Things you need to know before hiring
an ergonomics consultant

It is now becoming common for companies to retain a professional ergonomist to support an effective workplace ergonomics.  The following provides an orientation to maximize the advantages of involving an ergonomics consultant:

• Ergonomists have technical information that can help them effectively train your team in the skills of problem solving for your own environment.

• An ergonomics consultant may have seen operations similar to your own and may know good, practical solutions that fit your situation.

• An ergonomics consultant is a neutral party outside your own organizational politics, which provides an ability to say things that might otherwise be awkward for a staff member to say.  Furthermore, many decision makers appreciate having an outside sounding board — someone they can use to perform reality checks on ideas and plans.

• An ergonomics consultant may be skilled in facilitating brainstorming sessions and may have polished training programs.

With all the good that an ergonomics consultant can do for your company, there are a few potential shortcomings you should be aware of when hiring such a consultant.  First, despite their technical skills and academic training, he or she may not have experience in practical problem solving or may have no particular exper­tise in program development.   Second, you will need to find someone who has successfully solved a problem on the workplace floor and is not just teaching anatomy classes.  I can guide you to the consultant you need if I’m not available myself.

Getting the most from a consultant

There are a number of steps you can take to help make sure you get the most from a consultant.  The following is a hierarchy of consulting roles, which can help you and the consultant define and agree to the same expectations of the relationship.  

Hierarchy of Consulting

Many employers and consultants alike view the consulting task as the bottom rung (or two) in this hierarchy.  But in my view, you should expect a lot more from a consultant than this.

If a consultant succeeds in getting people to think about site operations, the consultant usually has accomplished a great deal.  As one plant manager once said to me, “Let me get this straight.  You’re a consultant who doesn’t try to tell us what to do, but instead you try to get us to think?”  I thought that was a superb way to regard the consultant’s role and how he or she sees himself in helping clients.

In general, the best results happen when the ergo­nomics consultant combines training with problem solving.  That way you get the best of both worlds: the consult­ant’s ideas and comments, plus people at the site are better able to solve problems themselves in the future.  More impor­tantly, the quality of ideas for improvements goes up when there’s interaction between the consultant and site people; then it’s not just the consultant making suggestions in the dark without knowing exactly how things are done.

Define the scope of work

It’s helpful to define the specific actions or outcomes of the consulting project, for example:

• Provide a 3-day training session for TeamErgo with the ob­jective of empowering the team to conduct task evaluations.

• Conduct four separate 2-hour sessions for supervisors on all shifts to explain the program and obtain their support.

• Meet with employees in the pilot department for 45 minutes.

• Conduct an analysis of OSHA 300 records and provide a short report of results in a PowerPoint format.

You may need to meet with the consultant, provide a site tour and discuss a range of options before being able to define the exact scope of work to be done.

Temporary help

Another common way to involve an ergonomics consultant is as a tempo­rary staff member.  The ergonomist, in this case, serves as an in-house staff member, either full time for a few months or part time on a more-or-less permanent basis.

In either case, it's important to develop a process that involves your permanent staff. Wouldn't you agree that your program shouldn't stop the minute the consultant leaves the door?