Factors affecting people productivity in workplace

One of the concerned area in a workplace to improve the manpower productivity. Given the situation, automation or use of robotics is limited, how to improve the workplace ergonomics, thereby improving the manpower productivity?.

The following factors contribute to fatigue to the people. By optimizing either one or all of the factors will improve the productivity.

1.Person and his/ her posture
2.Type of work being done 
3.Tool being used by the person to do the work
4.Work Environment in which the work is being done

Simple checklist for identifying ergonomic risk in workplace

As we discussed in Why Ergonomics is not given importance in SME organization? a simple checklist with little awareness to engineers, shop floor operating team will help the team to identify the ergonomic risk in the workplace. This awareness further triggers the improvement in workplace re-engineering by the operating team.

In fact, REBA (Rapid Entire Body Assessment) is a structured approach to identify the ergonomic risks in the workplace, the given below checklist is easy to understand and quick guide to identify the fatigue in the workplace by the operating team as we experienced in more than 10 + SME clients.

Ergonomic Assessment Checklist

1.Awkard Posture

2.Handling loads and moving

3.Repetitive physical activities

4.Environment and unfavorable layouts

Why is Ergonomics application not given much importance in SME organization?

Even though Ergonomics principles and simple risk assessment checklist can be used as a micro productivity tool in shopfloor to improve the productivity, safety aspects, most of the small, medium size organizations are not fully leveraging ergonomics principles and its application in process design.

Some of the misconceptions prevail among manufacturing professionals as we have gathered through our interactions

1.Ergonomics for product design not for process
2.Ergonomics can be applied in large organization
3.Ergonomics study can be done by scholars or external consultants 
4.Difficult to teach to shopfloor people 
5.Ergonomics is more related to Safety, health and environment  and nothing to do with people morale and productivity

In fact, with a simple checklist and little bit awareness on ergonomics principles, shopfloor operators, supervisors, managers can apply and identify the fatigue risk areas and implement simple solutions as we have witnessed in many SME manufacturing organizations.