MAKING THE
SAFETY/FITNESS CONNECTION. Ten ways to
integrate worker fitness into your safety systems.
By Fred Drennan and David Richey,
Ph.D.
With Baby Boomers hitting their fifties, employers are feeling the impact of the aging workforce. According to the Surgeon General, sixty percent of adults are overweight and out of shape—primary risk factors for cumulative trauma disorders to backs, knees, shoulders, and necks. These injuries make up half of all Workers Comp and health care costs. Never has their been a greater need to help workers improve their fitness and adopt healthier lifestyles.
It’s not that employers haven’t tried. Annual health fairs can raise awareness, lunchtime aerobics classes may appeal to some employees. Some employers have invested substantially in professional quality onsite gyms only to get fifteen percent participation. When I tell employers we get 85 to 100 percent participation in our programs, every day, they scratch their heads and ask: “How do you do it”?
Without hesitation, I tell them “You must make the Safety/Fitness connection.” Integrate fitness into your daily safety routine and you fill a gap that has too long been missing from injury prevention programs. At Team Safety, Inc., we firmly believe that basic flexibility, strength, and knowledge about fitness and health are an individual’s most important safety asset. Fit, healthy workers of any age are more productive and less likely to be injured—at work or at home. We help employers install systems to encourage workers to adopt healthier lifestyles, improve fitness, and reduce risk factors for injury. Here are ten things you can do to make the safety/fitness connection and get results.
1. MANAGEMENT MUST SET THE PRIORITY
When you firmly link fitness and safety in your training, your systems, and your culture, you can easily justify the requirement for 100% participation. Senior management must set the priority, provide the training and systems, and support the program—top down.
2. MAKE SUPERVISORS
ACCOUNTABLE
We know that the success or failure of any safety program
is directly related to supervisor involvement. They must understand the role of
fitness in preventing injury and translate the safety/fitness connection to the
workers. A core process of implementing a fitness program into the daily safety
routine must be supervisor training.
They must know how to lead, apply positive reinforcement, give
constructive feedback, set goals, and use team-building techniques. They must also be accountable for maintaining
participation.
3. MAKE IT
EASY—MAKE IT FUN
People like to do things that are fun and make them feel better. Making them do crunches or aerobics could send them out the door! We’ve found that daily stretching is a first step everyone can take. Just ten minutes can immediately relieve tension, stress, and pain! Daily stretching can improve posture and basic strength. Once employees learn they can do something physical and it feels good, they’ll keep doing it. People tell us they look forward to coming to work in the morning since starting the stretch routine. “We used to start work ten or fifteen minutes late every day because of stragglers,” says a supervisor at a public agency using our program. “Now everyone gets to work on time so they won’t miss the stretch routine.” Natural work groups create their own special motivation and add to the fun. One team discovered they spoke eleven languages between them; they had fun learning to count off each stretch in a different one.
4. MEASUREMENT
People like to be measured—how far they’ve walked, how
much weight they’ve lost. You can
measure flexibility using standard equipment and repeat periodically to show
workers how they’ve improved. Employees
tell us they look forward to flexibility testing. (Lack of flexibility is a key risk factor for
musculoskeletal injury.) Tom Berg,
Director of Resource Management at
5. FREQUENT VISITS OF QUALIFIED TRAINERS
It takes professional skill to improve the fitness of a large population. It’s not enough to have a chiropractor or physical therapist demonstrate a few stretches a couple of times a year. If you really want employees to challenge themselves to improve, you must provide a professional they can trust. Qualified trainers with excellent people skills must visit the site often to help supervisor’s train, deliver encouragement, provide constructive feedback, and measure and process results.
6. DELIVER SAFETY
TRAINING DURING THE FITNESS ROUTINE
Make your stretching time a health and safety meeting. In our program, we provide scripted, short safety messages with supervisor leader notes for every day of the year. Topics include biomechanics, ergonomics, risk factors for back and other soft tissue injuries; health topics; and general safety topics such as near miss reporting and housekeeping. Keep attendance and provide quizzes to document the training.
7. MAKE THE PROGRAM RELEVANT TO THE WORK
Photograph workers performing their tasks. When they see the stress they routinely put on their bodies, and learn that flexibility and strength can prevent injury, they quickly make the safety/fitness connection, and you get personal buy-in. We use site photos during program orientations and to train workers on biomechanics to more safely perform the tasks. The fitness program—in our case, stretching—can be designed to counteract the effects of repetitive stress and strain inherent in their work and their activities at home.
8. PUBLIC SCOREKEEPING
Most health clubs use scorekeeping to track attendance and fitness goals. The same applies at work. Individuals like to know how they are doing and how their team members are doing. One of our most popular core processes is posting individual, team, and organization flexibility scores. Each quarter, teams crowd around the bulletin boards to see the results! “It stimulates friendly competition,” says a cubicle-bound participant. “We enjoy getting together at the start of the day and encouraging each other to do our best.”
9. ADD VAREITY
Studies show boredom creates “exercise drop-outs.” People lose interest doing the same thing over and over, like walking or riding an exercise bike. Without variety and challenge, employees will drop out, or simply go through the motions without getting the benefit. People who adopt a lifetime of exercise regularly mix up their routine. As a core process, we provide new stretches every quarter.
Once employees feel comfortable with a daily fitness routine, you can increase the intensity and personalize the program. We add “fitness sticks,” calibrated to coincide with our flexibility measurement software, to improve shoulder and trunk flexibility and help improve postures. Later, we add stretch cords of varying resistance to introduce balanced strength. The important thing is that employees can use the equipment to increase the challenge at their own pace.
10. REWARD RESULTS
Reward employees and supervisors for participation and engagement in the safety process and the fitness program. Integrate fitness participation in your safety recordkeeping system and audit frequently. We’ve developed a comprehensive computer program that tracks the systems we install; however, a number of programs are available that may be adapted for your use. Management should discuss fitness participation and improvement data at staff and employee meetings along with their safety performance measurements.
For more information about Team Safety’s integrated safety and fitness programs, visit their web site at www.teamsafetyinc.com.