Take Home Messages:  

Many organisations keen to improve health and safety adopt a “top-down” approach, with the health and safety manager bearing sole responsibility for developing and implementing policy.

However, this study found that employees have a rich understanding of the complex issues that influence health and safety, including biomechanical and interpersonal risk factors.

In fact, employees’ health and safety insights fit well with the insights of health professionals, with the added bonus that they have hands-on experience of the workplace. This suggests that the trend towards participatory ergonomics – which, unlike the “top-down” approach, is based on collaboration between employers and employees – is well founded.  

Why the research matters: 

It has been recognised that a cooperative relationship between employees and management is more effective in preventing workplace injuries than a “top down” approach. To set up such a relationship it is useful to understand the level of knowledge about ergonomic risks of employees who are on the factory floor. 

What the research involved:  

Researchers from Canada interviewed a series of food service workers, collecting information about their levels of understanding regarding occupational injury and the risks of work. These interviews were then analysed and the information collated and compared.

Summary of research findings:  

The researchers found that the employees had a rich understanding of workplace risks. They understood:

• The basic ergonomics of job risks and physical hazards, including knowledge about:
  •  Weights, lifting heights and posture;
  • Trips and falls;
  • Lacerations; and
  • The influence of repetitive action and degree of force on soreness;
• The importance of social relationships and workplace culture, including:
  • How the level of enforcement of rules and policies influences health and safety behaviour; and
  • How the social atmosphere might encourage a worker to push on through pain or discomfort, without necessarily reporting their problem;
• The ways in which organisational factors, such as the focus of the workplace on health and safety, training initiatives, company image, and management incentives and disincentives might influence outcomes; and
• The importance of good communication between employers and employees. Employees reported that disconnect between management and people on the factory floor had a significant influence on health and safety.

Original research:

Lay versus expert understandings of workplace risk in the food service industry: a multi-dimensional model with implications for participatory ergonomics.
Cann AP, MacEachen E, Vandervoort AA.
Work. 2008;30(3):219-28.

Link to PubMed abstract