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...illnesses/injuries estimated $13 to $20 billion annually (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1997; National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1996), and much of this cost is attributable to lost workdays. The review performed by the U.S. General Accounting Office (1997) revealed that the ergonomics approach to these problems yielded reductions in workers' compensation costs as well as the number of days injured workers were out of work and also improved employee morale, productivity, and quality.
Ergonomic intervention is the key component in this process in that it attempts to eliminate or reduce the exposure of the worker to the source of physical stress. The ergonomic intervention process achieves these goals by quantitatively evaluating jobs in the workplace, deciding which jobs or tasks pose an injury risk to the employees, and redesigning the job with the primary aim of reducing the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) by reducing these exposures.
Goldenhar, LaMontagne, Katz, Heaney, and Landsbergis (2001) provided a three-step template for intervention research: development, implementation, and effectiveness assessment. The development phase begins with the identification of a job to be addressed and ends with the development of the industry-ready prototype. The effectiveness phase involves the evaluation of the intervention once it is in place and functioning at steady state. The middle phase, the implementation phase, can be challenging in that at the beginning of this phase the intervention is introduced to workers who may or may not have any problem with the job as it is currently designed and will often have reservations about changing their tools or work method, particularly if they are compensated on a production or piece-rate basis. To further complicate this process, there will often be a short-term reduction in productivity as the intervention is introduced and the worker begins to rethink the task technique to incorporate the new ideas into his or her work process. This process will often result in an immediate negative response from many workers and can lead to their withdrawal from the intervention process before it has really even begun.
This result is very unfortunate because often, once the workers have fully incorporated the tool/method into their work process, they will find not only improved ergonomics but also increased productivity. Experience has shown us that this initial resistance is dramatically reduced with time, and the individual will settle down to a more thoughtful evaluation of the intervention with an hour of use. The challenge is to find a way to encourage workers to continue to use the interventions through the "break-in" period so that they can begin to see the overall benefits.
One approach to this challenge that spans both the development and implementation phases of the intervention process is participatory ergonomics. In a participatory ergonomics process, the employee actively participates in the process of improving the ergonomics of her or his job (Imada, 1991). The major benefits of this approach are that (a) the employees are ones who are the most familiar with the job (work tasks, activities that create or exacerbate pain, ways to improve the job) and (b) if the employees are willing to participate and invest their time in helping with the design, it often means that they will have greater acceptance of any resulting solution (Imada, 1991). The participatory ergonomics approach has been shown to be an effective tool for increasing the acceptance of an intervention by those participating workers and illustrates that there are psychological and social aspects to the intervention process that need to be considered.
One limitation of the participatory approach is that not every worker who is going to be asked to use the intervention can possibly be involved in its development. Typically, a small team will be charged with solution development, and although the employees who participate in the new design may prove to accept the changes readily, other employees who are asked to use the intervention may not be so inclined because of the previously mentioned concerns (productivity, quality, inertia, independence, etc.). An approach that can be implemented when introducing a new idea (whether or not it is through the participatory approach) needs to be considered. One option (and the one considered in the current research) is to spend time with the individual worker at the beginning of the implementation phase and encourage him or her to work through the transition from the old to the new work technique.
One method of facilitating implementation is the use of feedback and positive reinforcement. In their review of occupational health and safety studies, Goldenhar and Schulte (1994) stated that an interdisciplinary approach, such as combining an engineering intervention with a behavioral one, strengthens the foundation for developing intervention research. This position is supported in an article addressing the future of intervention research by Rosenstock (1996), who argued that researchers must consider behavioral procedures, which attempt to influence worker knowledge, beliefs and behaviors. Finally, in a review of occupational injury intervention studies, Zwerling et...
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