Safer manual handling: A three step approach
Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) remain one of the most frequent types of work-related injury. Here, Davy Snowdon, founder of Pristine Condition, explains how organisations can buck the trend – reducing manual handling injuries and sustaining those results by addressing key causes of initiative failure
Reducing handling injuries is quite simply about changing people’s habits; exchanging a bad one for a good one,
which itself has three drivers:
• Individuals’ buy-in to the change
• Monitoring take-up of the change
• Management support to maintain the change
The reality is that initiatives fail when any of those three is deficient. When it comes to manual handling training, conventional wisdom overlooks one simple fact – the body doesn’t tell you every time you get it wrong, only when you’ve got it wrong too often – when it’s too late.
Consider that statement in the context of what is probably the most extreme manual handling tasks you’ll come
across – Olympic weightlifting. Injury is a huge fear, yet even when weightlifters fail a lift, they are rarely injured. Why?
Olympic weightlifting has evolved, with athletes striving for anatomical technical perfection, minimising the pressure
they place on their body. Avoiding injury is not primarily about weight, but about technique.
Conversely, I believe conventional manual handling training is too generic, using unrealistic scenarios of lifting empty
cardboard boxes from perfectly flat floors onto precisely positioned, waist-high tables. Your employees’ workplace isn’t like that, so don’t be surprised when they don’t buy into that message.
You need to deliver practical training, using lifting principles that every individual will buy into
because they believe it will reduce their chances of being injured. Those principles need to be easy to follow
and applicable to any handling scenario.
Crucially, training needs to be delivered in an engaging way, so it’s remembered positively and it needs to be sustained.
With manual handling, poor behaviour is rarely challenged, yet walk into many warehouses without high visibility PPE and you’ll quickly be challenged. Why? Because the company has made it abundantly clear what is right and what is wrong. Staff understand the
difference and with that understanding comes the confidence to challenge.
With poor handling techniques, supervisors are less confident about what is right, even if they instinctively
know something is wrong. They may not have the knowledge to correct poor technique, nor the confidence to challenge that
behaviour.
Result? Poor behaviour prevails. So not only do you need to train the workforce, you need to train front line managers to spot and rectify
incorrect technique.
Your lifting principles not only need to be simple, they need to be binary – right or wrong – and you need an auditing mechanism which deals with both.
The trick though is giving the supervisor the skills to deal with either scenario effectively. Get this right and you’ll
see some amazing results because training is now being properly sustained through effective supervisory auditing.
Combine that with an easy mechanism for recording the audit’s findings and you’ve got the beginnings of quite a
sophisticated management tool that shows where more effort can pay dividends, further improving results.
Check those findings with your own observations and take a healthily sceptical view on any that claim 100%
compliance!
Finally, support managers to maintain momentum and deal with unplanned scenarios. There will always be new ways of doing things, new plant and processes, and new equipment, so handling techniques need to adapt to change.
Think about how you’ll address things that aren’t an issue today, but might be tomorrow, how you’ll stay abreast of
latest technological best practice affecting your industry, accident trends and their avoidance, the civil scene and
what’s happening with personal injury claims trends.
Consider how to keep the programme’s momentum going and look for ways to redeliver similar
messages differently, so people remain energised. Refresher training is a given, but think creatively about how it’s going to be done.
Don’t just focus on the emotional negatives of failure. Celebrate the positives, such as
the results which good auditing will undoubtedly deliver when done properly, especially when it’s reinforcing good
behaviours.
Make sure you can evidence that positive progress is happening and then share that positivity with everyone.
But if someone does get injured, make sure you include reference to their anatomical technique in the investigation.
Be prepared to challenge inconsistencies and only ever record facts, not presumptions or opinions.
To conclude, in Pristine Condition’s experience, there are three fundamentals to guaranteeing any training programme’s
success in changing habits. Organisations which consistently satisfy all three see significant reductions in their manual handling risk profile, in their
manual handling accidents and in the total cost to the business from those accidents.
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