Ask the Ergonomist: Which Jobs Should We Assess First?

VelocityEHS ergonomists have 30 seconds to answer some of the most common questions we get on workplace ergonomics. In this installment, Deepesh Desai and Kent Hatcher discuss how to prioritize jobs when trying to mitigate ergonomic risk in the workplace.

Video Transcript

Kent: Hi, I’m Kent Hatcher, I’m here with Deepesh Desai we are both certified ergonomists and directors here at Humantech (now VelocityEHS Ergonomics). Today, as part of our ‘Ask the Ergonomist’ video series, I’m going to ask Depeche a question, you have 30 seconds to answer. The tables are turned this time, if you saw our last one Depeche asked me about the aging workforce and I had 30 seconds to give a response. So, I’m going to give you a question that we’ve collected from people watching our webinars and you have 30 seconds. I’m going to time you to answer it.

Deepesh: Perfect, let’s do it.

Kent: Okay, so the main question that we get – one common question that we get – is a company wants to move from reactive to proactive, they know they need to start doing proactive assessments, they don’t know where to start, they’ve got hundreds of jobs, which jobs do they assess first and how do they get to proactive. You have 30 seconds, go.

Deepesh: Perfect, actually that’s a great question, Kent. There’s a couple of different ways you may want to prioritize your activities and the first one is start with the jobs where you have had incidents – ergonomic related incidents – you know from there maybe move on to jobs that are the worst jobs in the facilities and even though you’ll have tons of reds at first, but still those are the jobs that that you’re going to focus on – the worst jobs at the facilities – and then from there maybe talk to your engineers and see where they’ve had production quality issues. I think those are three things…

Kent: Times up.

Deepesh and Kent: Okay, very good.

Kent: So, your 3 points were to start where injuries are, your second point was where the worst jobs are. How do they know where the worst jobs are?

Deepesh: Well, I would say talk to the employees and ask the question: what’s the job that they hate the most?

Kent: Yeah, I think you’re going to be able to see that the job that no one wants to do in the plant.

Deepesh: Right.

Kent: And the third point you made was talk to engineers about where there’s quality or productivity bottlenecks yeah and start there. I think your point about the risk map initially is going to look very red, because you’re assessing those high-risk jobs, but over time it’ll sort of balance out. Great job. 30 seconds you got three main points across. So, I hope you enjoyed this segment of ‘Ask the Ergonomist’. We’ll see you next time when two Humantech (now VelocityEHS Ergonomics) ergonomists quiz each other. Thanks for watching.