Putting People at the Center of Work - Industrial Ergonomics w/ Allan Brown

Does your back hurt? Is work literally a pain in your neck? Find out from MEMIC’s Director of Ergonomics Allan Brown if workplace ergonomics could be the culprit to some of your most common aches and pains. Good ergonomics is fitting the work to the worker, not the other way around. If you sit down at a workstation or desk or sit in a new vehicle and you don’t adjust anything, then you have to adapt yourself to the machine or tool. If you don’t make adjustments, then you may be exposing yourself to unsafe situations and blind spots. Pete Koch: Hello, listeners, and welcome to the Safety Experts podcast. Does your back hurt? Is work literally a pain in your neck? On today's episode, we're gonna find out if workplace ergonomics could be the culprit to some of your most common aches and pains. The Safety Expert podcast is presented by MEMIC, a leading worker's compensation provider based on the East Coast. A new episode of the podcast drops every two weeks featuring interviews with leaders in the field, top executives, MEMIC staff and other industry experts discussing how safety applies to all aspects of our lives. I'm your host, Peter Koch. And for the past 17 years, I've been working for MEMIC as a safety expert within the hospitality and construction industries. What I realized is safety impacts every part of each position that you have or tasks that you do. Yeah, sure, you can get lucky, but there's just no way to be successful in the long term without safety. There was a time when I believed that safety was important, but it was something extra that had to be done for those most dangerous jobs and in some cases an unnecessary concern that would slow you down. The realization that a safe job is also a productive job is when it came when I was clearing ice from towers here one winter in New England. The tools that I had to keep me from falling also allowed me to work hands free in a better position and with a lot less fatigue during the shift than some of my co-workers. So, as the shifts rolled on, I got more done. I didn't go any faster. I didn't just slow down as fast and was able to move more confidently in the environment. And it was a few years later that I realized that if we had the same tools and training, that level of productivity could have been multiplied. So, for today's episode of putting the person at the center of work or industrial ergonomics, I'm going to speak with Al Brown, the director of ergonomics at MEMIC, to better understand what ergonomics is and how it impacts our business. Al has been with MEMIC for more than a decade and helping hundreds of businesses get a handle on ergonomics in the workplace. So, Al, welcome to the podcast today. Al Brown: Thank you Pete. Happy to be here. Pete Koch: Awesome. I really appreciate you coming down. Today we wanted to focus on ergonomics in the industrial environment. So manual material handling, order picking and even housekeeping. But before we get into all those topics and unpack ergonomics, I want you to just give us a little bit of your history here at MEMIC and how you got to where you are as the Director of Ergonomics. Al Brown: Sure, Pete, thanks. I'm actually a physical therapist with a safety background and started onsite industry prior to being at MEMIC, which we when we were at industry, we would often go and they were manual material handling industries, mostly shipyards, retail, distribution centers. And the clinic was there. And if someone had an injury, we would often walk back with the person to the job to look at where they felt they were having problems. So sometimes we would re-engineer and we would analyze it and then re-engineer out that particular task or modify it or educate the person a better way to do it then we'd do the treatment.  It was very successful, and it seemed to be a win, win, win for everybody involved. That led me to Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Company and who partners with industry, and I felt the skills that I had learned in my previous life as an onsite physical therapist were well tailored for this type of industry. And it's great because we do partner with industry and we do get to go into industry. Look at, you know, there might be high exposure in particular area and we just have a different set of eyes. So, I tend to look at things from a physiological standpoint. We have a lot of safety professionals onboard. Sometimes I have to defer to them about safety issues, but I tend to look more at the human being and the ergonomics of work environments. And that's what has led me to where I am today. Pete Koch: To where you are right here today at the podcast. So, you talked about ergonomics. Let's define ergonomics. So, what is it? And then can ergonomics be tied to worker discomfort or pain in the workplace? Al Brown: Sure. I mean, ergonomics, the term ergo it's looking at work and the mechanics of work from the human perspective.  What are the tolerances of a human being? What are the reach distances? When you look at, for example, human beings, probably 5'1" to 6'2" represent about 90 percent of the population. Anything outside that becomes an outlier and so design a lot of times within the workplace is for that range of folks. Look at clothing, you know,  you get outside that range and it becomes extra tall or petite. Look at anything, look at door design in terms of people going in and out. Old homes have very short doors because there wasn't really a standard. Now there's a standard so that the majority, 99.9 percent of the population can go through the door without ducking. So, this has been it actually started with Department of Defense looking at tool and equipment and aircraft design because of issues they had, and it has morphed into more things. Another example is going down the interstate, you'll see a green and silver sign because that's the best unlit colors for the human eye to see. So again, these are all a little subtle inroad of ergonomics, but we tend to overlay it within the industry where we look at what are the tasks at hand, what are the critical demands of that job? How do we measure those and are things that are they outside the range of tolerance for the human being? And we understand that tolerance with human beings and there are things we can do to bring it back inside the tolerance level, be it automating or just changing the process. Pete Koch: So really the effect on the job, on the human person, and then how to redesign the job or the task or the environment they're in to fit that person. Al Brown: Right. We're trying to fit good ergonomics, is fitting the work to the worker, not the other way around. Oftentimes, you know, you sit down at the desk, you sit down in a manufacturing plant, you sit in a car. If you don't adjust anything, then you the worker has to adapt to the machine or the tool or whatever and often creates awkward postures, awkward reaches. Where in fact, good ergonomics, that tool should be fit to you, just like in your car. You adjust the seat, you adjust the mirror, you prepare yourself to drive so that you can safely see and drive and reach the gas pedals in a comfortable position. Pete Koch: So, when we look at the design, either designing the task or environment specific to the person who's doing it or providing adjustments to allow the worker to make those adjustments real time, like the car that you would. Al Brown: With adjustments, you can meet a greater range of people. Pete Koch: Yes. Al Brown: Unfortunately, like in the old manufacturing plants, the tool and die. Pete Koch: One size fits all. Al Brown: 1940 equipment, it's one size fits all. So, it's a bit more of a challenge when you deal with older tooling. Modern day tooling, we tend to see a lot more of that adjustability to adapt to different statured workers. Pete Koch: Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up. One of my first jobs back when I was 14 years old, I was working in a manufacturing facility and my job was to bring the dyes from the dye room onto the factory floors, to switch the dyes out for the metal stamping process. And so, all the machines, it's one size fits all, but it wasn't one-person size. So, you had someone like yourself who's more than 6' standing at a particular task and the work is down by their belt. And then you've got the little old lady who is there; who is 5'6" or 4'6" right, just there.  And her shoulders, I remember this specifically cause it just a wonderful woman. Really kind of was friendly to me, which was not what most of the people were when the little 14-year-old kid is tooling around the factory floor. But her shoulders were at the level where the tooling was happening. So her arms were basically, she spent most of her day with her hands at shoulder level.  I didn't realize then what an issue that could be. But now I can't even imagine spending even half an hour or 15 minutes, 10 minutes with your arms at that level. There'll be a lot of fatigue and challenge with it. Al Brown: Energy expenditure for her was exponentially much higher than someone where the tooling or the work area was at elbow level. Pete Koch: And that wasn't all that long ago even. So, there's been leaps and bounds made in a lot of the new machines that are out there. But we still find a lot of tools, a lot of machines that have been built in the ‘50s or the ‘60s or the ‘70s and even in the ‘80s where they're not as adjustable. So we're gonna get into some of those pieces. So, let's talk about risk factors, because without understanding risk factors, I think it's hard to understand how a particular machine or a task would affect the worker negatively. So, what are some of the risk factors that can cause or, if you can notice them, predict future discomfort? Al Brown: Risk factors can range. You know, there's exertion. Heavy lifting that one is obvious. And the perception is that's the cause for a lot of things. And in fact, as we go through this podcast you may discover that everything is not what it appears, that it's not necessarily always the heavy lift, but exertion, repetition. How often am I doing this task, how often is it repeated? In the manufacturing world it's not one widget, it can be a thousand widgets an hour. So just repeated motions, so that you create fatigue and exhaustion, muscle tendons, ligaments. So, it's exertion, repetition. Pete Koch: Force was there. Al Brown: Yes, kind of exertion. Awkward posture, yes. So extended awkward reaches, just like the person you were talking about earlier in the podcast where it was an extended awkward reach. So, when the body is in those awkward positions, you can have a considerable reduction in the ability to generate force. So that shoulder on that the woman you were talking about earlier, she's going to have to generate a lot more force or a lot a greater percentage of her force that she can generate in that awkward position in order to do the task compared to the person that was standing in more of a working neutral position. So, the force requirements or the percentage of force required is much greater for her. So, she's almost maxing out every time she does something at that level. So, you're looking at exertion, awkward postures, repetition. Those seem to be the high sort of risk factors that we are looking at when we look at a work environment. Pete Koch: So, when I look at my job as I'm looking through a whole cycle of the tasks that I'm going to do. So, start to finish. I'm looking at so where are the person's position versus where the work is positioned? How many times they have to do that? How much force do I have to exert in order to get it done, whether it be pressing a button or moving a raw material into a machine, removing the raw material from or produce machine material from the machine into something else.  All those pieces that you're looking at. Al Brown: All those pieces you're looking at, you know, where's the workflow? Where is it? You know, we try to get folks to keep work between knee and shoulder. Pete Koch: Okay. Al Brown: And we'll probably get into that a little bit later on. But you try to keep that sort of your power zone. That's where when we look at a lot of the research that's been done out there, trying to keep that work in that area is of greater benefit.  When you start to go beyond that, for example anything, I always go into industry and say, "Don't put anything on the ground that you don't have to."  Placing it on the ground, particularly if it's a light thing, our perception is no big deal. I'll throw it on the ground, and I'll bend over to pick it up.  And bending over to pick it up, oftentimes it's a bend at the waist, a reach down and a pickup with the hand.  And you, when if you can visualize this, the buttock and the head end up on the same plane for the reach down to that object. And we refer to that as the butthead maneuver because the forces on the back often exceed what the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health deems sort of a safe limit. And all you're doing is picking up a small object. It might be a pen, piece of paper, the scrubbing bubbles if you're in housekeeping, whatever the case may be. That you don't realize it's the little things that cause a lot of the increased force on the low back.  Pete Koch: And that movement to the ground to pick something up from the ground is habitual, really. That movement, the bend from the waist to lift something from the ground comes more from habit. Because if we were going to lift something that was very heavy. So you take that piece of paper or the squirt bottle or the spray bottle, that might weigh a pound more or less. That's a pretty easy pick. But, if I'm going to pick up 60 pounds of concrete or one hundred and twenty pounds of something, or a bag of whatever from the ground, I'm going to do more because I have to exert more force to do that. But what you're saying is that you can exert just as much force on your back picking up something small when you've got the butthead effect going on. So, your head and your butt are in line and I go to lift something light up, I'm putting a lot of force on the lower portion of my back and all I'm doing is picking up that one piece. And I'm doing it from habit. So heavy thing I might think about more, but that little thing that I don't think about that I'm going to bend over at my waist to pick up is what's really going to cause the bigger problem, especially over time, is that correct?. Al Brown: Right. And again, we're always searching for that big thing. And your perception's right that typically when there's a big thing to lift, people are more cautious about lifting because in their mind, it's a heavy object. So, I have to be careful how I do this. Not everybody is good at proper lifting technique. But we all pause when we look at that thing and say that's gonna be heavy. And we either choose to lift it and we get pretty close to using good technique or we get help, or we use a device to lift it.  The little object where everybody is guilty of just bending over to pick that up. Think of this. How many times when you're making a bed? Do you think a housekeeper just takes some sort of reaches out with her arm to sling the sheet out over like a double, or a queen, or king-sized bed instead of walking around the other side? It's just really quick and easy. But that's a huge load on the back and the shoulder, because you know what? In today's work environment, we probably see backs and shoulders kind of lead the way in regard to injuries. So, both of them are exposed to these awkward heavy loads; shoulder more, you know, when you're working overhead, backs, the little things. Pete Koch: Mm hmm. And statistically, shoulders and backs from a soft tissue injury are not only leading the way from a frequency standpoint, but they also are quite expensive over time for our clients and also for the individual and not so much expensive from a cost perspective. But it could have an expense on the pain side for someone and not just at work, but it could be a home. If my back hurts all the time, my quality of life starts to change substantially. I know a number of my friends have sustained back injuries, whether it be through work or play, and they've gone through periods where they've had chronic back pain for weeks or months at a time. And it changes personality, it changes how they work or their job and how they can work at their job. But it also changes what they like to do outside of work as well. So I think it's important to understand these risk factors and not just because it's a workplace thing, but it's because if we can protect what we have, we can do more for longer with what we have and the things that we enjoy, whether it be being outdoors hiking, whether it be something active or even inactive. If you have low back pain, sitting in a chair watching a movie can be excruciating over the long term. Al Brown: It's funny, you know, you talk about back pain and again, going back to that, little things can cause back pain. Education is so important when it comes to those types of injuries, shoulders and back. And again, that's kind of one of the key elements of when we go into industry, we try to work with industry to understand that, you know, for example, a back injury, you sitting will place more force on a back than you and I standing right now. And it can be up to 50 percent more force on a back in terms of disk pressure, if we were to measure that. If you look at some of the studies done by Al Makinson and the folks in the past, they actually have documented that, you know, sitting places more force on the back. So, you going home with a sore back and thinking, I'm going to sit down and watch a show -- "Oh, my back hurts worse."  If you don't understand those nuances, you can actually make things worse. Pete Koch: Yeah, because that that connection between if it hurts, rest it, I mean, it's been driven in our heads for years and years. So, it's good that you go to the doctor. Something hurts. Oh, so take some time, rest, come see me, take some ibuprofen or whatever that is, and the rest is going to be good for you. But many times the rest that he's talking about or she's talking about as a doctor is not that my back hurts after work and when I go spend the rest of the day seated to take the load off, because what we're you're actually saying is that if it's a back issue and it's a disc issue, you're putting more force on your back sitting in that chair, or sitting on that sofa, or on that couch, or in that movie theater seat than you would be standing or even walking. Al Brown: 30 to 40 years ago the treatment of choice was, you know, if you had a rupture or herniated disc was to put you to bed for two weeks. And the problem was that, you know, again, we live in a world of gravity and you take muscle tissue, tendons, ligaments and all those structures in your body and they actually begin to decondition. So, after two weeks, the core musculature, which actually gives our body stability and the back stability have become weakened. So, if you can think of a radio tower and these tethered wires that stabilize it, we've actually loosened those all up, so we've actually made the back more prone to further injury or recurring injury down the road. So today we've gotten smarter and people are much more active, and they begin to understand that, you know, the mechanism of injury and the things that kind of help improve health and start to allow for the rehabilitative process. Pete Koch: Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about lifting. Because lifting is a task that gets done in every job. It doesn't matter what it is. You could be seated at a desk and you will lift something. It could be the telephone, it could be the stapler, it could be the mouse, whatever it is. It could be a book off a shelf. Or you might be in manufacturing and you're lifting material or you're in housekeeping and your lifting laundry or product or whatever.  There's lifting everywhere. So, you'd mentioned before that there are possibly safe lifting limits that one could follow, but depending on how you lift, it might not be quite so safe. So, can you speak to that a little bit, what those safe lifting limits might be and how it all works. Al Brown: Right. Sure. I mean, it's based on science. Tom Waters back in '91 with a host of other folks, Vern Putz and then some contributing from the folks at University of Michigan, Chaffin, Tom Chaffin, Armstrong collaboratively put together what's called the NIOSH lifting equation. And about 3 years later, they had the modified NIOSH lifting equation. It's an equation you can go online and Google NIOSH lifting equation, but it's based on science and in that equation there's 51 pounds, which is the load constant that is started.  And I don't to want to get too deep into the weeds on the science here, but, as industry out there has kind of grabbed on to that number and said that's a safe amount of weight for workers to lift. And here's the deal. It's the load constant that starts the equation. And they figured that that was 99 percent of male, 75 percent of female could safely handle that if these particular factors exist and those factors without, again, getting too deep in the weeds. It's a perfect lift. It's only 10 inches from our center of gravity. It only goes up or down 10 inches. There's no rotation, there's good coupling blah blah blah.  That doesn't exist in industry. So, the way the equation works is we begin to look at the other factors.  Where's the starting of the lift?  Where's the termination of the lift? Is there good coupling, is there rotation in the body? What's the distance? Vertical distance? Horizontal distance? So how far my travelling with it. How far out am I placing it. You know, think about reaching across a pallet and placing something way across a pallet. Well, that's going to be a 20 to 25 inch reach across a pallet to lay a box down. With those increase in critical demands or those increase in exposure, you begin to take that 51 pounds and chisel away at it. And they do that by, they have multipliers. So, it's something less than one. And obviously the higher the critical demand, the smaller that multiplier and it starts cutting that number down so that we can actually look at a job task, put it through the NIOSH lifting equation. And, you know, it might be a 35-pound object. But really, when we get done with the equation, it says that lift is only safe for 99 percent of males and 75 percent of females if it's 14 pounds. Pete Koch: Wow. Al Brown: So, if you think of the 51 pounds, it's probably not a good indicator of what everybody can do within a working environment. You know, NIOSH has actually come out and looked at the healthcare industry and said, "Let's call it 35 pounds." And again, I'm not totally happy. I mean that's a great number. And you know, a good way to feel that is to go out and buy a bag of cat litter or dog food that's in and around that and have people handle it so they can get a sense of what 35 pounds is. It's still Pete, if you think about it, when we go back to that butthead maneuver, that was just a pencil that we were picking. So, it had nothing to do with the weight. So sometimes we get locked in on this weight, but it's those other factors that will impact what is a safe limit. So, you know, just a rule of thumb for industry is to think about nothing below your knees, nothing above the shoulders and 35 pounds. But still, there are other issues you have to think about within those ranges. How far is a person reaching when they're putting things down, that kind of stuff. Pete Koch: So, it comes really it comes down, what affects that 50 pounds or a safe lifting? 51 pounds for safe lifting is all about posture. And it seems that the more awkward the posture is, the harder or the less weight that you are able to lift safely for that 99 percent of males and 75 percent of females. Can you look at it as simply is that?  Like the more awkward the posture is, the less weight you're gonna be able to do move safely? Al Brown: Yeah, that's probably it. You know, and again, it's better to keep it simple when you're thinking about it. So, the more awkward the lift, the less force, the less mass, the less weight that that person can safely handle.  And you know, you begin to look at, if you're a, an owner of a company, you know, a quick walk or just a walk through and start looking at the job tasks within your industry, as you know, who's what stuff are you putting on the ground?   You know? And that's a good start. And then how much is that stuff that I'm putting on the ground? What weight is it? And can I raise that thing up? And it might be simple as instead of having a single pallet on the ground, you double the pallet. So now instead of four to six inches, we're eight to 12 inches, you might triple the pallet so that it actually gets up into that 15 inch about knee height. That's a cheap, easy way to do it. Obviously looking at pallet lifts or a more automated way. But, you know, you start to look for those exposures within industry. Pete Koch: So that concept of keep it off the ground, keep it below your shoulders in that lift. So, I'm looking at lifts between my knees and my shoulders is a good, again, simplistic way to try to limit some of the awkwardness of the posture and how things are going to function. So that's two good pieces. But it's not always the lift from low or high, but it's the reach out that can also cause some of the challenges. So how far can I reach? Where's my, where's my reach to keep it safe? Al Brown: Yeah. I mean, if you think of the primary power zone, we actually have a resource in a chart that actually shows kind of a power zone.  You can actually go online too and just Google manual material power zone and you'll actually see it's a graphic. But when you're looking at it arm extended, so staying within that 10 inches from your core out to where your hands are approximated on the thing that you're holding. That's kind of the real power zone. You can extend beyond that maybe out to 15 or so inches. But again, it depends on the mass and weight that you're handling. So, staying within that power, almost elbows at your side is probably the safe zone. So, think about just flexing your elbows and coming to your shoulders or extending down to your knees where your elbows kind of stay in close to your core. That's your safe zone to work. Soon as you go out a little further, it turns into a yellow zone. And then finally, you get out to the no go zone, which is the red zone. Pete Koch: How does, and I might be getting a slightly off topic here, but how does posture, human posture, affect that? So, you know, if I have that forward head posture or I have a slouched posture, how does posture affect my ability to safely lift that that load? Al Brown: Well, think of it this way. You see a forward head posture. For example, if you take your head, which weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 to 15 pounds for every 10 degrees, you tip your head forward. So think about looking at your eye, your cell phone. And we all tend to look down at our cell phones. So, for every 10 degrees, you tip your head forward, you add 10 more pounds of force. So with a head that's tipped forward, 30 degrees, which is kind of almost like your chin down on your chest a little bit, looking down at something instead of 13 pounds, we now have 43 pounds of force that we are adding to our axial skeleton and our ability to hold. So now we've loaded our back up with that head position. And then if we round our shoulders and bring our core forward, we add that much more force and we haven't even initiated a lift. So again, going back to just body posture and where you're located, you can create a huge load on your back just from your body position. Think of a kitchen. Go to the kitchen, and if you look at the bottom of your cabinet in the kitchen, there's a toe kick space and I'm not sure where that was invented, but the toe kick space allows you to almost belly up to the counter and your toes can go in that extra three to four to five inches. And that allows you to stay upright as long as the counter fits you. If it didn't exist, you would have to lean in on that counter. And you've already loaded your back up simply because of that minor little difference. So toe kicks, have a significant role in the world of happy back in the kitchen. Pete Koch: And you can take that into the industrial kitchen also. And I know going into some industrial kitchens, so I have my prep table and I've never been in a kitchen that has enough space. To put things so sometimes you find things that are actually stored at floor level, so you can't get that close because that toe kick space is being filled with something. Stuff. Al Brown: Stuff. If we go, even at a workbench people end up using that area underneath for storage and all of a sudden, they have no toe kick space. So just because of that storing of things there, you've already loaded your back up simply because you have to lean forward into the job. Pete Koch: And that's a pretty interesting part to think about, like most people wouldn't think. They always think about height, like what's the height of the workplace that I have to work at and how close I can get to it makes a big difference, too.  Because it will change my ability to stand up straight versus just that little forward posture and even just a few degrees forward as you mentioned, you know, how many pounds of force was it again if I tip my head for again? Al Brown: For every 10 degrees, it's 10 pounds of force, just for the head. We haven't talked about the weight of the core, because those measurements are taken, if you go back and look at the Natkinson research those forces are taken at like L5, S1, the low back area. So, anything that you tip forward of your pelvis, above your pelvis, impacts that disc pressure and like I said it will go up exponentially because we live in a world of gravity, so it's not a one to one relationship. It's like a game of Jenga. The further out you start moving those blocks, the more unstable the stack. And sooner or later, it's going to fall over. Pete Koch: Yeah, that's interesting. If you think about it that way, you're really working like a machine, like a crane, and you take a skilled crane operator, he's always or she's always, take into consideration how far out do I have to have the stick? What's the weight of my load? Where does it have to swing to and move to so that they stay within the capacity of their crane or their machine? And we as humans don't often think about all those pieces. We just think about how heavy is it? Not so much where it's located first. how do I muckle onto it? How high do I have to lift it? How far do I have to go with it? We just take for granted that our body can do it because we might have done it before. But as we get older and I think across the nation where we're finding that our workforce is aging, we are as we get older, we struggle to do the same amount of things or lift the same amount or recover faster from doing something incorrectly that we might have been able to do before. Al Brown: Our physiology's slower. And it's as we as we age, we also bring along comorbidities to define that term those are the aches and pains. That's the sprained knee from hiking the hill. That was the old football injury. That was the cheerleading, "Oh I hurt myself." So those aches and pains that kind of come along with life, heal but there's always a little bit of scar left over. And when we start to get to that point in life where we're we consider ourselves aging, and that seems to be a moving target nowadays for me, I'm trying to push it back as far as I can. Those aches and pains come with you and our posture indicates it will impact those comorbidities, too. So, the more awkward or, or forward, or leaning posture as we age, we tend to drop down a bit the more you will impact the joints, ligaments and tendons in your body because they weren't originally built for that posture. So now something has to take up those forces and that's when you begin to get chronic pain and discomfort and strain muscles sooner and easier and tear muscles and tendons and ligaments. So, we're a little bit more exposed. So, when you're taking care of the body and trying to maintain that body in an upright position.  Again, it's like that crane, you've got a preventive maintenance.  It allows you to do more. But still at the end, gravity wins. It's undefeated. So, you're gonna go. So, you're trying to compress your comorbidities as much as you can in the manual material handling world. Pete Koch: So, let's look at those risk factors again. So, exertion, repetitive motion or movements and then awkward postures. So, when you're in the workplace, give me some examples of where you see these either three combined into something that could be very challenging for somebody or just where you might see these in the workplace. Al Brown: Well, you know, it can be a low work area, you know, where you have a tall worker that comes in and they might be doing auto parts, where they're reaching and then they have a box to the side of them that they're stacking these parts and the box might be a little too high. So, or it's just in an awkward position. So, they have to kind of reach up and over the box and place it. And then when the box is filled, they close it up, they pick it up, they turn around and then they put it on a pallet which is on the ground. So, we've got we've got, you know, awkward posture. Static standing, reaching for the parts, to rotating, to put it in a box, up and over with a shoulder being exposed to kind of an up awkward overreach. And then you finished with this I pick it up, it's a heavy lift and I place it on the pallet. So, I'm very exposed.  Now, let me tell you something. Just a little physiology about disks. Disks are, we hear about slip disks. That's actually a bad term.  Disks don't slip.  They are well attached to the vertebrae above and below.  The vertebrae are the bony structures, and through those bony structures go your nerves. And there's lots of tendons and ligaments that hold this all together. And the discs are well attached. However, they are the weak link.  And so, they're a little bit like a jelly doughnut is always used as an example. So, with bending forward slightly, you will create sort of a forward compressive force on the front side of the disc and a forcing that gel inside the disc sort of posterior backwards.  And behind that disc are your nerves that kind of go to different parts of your body.  So, you can create sort of a bulging to that disc.  A natural bulging. And that's why you, me and everybody else, when we've been sitting or even leaning, we have this, some of us will have this natural instinct to stand up and do sort of a backward bend. And all we're trying to do is reset that gel back where it belongs. And with industry, we try to encourage workers to do that. We do that with drivers that are delivery drivers or truck drivers because they're sitting. They change that disc and it takes about anywhere from three to 10 minutes to get that disc to reshape, because you're at great exposure to a to a back injury if you just go and muckle on and pick something up.  So that person I was talking about earlier that is doing the auto parts, they're bent forward, they're loading the disc, they're placing in the box. And then the next thing they do, they turn around and they pick the box up and put it on a pallet and they go, "Oh, my gosh, it was the heavy lift." And it wasn't so much a heavy lift, but it was that awkward leaning forward posture that prepared the disc for injury. Pete Koch: Yup. The movement of the inside of the disc or that gel inside the disc, as I sit forward it's not a quick change all the time, So the longer I stay in one position the longer it takes for that to then reset. Al Brown: Physiologically you have do have a limit. I mean it's like I said three, maybe five minutes. We usually encourage folks to go longer because what happens is sitting flattens your there's an inward curve in your low back. So, it actually flattens that curve and that changes the physics of the compression on that disc. And again, it depends on all the comorbidities you bring along for that disk and how weak the back wall is. But let's call it a healthy disk, when you stand up, that curve doesn't just spring back to its normal shape. It will as you stand and walk around just because it's resetting, it's the gel is re-shifting. And it's not a like a water filled water balloon in there that just squirts around, it takes a moment for it to change. So, it's a slow process, but it resets. But you can assist that by doing a little bit of a back extension. A lot of times we, we encourage that with like I said, drivers or folks that are in manufacturing, where they're doing a lot of stuff in front of them, that during that stretch break they sort of reset their back. Pete Koch: And I think the key right there is it's a stretch break. So, it's a break from doing what's in front of you. Again, the repetition to help change the effects of the awkward posture. So if I'm gonna be in that forward position for a while, if I can't change what's in front of me, then before I go to lift the heavy part, I need to take a not just a moment, but I need to actually take maybe a minute or two and reset before I go to lift that. Al Brown: Yup and in that case, you know, here's an example of working with a company to realize that they're going to say, I can't wait three or five minutes for them to move that box. So that's where you look at can I automate.  Is there a spur? Can we roller conveyor once it's filled? Can we just kind of push it off? So, we eliminate that risk factor because you can't you know, you don't want to interrupt production.  You don't, you know there's a fallacy that ergonomics actually creates a slowdown in the world of production, but in fact, it sort of enhances it and minimizes the risk. But in that particular case, you have to find that kind of a solution. For example, the roller conveyor or, you know, a vacuum lift or whatever to kind of move the box up and out. Pete Koch: Well, you know, talking about that part like ergonomics slows it down so that story I told at the beginning of the podcast about clearing ice from towers one winter.  So, the task we had a group of people we were clearing ice from towers, we were up anywhere between 30 and 60 feet in the air working in the wintertime. The environment was very slippery. So, we're in a full body harness and we have fall protection. And so, in my kit, I have work positioning that allows me to connect into something, lean back into it and sit into a good spot and then work hands free with it and not having to muckle onto something, where my co-workers didn't. They either leaned into their fall protection equipment, which you don't want to do. Or they had to hold on with one arm and do all the work with the other arm. So, what happened throughout the day is that I got more done because I had less fatigue throughout the day. So, production can come from many different ways. Either it's a solution that allows the worker to exert less throughout the day, therefore getting more done throughout the day.  Or it eliminates or reduces one of those risk factors and allows the production to move more quickly.  Like a roller conveyor instead of a pick and a lift. Anytime you can put something on a piece of machinery and move it from point A to point B, it's gonna be a lot more efficient than it is if you're going to give it to somebody to move it someplace else. Al Brown: And think of it, you're just more efficient, you're working more efficiently. So, your fatigue factor is a lot less compared to that person that's struggling and lifting and kind of reaching around. They're going to use much more force or much greater percentage of their force that they can generate. We always do a grip dynamometer; it measures your grip strength. So, we'll have someone in their power zone grip and for ease of math and for everybody listening. Say the person can generate 100 pounds of force and then we'll have them do a reach across the table, maybe an awkward position of the wrist and we have them squeeze that grip dynamometer again. And often, more often than not, that person will generate only half the force that they can in their power zone. And it's not because they gave us less effort, that was their maximum grip because of that awkward position. So, they lose half of their force. So, if they're doing a task that requires 50 pounds of force when they're in their power zone, that's half of their ability to generate force. So, they're much more efficient. They have to reach because they're in an awkward position and reaching across the bed to make the bed. They're reaching around to remove the ice, that's a maximum grip every time. So, they're exerting everything they've got every time. So, their fatigue factor sets in much quicker.  Get clumsy. They start to trip and fall. They make mistakes. Boom: injury occurs. So that efficiency factor and the ability, it's all about positioning the person, whether they're on a tower or in front of a manufacturing plant, how can we get that product again, fitting the work to the worker into their power zone? And again, another quick example. I worked in an industry that was a wood manufacturer and they would bring in these 50-pound bins, back to that 50-pound number again, and we watched raw product to finished product. And in that process, those 50-pound bins got picked up and set on the floor 14 times. So those are 14 opportunities to create back injury. Plus, if you just did a time study on "I Pick It Up and I Set it Down".  The amount time they spent doing that, lifting up, setting down, they were spending a lot of wasted time, non-productive time that was high risk time. So, we actually got to the point where we created a roller conveyor where this product would just stay at the same working level and those 14 lifts went away. Pete Koch: Yeah. Not to mention the fact that you start doing the math and, you know, 14 times 50, you start thinking about, all right, I'm going to I'm going to go work out today. I'm going to go lift that 50-pound dumbbell or whatever, 14 times like that's a lot of weight -- at work. Laundry, picking up a 50-pound bag of laundry from the floor 10 or 15 times because I'm not putting it in a place where I don't have to lift it from the floor.  Or raw product or completed product, the more times you handle it, like you said, the less efficient it is overall for lean manufacturing. But also, it takes away from the person's capacity throughout the day. Al Brown: Yeah, fatigue. I mean, it's just it's energy.  Housekeeping. You know, the butthead maneuver, if you go back to the butthead maneuver and typically, if you're looking at an average individual and they're bending down and it's an extended reach, they can generate up to a thousand pounds of force inside that disc. Now, in the NIOSH lifting equation, sort of references 770-inch pounds as kind of a safe force that's tolerable by the back, so you’re reaching a thousand pounds of force. So, if I'm a housekeeper and I know we've worked together with a housekeeping company, and they're in condos and they put things on the floor. Every time they needed something; they'd bend over to pick up that thing. And if that was 30 times in the day, that's 30,000 extra inch pounds of force on the back, that if I had just taken that same object and placed it on a table, I've eliminated 30,000 extra inch pounds of force on the back that day. Pete Koch: And that's, you talked about doing a time study.  That same thing, doing a lifting study or a moment study when you're looking at the workplace throughout. Where are those times where you're putting something that's below your power zone or above your power zone? Because if I asked you, "Al, thanks for coming in today, I want you to lift a thousand pounds 30 times for me." You'd look at me and go, "There's no way I'm doing that. I'm going to find a different job" Al Brown: Maybe if I warmed up Pete Koch: Oh, possibly. But we're asking or inadvertently causing that same piece to happen with some of our workers. And no wonder that we get to the end of a long week or a long day or increased productivity or I've lost somebody on the shift for whatever reason, I have more work to do that you get a fatigue-related or repetitive motion style injury or cause to one of the workers. Where if we understood more about the effect of the work on the worker, we might be able to manage some of those risk factors. Al Brown: Yeah, I mean, it's like I said, when we go into industry, that's one of the big things is we help industry sort of identify those. We actually have a little 10 tips for good manufacturing or manual material handling environment. So, you begin to look at those 10 parameters, you know, and you can begin to identify where the where the issue might be. And then that's where you might find your root cause and you back up and go, "OK, what can we do to make a change there?" I mean, that's always what we're trying to do. And we, sawzall and duct tape, we try to, you know, provide a solution that is low tech. Because obviously, people can't just throw hundreds of thousand dollars at a solution. But in the long term, you know, you may suggest robotics, you may suggest automation, you know, vacuum lifts. And those things can be worked in the capital budget over time. But prior to that, you know, we've got to find the low hanging fruit, or we've got to find the thing that we can do now to reduce that exposure. And let me just as a caveat here, or as an outlier, you know people go, "Can you teach them proper lifting?"  And proper lifting is not going to solve bad ergonomics. It is not going to solve bad ergonomics. And sometimes I have to sit down and go, OK, we have to have a conversation because that's just not going to solve it. That's an administrative thing that you can teach. A proper lifting is a skill. Not everybody has it. Soon as you walk away, they're going to go lift it the way they're going to go lift.  And you're better off to engineer out the problem. So, so proper lifting, you know, it looks great on paper. It sounds good when you do the presentation, but in reality, you're better off to address the ergonomics of it. Pete Koch: So, it's one component that addresses the outlier that couldn't be managed by the engineering solution.  Al Brown: Yes. Yes. Pete Koch: Hey, so let's take a quick break and we'll be back in just a moment with the Safety Experts podcast. Pete Koch: Welcome back to the Safety Experts podcast. And today, we're talking with Alan Brown, Director of Ergonomics at MEMIC. And today, we're talking about industrial ergonomics and putting the worker center in the workplace. And so, let's jump back in with more questions. So, prior to the break, we've been talking about how ergonomic risk factors affect the worker. And we talked about repetitive motion and awkward posture, excessive reach and excessive force. So, talk to our listeners about how they might be able to evaluate their work area. So, if they're at a workspace right now, they're listening to this podcast through headphones and they're hanging out at their workspace or they're thinking about their workspace. It could be an assembly station. They could be order picking. They can be in a laundry space. They could be in a kitchen space. What would they look for? And then what might they be able to do to make some adjustments? Al Brown: Sure. Pete, thanks. The very first thing is if you go back to that NIOSH lifting equation and you have folks handling weight beyond 50 pounds, that's a red flag.  That's a good place to start and ask yourself, why are they handling 50 pounds? And is that a two-person lift? And if it's not that you need to reassess, why are we handling, what can we do to change the 50 pounds? Do we bring in smaller bags? You know, we think of like the beer brewing industry, where there are bags of hops that come in that are 50 pounds.  Or flour, that has to be lifted into a vat. And in that particular case, if it's not going to be a two-person job, they actually are using, actually, this was a real-life assessment it was, where actually went to a vacuum lift. So the very first thing is if you're handling things greater than 50 pounds, you have to look at how can I bring that back to more of a 35 pound force or do I have to automate or find a mechanical way to handle that? There are all kinds of mechanical material handling devices out there. I think of barrels, barrel tippers, you know, those kinds of things. Al Brown: The second thing is to add anything you're putting on the ground, stop putting it on the ground if you don't have to put it there. Go back to that wood manufacturing plant I talked about where they would put the 50-pound bin on the ground 14 times. So, don't put anything on the ground that doesn't have to go there. Use the knee as sort of a guideline that anything below the knee, ask yourself, "Why are we doing that and how can we get it above the knee?" And again, early on it can be stacking pallets to bring the load up. It can be something fancy like a pallet lift or you know, that will actually with a rotating top so you can load the pallet and you don't to reach across the pallet and spin it around.  And then nothing above shoulder level. So, you go to that and we throw numbers at it, and again, looking at the average individual, think of 15 inches at the knees, nothing above 60 inches at the shoulder and 35 pounds in between. Al Brown: So, when you start to find outliers in your industry that go beyond those critical demands, you have to ask yourself, is that an essential function of that job? And if it is, how can I change it? And if I can't change that weight, then mechanically I have to figure out how to move that.  In the health care industry, in nursing homes and extended care facilities. Human beings are really starting to get much larger.  We have bariatric units. We have folks that are 400, 500 pounds.  And poor handles, no handles. So, we actually are very focused on using mechanical lifts. Now, now part of the issue there too, is you have to apply the belts and things and that can be those little things that causes back pains. They have to be more aware of those. So, in an industry, you have to look at where you're outside those critical demands. Housekeeping is another challenge. You know, getting folks educated about reaching across the bed because that when you reach across the bed -- here's one of these funny little awkward things -- when you bend forward at the waist and you reach out with your arm to pull the sheet up. Is that above your shoulder or below your shoulder? Pete Koch: As I'm looking at you right now it's above your shoulder. Al Brown: It's above your shoulder, right?  And most folks don't realize that when they're bending over and they're reaching way out, that's actually above shoulder work. And it's actually provides greater force than if I was to stand straight up and reach above my head because I've at least got the game of Jenga lined up. And, you know, the forces are compressing me down through my axial skeleton. And when I reach across the bed, I'm that long extended crane and that's above my shoulders. So very inefficient. So, in that case, we can't change a bed configuration. So, you have to do some education and that becomes a two-person task. So, you'll look at situations like that. So, it depends on the kind of industry you're or you're in.  Just moving product around. Take a look at the flow of your product and going from raw product to finished product. Is it a linear process moving through your industry or is it zigzagging all over the place? And if it's zigzagging all over the place, you're taking a lot of time to move stuff around that you probably don't have to and you're probably moving at multiple times. So how can we actually line up the process to minimize all that extra movement and risk of injury? And certainly, look at, you know, automation and the mechanical lifts that are out there because they've gotten very sophisticated. You might think that a bag of flour can't be vacuum lift. But it can.  You know, it's amazing the stuff that you can do. Big awkward things might not be 50 pounds. I'm thinking of like a window, you know, but it's a big awkward thing that also is gonna create awkward postures to kind of pick it up and put your shoulders or your back in an awkward position or an inefficient position.  So you might use a vacuum left to move that around. So, it depends on the thing you're doing.  So those are some of the when you're walking through your industry or when you're first taking a glance at it. Think about that, 50 pounds. Am I exceeding that? I like 35. So, if you see things above 35 pounds, that's also a red flag for me. Pete Koch: Well I think that's a that's a key point to bring up and even though 51 pounds, is that NIOSH Lifting limit, as we talked about before, there are so many factors that cut into that 50 pounds that don't make it 50 anymore. So, 35 is a much place.  Al Brown: 35's a much more realistic number. Pete Koch: Because I have never seen anybody in a in a non-laboratory, you know, testing standpoint be able to pick up 50 pounds and keep it no more than 10 inches away from them and no more move at no more than 10 inches up and down and not twist with it. You always have to do something else like that. So, yeah, 50 pounds. Great place to start. But let's start at 35 because that's more realistic throughout anything. Al Brown: And if you look at a lot of the research that's been done the past, I've always asked this question of the researchers, "What age were these workers?"  Because oftentimes they're young college students that they, you know, volunteered to do this or get a little extra money for the research project. And I'm thinking that is not our workforce nowadays, particularly Maine. You know, we are the oldest workforce in the nation with an average working age of about 47.8 years old. So, you know, 35 pounds is much more realistic. And again, as we get older, we lift less and are less tolerant of those kinds of forces. Pete Koch: And I think in a lot of the manual jobs and a lot of the jobs that that require someone to do lifting or reaching or those physical tasks, you're gonna find an older workforce regardless of what state you're in. The workforce as aging overall, not just in Maine, but overall. And we're finding that to be more of a challenge. So, yeah, I think just from an efficiency standpoint, it makes sense to think to think about it in that perspective. So again, kind of recapping so the, anything above 35 pounds we're really paying attention to and then location of where that product is. So where is it? And you referenced your knee and your shoulder as being those two pieces.  What were the measurement that you had in there? Al Brown: Well, I said 15 to 60, but that's the average worker, when you look at shoulder height, knee height. But to include all workers always think knee and shoulder, because if I have someone that's five foot one in that job, their knees are gonna be a little bit lower than someone that's 6’2”. And again, that 5'1" to 6'2", you know, that's going to be 90 percent of your workforce is going to fall between those two heights. If you have someone that's not 5'1" and they're less than you have someone greater than 6'2", you may have to make some accommodations simply because they are at the extremes. But you want to try to find, you know knee to shoulder is kind of what you're looking at. And you had mentioned it earlier on, Pete, in the podcast and that is adjustability. So, knee and shoulder, if your workspace has adjustability, I know at one of these large retail distribution center in the Freeport area, a lot of their work benches do height adjust. Pete Koch: And I was thinking in that same example. Al Brown: They walk in and the first thing they do is they adjust it to their stature. Pete Koch: I’ve seen it happen actually; it was actually at one of the checkout stations that they had. There was a little guy who came in. He probably was, I don't know, maybe 5’4”. So pretty small in stature. And then the next person that came in was close to 6'4". So almost a two-foot difference. And when they came in, the first thing that the person did was not go right to work, but they adjusted the workstation to bring it up to. So, each person was working at the same level, but they adjusted the workstation. So great training on that, the company's part to instill it into the heads of their workers that this is where we expect you to work and we're providing you some tools in order to accomplish that and work to accomplish that. Al Brown: And that's a that's a high level. I mean, when you get to adjustability, I mean, that's a company that's really forward thinking. And they've been, oh, 40 years kind of through this process, you know, as long as I've been involved and to current day. So that's been an evolution. So, you might have you know, you don't need to be that fancy, but that's where you would like to get where you could actually have a workspace that is adjustable that fits multiple statured individuals. Pete Koch: And I think if that's your plan, as you begin to look at your workplace like that would be the ultimate thing to be able to adjust the work place or the workstation or the work area to the myriad of different workers that I have. If that's the goal, then you can always make incremental steps towards that goal. But if you don't start with that goal, then chances of you ever getting there, it might take you 40 or 50 years and that's not really functional. And as quickly as we move these days, you need to be more thoughtful as you're working towards those ergonomic solutions towards adjustability. So even though it is advanced, I think if you set that as the goal, then that would be you're more likely to achieve it than if you don't set it from it from the beginning. Al Brown: And I'm going to tell you, one of the greatest resources you have is the worker.  When I go into an industry, I go talk to the person doing the job task and ask them where the low hanging fruit is. What do you see as a solution or what would make this job easier? And they can often give me one through three bullet points that are like this would make this job a lot easier if I could do this. And enlisting that worker is invaluable. In instituting a change, because if I came in and just dictated a change, I might get some folded arms and that closed body posture looking at me going, I don't think so. Pete Koch: That's not going to happen, you don't know my job. Al Brown: If I collaborate and work with the worker, the change comes much easier. And also there's process improvement because they're going to try something, then they're gonna go back and go, you know, if we tweak this and that has been repeated time and time again through industry throughout the US that we've been working with. You go to that valuable resource at the front line. Pete Koch: That's a really great point. That change is difficult for everyone. And when you change something at work that's been constant for a long time, it becomes very challenging regardless of how awkward or uncomfortable it is. So enlisting the person that will have to manage the change, to develop the change and to tweak the change. It helps with that productivity helps them become more comfortable as there is a great way to eliminate some of those change challenges that you're gonna have in the workplace. Fantastic. So, I think we've hit just about all the points that we wanted to make today. There's certainly a myriad of other concepts and discussions that we can have around industrial ergonomics, but I think we'll leave those for a different episode. So, I really do appreciate all those suggestions today about how to make changes in the workplace and industrial ergonomics. And we're going to wrap up today's episode with maybe some final comments from you about industrial ergonomics and how employers might help manage some of their challenges in the workplace. Al Brown: Sure. You know in the news, if you listen to the news nowadays, everything is going to go to robotics. And as often as I've been out in industry, I haven't seen robots take over all the jobs. And the human factor is still there. And as long as the human factor is there and I think it will be there for a very long time, there is always going to be risk and exposure. And we have to know the limits of a human being. Know the limits of human physiology. And if you understand those and you work within those limits, you find that you actually will have a very efficient work environment that can be very productive and that workers can come in happy and go home happy without aches and pains. And a lot of times the pearls of wisdom that you share or enlist in your workplace, they can overlay those in the non-work environment, too. So, it's kind of a win, win, win. And robotics won't take every job. So, we're here to help out that that that human equipment. Pete Koch: I think that's great. So, know the limitations, understand them and how they will affect your workforce is a great piece. And that ties right into the definition of ergonomics and how it fits in within industry. So, thanks Al for joining us today and to all of our listeners out there who have spent the hour with us. If you have any questions for Al or would like to hear more about a particular topic or from a certain person on our podcast, email podcast at MEMIC.com. The podcast is presented by MEMIC, we are a leader in workers compensation insurance and a company committed to the health and safety of all workers. And to learn more about how MEMIC can help your business visit MEMIC.com. Don't forget about any of our upcoming workshops and webinars, and if you do, you can always go to MEMIC.com for a listing of topics and dates. And when you want to hear more from the safety experts, you can find us on iTunes or right here at MEMIC.com. And if you have a smart speaker, you can tell it to play the safety experts podcast and you can pick today's episode or a previous episode if you'd like. You can also enable the safety experts podcast skill on Alexa to receive safety tips and advice from any of our episodes. We really appreciate you listening and encourage you to share this podcast with your friends and co-workers. Let them know where they can find it and they can go right to their favorite podcast player and search for safety experts. Thanks again for tuning into the Safety Experts podcast. And remember, you can always learn more by subscribing to the podcast at MEMIC.com/podcast. Resources/People/Article Mentioned in Podcast MEMIC - https://www.memic.com/ Peter Koch -https://www.memic.com/workplace-safety/safety-consultants/peter-koch Allan Brown - https://www.memic.com/workplace-safety/safety-consultants/allan-brown US Department of Defense - https://www.defense.gov/ NIOSH - https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/index.htm NIOSH Lifting Equation - https://ergo-plus.com/niosh-lifting-equation-single-task/ University of Michigan - https://umich.edu/ Alf Nachemson - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2200702/ Tom Waters - https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog-entry/thomas-r-waters-receives-niosh-lifetime-achievement-award Vern Putz Anderson - http://behavioral.cybernetics.cc/index.php/2-uncategorised/19-vern-putz-anderson Tom Armstrong - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~tja/ta.html Don Chaffin - https://bme.umich.edu/people/don-chaffin/