A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ERGONOMIST
By Phil La Duke
Utility Player: How human factors engineering is used to find the perfect balance of the concurrent priorities between manual labor productivity and worker health and safety.
One of the fastest growing roles in the field of safety is the ergonomic specialist, or ergonomist. Any crossword puzzle enthusiast knows that “erg” is a unit of work and that term identifies the position of the ergonomist as one of the most skilled safety professionals working in safety today.
An ergonomist is trained in making the intricate interactions between people safer by drawing from the human factors sciences of psychology, engineering, industrial design, graphic design, statistics, operations research and anthropometry. This scientific understanding of the properties of human capability is applied to designing, developing and deploying manufacturing systems and services. His heavy emphasis on how the physical and cognitive properties of humans and their social behavior influence the function of an operation often give him the label of human factors engineer. READ MORE
Hardwiring Safety Into All Activities
http://philladuke.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/hardwiring-safety-into-all-activities/
I’ve written several times on the hypocrisy and condescension of slogans like “Safety Is Our Number One Priority” and “Safety First”. Such platitudes are disingenuous and the people who perpetuate them are either liars or fools or both. For some reading this, this is fairly obvious, while others will furrow their sub-simian brows and hammer out an angry email filled with mouth-breathing outrage. So why revisit it? I am continually surprised at the shear volume of safety professionals who continue to self-righteously lie about this to his or her constituency.
Nobody likes hypocrites, of course, but the real danger here is that once a population has been lied to, it seldom believes anything else it is told. So by perpetuating this lie, safety professionals forever diminish their abilities to ever deliver a message. I’ve talked to too many people who cite the practice of beginning a meeting with a thought about safety. We must stop the practice of self-congratulation because we managed to finish the day without killing someone. Safety professionals who brag about commitment to safety because every meeting begins with a word about safety diminish the world’s view of the safety professional and by extension the profession itself.
Safety is neither a priority nor a goal instead it is a criterion by which companies measure the efficacy of its efforts to be successful. There is too much word service given to safety; much ado about nothing, sound and fury signifying nothing. Too many safety professionals mistake communication for awareness and activity with action. For safety to truly achieve any sort of capability it must be imbedded into every thing we do. Of course that is far easier said than done. But isn’t that the essence of a so called “safety culture”?
Hardwiring safety into all activities cannot be achieved through sermons and scoldings. Hardwiring safety requires a reimagining of the nature of safety itself.
For some safety professionals, the role of the safety professional is cheerleader; a perpetually perky advocate of all things safe. Unfortunately, this kind of safety professional typically has only the most superficial understanding of what it takes to make a workplace safer.
Other safety professionals see their roles as parental, eternally haranguing a petulant workforce into straightening up and flying right. Command and control approaches to safety don’t require much more awareness of the nature of safety than that required of the cheerleaders.
Some safety professionals are witnesses to business. They walk around the workplace worrying over charts and counting boo-boos. These safety professionals are too busy looking at what happened that they can’t ever internalize the true nature of safety. In most cases they don’t really care about the nature of safety. They content themselves with passing charts to Operations.
Until safety professionals can see safety as an expression of risk and can advocate for risk reduction through coaching Operations can safety become imbedded into all our activities. Safety has to be more about removing variation from our processes and protecting people from injury when things go wrong and our processes fail.
No operations will ever be completely without risk, and therefore nothing can ever be described as 100% safe. Safety is a strategic business element that needs to be managed as scrupulously as Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Morale.
Deming On Safety Point 11 “Remove Barriers To Pride Of Workmanship”
By Phil La Duke
http://rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/deming-on-safety-point-11-remove-barriers-to-pride-of-workmanship/
When I first contemplated the relationship of Deming’s 11th point (Remove Barriers To Pride Of Workmanship” Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective) to safety I confess a certain misgiving. At first blush there didn’t seem to be a clear parallel and when I sat down to write this series I committed to not drawing connections where none truly existed.
And what, after all, does safety have to do with removing barriers to pride of workmanship? After reflecting on this point, I think not only are there connections between this point and safety, but these connections are pronounced and profound.
First, there is an implied call to remove the barriers that rob people of their rights and responsibilities to think for themselves. At the heart of the pride of workmanship is the understanding that as the worker you have created something remarkable, you have done something that is an extension of yourself, and you have done something enduring and worthwhile. For one to accomplish these things, one must have the authority to make the choices that shape the work. I don’t believe that it’s too much of a stretch to apply these same sentiments to safety, and it’s essential that we do.
If we truly believe that safety is everyone’s job then we cannot prevent workers from making their own decisions as they relate to safety. There are many barriers to the kind of pride of workmanship that relates to safety, with the safety professional chief among them.
Often, in their zeal, safety professionals throw so many rules at Operations that to follow them would paralyze Operations and choke productivity. Faced with these choices, workers are forced to guess which rule can safely be broken.
Many times, workers are forced to follow rules which make no sense or that seemingly contradict common sense. Since the worker has no say in the construction of safety regulations he or she can take no ownership of the rule or show any pride in ensuring compliance with it. Of course, not all safety regulations are negotiable or even universally applicable. Government’s routinely dictate safety regulations to us and we have no choice in how we comply. That having been said, it is completely possible and appropriate to include workers in discussions regarding how best to comply with the regulation without hamstringing the worker’s ability to efficiently to the tasks.
Secondarily, there are still huge pockets within industry that insist on managing safety by objectives and that routinely provide incentives for injury free workdays. Obviously, there is a perfect correlation between this element of the eleventh point and the world of safety. Organizations must stop the practice of managing safety by objectives, and rewarding people for the absence of injuries instead of the presence of safety, i.e. lowering the probability of injury to the lowest practical levels.
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below