Do you think you’ll have any this year?

If you’re like many industrial companies, you have recordable MSDs every year and it’s costing your company and employees.

According to the Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index, overexertion injuries alone accounted for more than $50 billion in direct workers compensation costs in 2011. With indirect costs being three to twenty times the amount of direct costs, overexertion injuries account for a significant portion of the injury burden in the United States.

Because overexertion is being directly correlated to these injuries, it’s necessary for companies to develop a prevention strategy specifically focused on addressing fatigue and discomfort before it becomes a recordable injury.

Proactively Address Fatigue and Discomfort

Proactively address fatigue and discomfort with early intervention. This is a five-step process.

1. Educate employees to recognize early signs of musculoskeletal disorders.
2. Provide a way for employees to report early signs to supervisors, team leaders or directly to the injury prevention specialist.
3. When an early report is received, be over the top positive and notify the injury prevention specialist.
4. The injury prevention specialist should conduct a one-on-one early intervention consultation. During the consultation, the injury prevention specialist should evaluate the job for risk factors present and consult with the employee on a self-care program to return them back to peak health.
5. The injury prevention specialist should follow up with the employee on a weekly basis until the early signs are resolved and the employee has returned to peak health.

5 Reasons Why You Need to Get Started With Early Intervention Today

We know that MSDs develop over the course of time as the result of exposure to risk factors. The earlier you address the early signs of an MSD, the greater your chances are of preventing the injury in the first place.

Consider this: The next two to three years of MSDs at your facility are in development right now. The question is what are you going to do about it? Get started today!

Here are five reasons why you should get started with early intervention today.

1. Identify and remove risk.

A fundamental concept in prevention is identifying and removing risk. By encouraging early reporting of fatigue and discomfort, you can identify the risk factors at fault and work to remove them.

2. Prevent injuries.

Removing risk factors and establishing a self-care program for the employee will improve your injury rate. Most early reports are resolved without a recordable injury!

3. It’s the right thing to do for your people.

Addressing the fatigue and discomfort of your employees is simply the right thing to do. Musculoskeletal injuries and disorders are physically and emotionally devastating and can have a major impact on the rest of the employee’s life. Prevention is always better than treatment.

4. It’s the right thing to do for your business.

Prevention is good for business. Not only can you avoid costly injuries, but you have an opportunity to turn human performance into a competitive advantage for your business.

5. Build the safety culture you’ve always wanted.

Providing a workplace athletic trainer (injury prevention specialist) to work side-by-side with your employees out on the shop floor has a dramatically positive effect on company safety culture. It shows the company’s dedication to the safety and health of every employee and that you actually care for their well-being.

Implement Early Intervention as Part of a Comprehensive Process

Early intervention is partially reactive. While it seeks to proactively address fatigue and discomfort that is present in the workplace, it does not prevent fatigue and discomfort from happening in the first place.

For this reason, it’s important to include early intervention as part of a comprehensive prevention strategy that includes a workplace ergonomics process and ongoing education and training.

• An ergonomics improvement process systematically identifies and removes ergonomic risk factors. This process will remove incompatibilities between the work and the worker, making the workstation more efficient and productive while also reducing injury risk.
• An educated and trained workforce is necessary to ensure all employees understand their role in the prevention process and have the tools and training to meet their responsibilities.

Over to you …

Do you have MSDs at your facility every year? Do you think an early intervention process would benefit you? Let us know in the comments section below!

Every Friday we pass on a few health and safety resources we enjoyed throughout the week in a “Best of the Week” post.

If you’d like to get these links (and more) during the week, follow @ErgoPlus on Twitter and check out our Health+Safety News website.

Health & Safety Links

Why Workers are Stressed
EHS Today 

A new poll reveals that job insecurity, job reorganization and high workloads are the most common causes of occupational stress among workers in Europe …

15 Pearls of Wisdom from Worksite Wellness Experts
TotalWellness 

You’re busy. We get it! Wellness practitioners and HR professionals must juggle daily operations, budget, industry trends — not to mention changing the health and in turn, lives, of your employees. You’re making a real difference in the world but sometimes you need a little pick me up …

Infographic: The Link Between Cell Phone Use and Fatal Car Crashes
EHS Today 

According to a new infographic released by the National Safety Council, data alone cannot capture the scope of cell phone distraction on our nation’s roads …

Workplace Wellness Wisdom …

From the Ergonomics Plus blog

From the Ergonomics Plus blog this week:

• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Safety Leaders
• Free Wellness Handout – Healthy Cooking Basics

Scroll to the bottom of this post for the free Wellness Handout PDF file.
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Healthy Cooking 101

Americans are eating more and more food they don’t prepare themselves. The convenience of take-out dinners and microwaveable meals has made it almost too easy to stay out of the kitchen. And it’s made it too easy to eat unhealthy junk food.

If you want to stay healthy, consider cooking your own meals with fresh ingredients.

By using the right cooking methods, you can make your every day meals healthier and with fewer calories. Healthy cooking methods also help capture the natural flavor and retain the nutrients of all the ingredients without adding lots of unhealthy oils, fats and salt into the recipe.

If this sounds great, but you’re not a master chef – don’t worry.

You don’t have to become an expert in the kitchen to use these healthy cooking techniques. With just a little practice, you can master these techniques to make every meal healthier.

Healthy Cooking Techniques

1.Steaming

Steaming is cooking food in an enclosed environment infused with steam and is one of the best ways to preserve the nutrients in your food. Steaming also cooks and seals in flavor, eliminating the need for added fats and salts during preparation.

2. Stir-frying

Stir-frying cooks your food at a very high temperature for a very short time period. You only need a small amount of oil or cooking spray for this method. Stir-frying is great for cooking vegetables along with your choice of lean meat.

3. Broiling

Broiling is one of the simplest of all cooking methods and involves exposing food to direct heat in an electric or gas stove. The benefits of broiling is that it allows the fat to drip away from the food, saving you those unnecessary calories.

Keep in mind:

(Sources: WebMD, Wikipedia, SHAPE Magazine)

Free Wellness Handout – Healthy Cooking Basics

Healthy Cooking Basics [PDF]

For many of us in the health & safety profession, it doesn’t seem like enough. There are always more reports to file, employees to tend to, and meetings on the calendar.

We won’t ever get more time in the day, but what we can do is be more effective with that time.

Enter The Seven Habits …

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is one of the best-selling business and self-help books in history.

According to Wikipedia, Time Magazine named it as one of The 25 Most Influential Business Management Books, and Bill Clinton even invited Covey to Camp David to counsel him on how to integrate these habits and principles into his presidency.

With that kind of recognition, the seven habits presented in the book are worth inspecting for nuggets of practical and actionable wisdom.

Following are the seven habits presented in the book and how they apply to Safety leaders.

Habit 1 – Be Proactive

The habit of being proactive is innate for effective safety leaders.

The big idea behind this habit is to be intentional about how you use your time. Don’t spend time worrying about events you can’t control. Instead, focus on the things you do have influence over and proactively use your time to make the greatest possible impact.

Habit 2 – Begin with the End in Mind

Imagine your retirement party and what others are saying and thinking about your career and what you accomplished at work.

Literally begin with the end in mind. What would you want people to be saying about your career? What would you want to have accomplished? What would you want them to be saying about how you accomplished your goals?

In this chapter on beginning with the end in mind, Covey writes about creating a personal mission statement. Can you codify in just a few sentences what your mission for your career / professional life is?

Habit 3 – Put First Things First

The central idea behind this habit is that most things we do every day can be divided into two categories – the urgent and the important.

Be proactive (see #1 above) and prioritize, plan and execute your week’s tasks based on importance rather than urgency. For example, doing strategic planning for your workplace ergonomics process is important. Answering a friend’s email about weekend plans is “urgent” but not getting you closer to your goals.

To be more effective, put first things first and don’t let yourself get into the reactive rat race of putting out small fires that prevent you from getting bigger, more important projects accomplished.

A good way to accomplish this is to define goals for the upcoming week and schedule them into your calendar. These are the important items you must get done for the week without getting sidetracked.

Habit 4 – Think Win-Win

This habit is a fundamental way to see all relationships.

Is there a way both sides can come out ahead at the end of an interaction?

This question is a great filter for your decision making process and the way you interact with co-workers. Are all stakeholders winning here? Is this decision good for the company and good for all affected parties?

Do your best to find solutions that allow everyone to win.

Habit 5 – Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood

The main idea behind this habit is that you should really try to understand as much information as possible before suggesting a solution.

Investigating and getting to the root of problems is a hallmark of effective safety leaders. Communicating solutions becomes easier and more effective when you have all related information available to you.

Habit 6 – Synergize

Synergy is, “the creation of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Covey points out that highly effective people are able to lead a team to accomplish goals that the individual team members couldn’t have accomplished on their own.

Safety leaders recognize that the art of injury prevention is effectively leading people toward a common goal – the safety and health of every employee.

Habit 7 – Sharpen the Saw

This final habit focuses on the need to do things that renew you in several different ways: physical, mental, spiritual, and social/emotional. In other words, take time to focus on taking care of yourself.

If you take the time to work on yourself, you’ll find yourself on what Covey calls an “upward spiral.” This will result in personal growth, change and continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Safety professionals have an important job and not enough time to do it in. Applying the seven habits above will help you be more effective at your job and make the most of the time you do have.

Do you intentionally practice any of these habits? What would you add to the list? Please let us know in the comments section below!

Sign up for the E+ Newsletter

For more workplace ergonomics articles and tips, sign up for the Ergonomics Plus monthly newsletter.

Every Friday we pass on a few health and safety resources we enjoyed throughout the week in a “Best of the Week” post.

If you’d like to get these links (and more) during the week, follow @ErgoPlus on Twitter and check out our Health+Safety News website.

Health & Safety Links

Near-Miss Reporting: A Missing Link in Safety Culture
ASSE 

Near-miss reporting, or the lack of it, is a controversial indicator of an organization’s safety culture. Over the years, SH&E professionals have heard concerns about the statistical validity of the many ratios published in the literature. The term itself has been widely debated—should these incidents be called near-misses, close calls, near hits or something else? …

Safety Has No Competition
EHS Today

Earlier this week, I attended the International Safety Equipment Association (ISEA) Executive Summit in Orange County, Calif. In addition to enjoying the beautiful resort, listening to some excellent speakers, and even spotting some dolphins and gray whales on a whale-watching trip, one of the highlights of the event was watching competitors agree on what’s most important: safety …

What a Little Ergonomic Light Can Do
ErgoWeb

Workers in a bad mood? Maybe it’s the light. It’s tough to be glum when the sun is beating down on you on a late winter day. But workers who spend their days indoors don’t always have the option to step outside. Instead, their moods, productivity and work performance can be affected by the lighting around them, inside the workplace. When the lighting is good, so is work. When the lighting isn’t, that’s another story altogether …

Workplace Fatality Data …

eTraining

From the Ergonomics Plus blog

From the Ergonomics Plus blog this week:

• A Guide to MSD Prevention Roles and Responsibilities
• Free Wellness Handout – Finding Motivation to Stay Well

Scroll to the bottom of this post for the free Wellness Handout PDF file.
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“Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and then begin to build.” ~ Robert Collier

Finding motivation to stay well begins with having powerful reasons to get and stay healthy.

Having a powerful reason to make important changes in your lifestyle is something that no one can give you. It’s important that you  take time to identify some powerful reasons to make changes in your lifestyle.

When you identify reasons that are important enough, you will be better equipped to handle the inner battles that will inevitably take place as you seek to form new habits.

Maybe your “why” is that you are sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

Maybe it’s being there for your family.

Maybe it’s keeping your job.

Living longer and healthier. Looking better on the beach.

Here’s another important “why.” We are living longer, but we are not living healthier. We are aging prematurely in this country, and the decline in health that we see around us is not related primarily to chronological age.

Abnormal and early loss of functional health is caused by lifestyle diseases. Early aging leads to a lower quality of life in the last years of life, which is very sad indeed. One of the most important reasons to build a good wellness plan is so that we can live a longer, healthier, and happier life.

Lifestyle determines the aging process, not merely the number of years that we’ve lived.

There’s an important difference between lifespan (how long you live) and health span (how long you stay healthy). It’s very important to keep the difference between the two very small, a good wellness plan will help us do just that.

What are your reasons?

Tips to Stay Motivated

1.Find an accountability partner (cheering section!)

2.Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) wellness goals

3.Measure the progress of your goals over time. Celebrate success!

4.If times get tough (and they will), remember your primary reasons to stay well.

Free Wellness Handout – Finding Motivation to Stay Well

Finding Motivation to Stay Well [PDF]