person developed or gathered ideas about the strain/sprain injury hazards on the job, and how to improve the job. Ask the ergonomist to do an MSD (musculoskeletal disorder) hazard screening, to identify specific demands that may exceed exposure guidelines.
MSD Hazard screening brings problems and “quick fix” opportunities to your attention. If the solution is not obvious, or if you need justification for a bigger ticket item, you can do a deeper dive; an ergonomics (MSD risk) assessment should yield a risk index.
If you have an idea to improve a job, an ergonomist can also help you to evaluate its effectiveness. We can compare the current demands with the proposed demands, in a “What if?” assessment. We do these comparisons for all of the recommendations presented in an ergonomics assessment. A “What if” assessment can feed into a cost-benefit analysis, which is particularly useful when the intervention costs are high – you want assurance that the change will mitigate the risk, improve productivity, improve quality, and/or make workers happier.
Ultimately, mitigating injury risk reduces compensation costs for the organization. However, making ergo improvements does start with understanding, quantitatively, what is currently being done (and this is why we do PCDAs first!) If you invest in ergonomics, the return will be much greater than simply “checking off a box”! Don’t stop at PCDAs. Ask your ergonomist to do an “MSD Hazard Screening” after each PCDA. Then ask around to see if tasks with hazards are also associated with productivity, quality, absenteeism, or turnover. Get everyone onboard the ergo train!