OSHA's New Focus on MSDs

In an effort to gain further insights into MSD (musculoskeletal disorder) injuries in the workplace, a category of injury currently considered underreported, OSHA is proposing a change to the workplace injury recordkeeping OSHA 300 Log-the addition of a column for MSDs specifically. Currently, MSDs are difficult to identify through the log, with no single column allotted.

 

Clearly, for employers, reporting practices may change. In the bigger picture, however, it sounds like David Michaels, new Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA,  is interested in creating tighter regulations around MSD injuries and prevention in the workplace.

 

Click here to submit a comment to the hearing committee prior to March 15.

A Legislative Push for Workplace Risk Assessment – Hurray!

In case you haven't heard, the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) has just announced its top 12 legislative and regulatory issues for 2010. It’s no surprise that #3 is “Advance a Safety and Health Program Rule.” In essence, ASSE wants OSHA to require that employers take proactive responsibility for employee health and safety, including assessing risks in their workplace. If this legislation passes, hopefully more organizations will treat injuries as a serious threat to employee satisfaction and productivity, all of which impact resources and the bottom line.

 

P.S. We also like issue #8, which argues that ergonomics should not be considered as a one-size-fits-all approach but, rather, as a risk-based, non-prescriptive, cooperative approach. After all, no two employers or employees are exactly the same. Why should ergonomic remedies be any different?

 

To read all 12 issues, go to:

http://ehstoday.com/safety/management/asse-announces-top-legislative-regulatory-issues-8541/

Understanding Risk Control

Before following up on my previous eLearning post, I wanted to point you to this article on Occupational Health & Safety Magazine’s website entitled Understanding Risk Control. It’s relevant and informative to our discussion on how to address injury prevention beyond knowledge-based training, and looks more in depth at the causes of injury and risk in the workplace.

 

More to come on eLearning soon…

Building a Culture of Safety

Having been awarded as one of the Best Places to Work for two years in a row (yay!), Remedy Interactive certainly knows the importance of office culture in building a strong team. And, as a leader, I know the importance of being a strong role model in building and maintaining that positive office culture.

 

Culture can play as important a role in engaging the employees in safe behaviors when working towards achieving a safe workplace. Read these rules of engagement to get actionable ideas on how managers and supervisors can become role models in creating and participating in a culture of safety. And for further ideas on how to get the employees more involved, check out this article on creating an action based safety committee.

eLearning - The Right Way To Teach Safety & Injury Prevention?

We do unsafe things even though we know they are unsafe. I’m pretty sure that we don’t always know why, but sometimes because there are social and professional rewards for being unsafe, or costs for being safe (taking breaks means you don't get promoted, saying you're uncomfortable means you are a whiner). Sometimes it’s because we’re lazy, and sometimes it’s because we're trapped in the middle of conflicting information (deadlines are important, but so is taking your time).

 

What does this have to do with eLearning? Well... eLearning - and “education” generally - is designed to impart knowledge and then test for the successful delivery of that knowledge to a learner. The assumption for safety is that people who know how to work safely will work safely. Questionable, eh?

 

While it’s entirely true that a person is more likely to behave in safe ways if they know what is safe, what isn’t, and the potential consequences of acting unsafely, it is not deterministic of safe behaviors. Knowing how to be safe is a necessary but insufficient precondition for actually acting safely. In this way, teaching safe behaviors is very unlike teaching something like math – someone who knows that two + two = four is very unlikely to tell you that it equals five. Experience (ahem…) tells me that knowing – for example – that driving above the speed limit is unsafe does not result in people driving safely. 

 

If people do unsafe things even though they know those activities are unsafe, then lack of knowledge isn't the root cause of all injury. Therefore, any intervention can and will fall short if trying to solve this problem by relying exclusively on education and knowledge in the hands of the could-be-injured person. 

 

Injury	Cause	Cure
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome	Lack of knowledge of causes and symptoms	eLearning
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome	Overworked	Different incentive structures for employee behavior
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome	Manager is relentless in focus on productivity	Increase manager accountability for injury rates in conjunction with productivity

 

Put simply, eLearning is a great solution if the root cause of your problem is fundamentally a lack of knowledge. Sophisticated systems for understanding root causes might say something like, "eLearning is a great solution when injuries are occurring because of a cognitive root cause." 

 

Next post, we’ll dig into some things our customers are doing to prevent injuries that blend with eLearning and other solutions, based on their understanding of root causes within their organizations.

The Future of Injury Prevention and OSHA

Here’s an interesting editorial piece from the NY Times on Obama’s nomination of David Michaels for the head of OSHA. It references an article (page 10) written by Michaels himself in December.

 

I’m excited about this nomination! Michaels seems interested in promoting a “culture” of safety, and restoring the government’s progress in improving workers' safety—if his nomination is confirmed by the senate, we may see changes in many companies’ injury prevention planning.

Employees' discomfort should make you uncomfortable.

In a population of many thousands of US-based computer users at a California-based corporation, a single report of constant or frequent discomfort by an individual over a three year period (we asked them many times, they potentially answered many times) correlated to a 20X greater likelihood of that individual filing a workers’ compensation claim. 

 

 

While the causes of discomfort varied for this population, “discomfort frequency” provides this particular company with a reliable way to make decisions about how to spend their limited resources to have the maximum impact on the health and productivity of their workforce and a substantial reduction in losses.