Numbers That CEO's Actually Care About

Want to prove the impact of ergonomics and make your work impossible to ignore? In this episode, we're diving into leading indicators, activity metrics, and lagging metrics—the key numbers that show the real value of your ergonomics program.

You'll hear real-world case studies, cautionary tales, and practical tips on tracking and presenting your findings to management. Plus, I’ll guide you through some powerful reflection questions to help you take action immediately.

🎁 Grab your free Ergonomics Metrics Tracker at https://www.ergonomicshelp.com/blog/numbers—it’s the perfect tool to start documenting your impact today.

🚀 Want to grow your ergonomics business? Join the waitlist for Accelerate: The Business of Ergonomics at www.ergonomicshelp.com/biz and be the first to know when enrollment opens!

Don’t miss this episode—it could change the way you track, measure, and communicate the power of ergonomics forever.

Are you a healthcare professional curious about how office ergonomics assessments could fit into your services? I’ve got you covered with some valuable (and free!) resources at www.ergonomicshelp.com/free-training.

Transcript

0:00

Well, hey there. Welcome to the show. Today we are talking about the metrics that CEOs care about related to ergonomics. Let's do this.

Darcie J's video recording 0:10

Welcome to the Business of Ergonomics podcast. I'm your host, Darcie Jaremey. I'm a board certified professional agonist with over 15 years of experience delivering ergonomics programs to employers of all different types. In this podcast, I share what other healthcare professionals are already doing and being with ergonomics assessments. And how to land those clients that you dream of. Without further ado, let's jump into this episode right now.

0:42

Today we are talking about the ergonomists guide to metrics that matter. If you have ever felt like you're doing amazing work, but businesses and decision makers, they don't quite get it, then you are in the right place. What if I told you that there's a way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that ergonomics is essential to business success? I'll be all in. Today we're breaking down the key metrics that make or break an ergonomics program. Fun fact, this conversation actually started inside the business of ergonomics program. Have you heard of it? Well, I'm opening an enrollment on April 9th, 2025. You can sign up here to get more info to see if this is gonna help you get to the next level in your ergonomics service business. Whether you're doing this hustle, part-time, full-time work, go to ergonomicshelp.com/biz. I wanna tell you about a time I worked for a company a few years back. They were losing literally thousands of dollars every month due to repetitive strain injuries. Employees were missing work, morale was down, and the CFO couldn't justify spending on ergonomics improvements. Does this sound familiar? This organization needed change fast. Enter ergonomics to help. There was an incredibly smart and thoughtful manager who had the foresight to understand the value that ergonomics brings to the table. We started with a really simple approach, nothing fancy. We identified where the risks were. We took consistent effort, we put fixes in, and then we followed up to ensure that the solutions actually worked. Super simple. There's no rocket here. Just consistent effort and follow up, and we started tracking leading indicators. We measured discomfort reports, training, completion rates, and workstation risk levels, and took a narrow focus on daily proactive activities that would hopefully lead to positive outcomes and decreased costs. And now here's the good stuff. Within six months, only six months, proactive changes led to a 30% reduction in reported discomfort and a 45% drop in time off request due to musculoskeletal issues When we presented this data, leadership had no choice but to act. Suddenly that organization was emotionally invested in the ergonomics program. It wasn't just a check in the box. There was a lot that was going on under the surface of this awesome result, and it took consistent effort and equally importantly, messaging. They didn't really need to know what we are doing. They needed to know why we were doing it. And then of course, they needed to see the results once they happened. And we did this over and over again, almost to the point that I almost felt like I was being a broken record. But there's a point to this. So strategy. Have you ever heard that it can take a person hearing a message between seven to 11 times before they take an action? I normally talk about this related to marketing our services and how it takes way more time than you could ever think for a prospect to hear what you're doing. Hear your message related to ergonomics and take a action, whether that's to call you, book a discovery call, sign up for an email list, leave a comment on your LinkedIn post because the environment is so noisy, right? Well, the same is true with internal communications in an organization about ergonomics. And as a value added service providing all this information, the messaging, why we're doing it in a way that business leaders and frontline workers, everyone in an organization, this is something that will help the success of the ergonomics initiative and pay your bills. It's like the extra stuff that gets results. That's a conversation for another time though. I wanna share a phrase that really embodies today's episode. What you don't measure, you can't grow or manage. Mic drop, right? This is so key. This is the power of indicators to understand where an organization's ergonomics process is and where the best place for us to help is too. Just like symptoms that underscore what may be wrong with the human body. There are certain indicators that tell us the stage of the ergonomics process a company is in, and that's important because the stage of ergonomics is directly related to a business's profit. And there are two major phases that an ergonomics process or ergonomics program can be in. They cannot be in both of these. An ergonomics process can be in a proactive stage or a reactive stage. Each of these stages has incredibly different indicators and results. And it boils down to this, if a company has a lot of injuries and high workers' compensation rates, then the company is probably in a reactive phase. So let's stop right there. What proactive data. Are you currently tracking in your ergonomics programs with employers? If none, what's the first metric that you could start tracking today that wouldn't take you very much time? Maybe you could have like a, a spreadsheet and just track it for your employer and you can hand that to them. Something really simple. If you're not sure on what to track, then I'm gonna talk about leading indicators, and I'm gonna give you a really clear step-by-step approach to what you can put in place so you can start tracking this stuff today. Leading indicators are kind of like the crystal ball of ergonomics. These are the metrics that help predict risks before injuries occur. And because it's leading, it's a preventative stream. Have you ever heard of the old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Yeah, that works here. To have strong prevention, there needs to be some factors that are deep at play. First, they have to have a strong safety committee. And this includes regular safety meetings. They have to respond to inspection reports, and they have to have a communication board so that everyone knows what's going on. Usually if they have a certain number of employees, they'll already have this for occupational health and safety or part of their joint occupational health and safety team. And they just need to be sharing what's going on with ergonomics too. It's proactive, it's preventative after all. Second, they have to have proactive initiatives. And like I said, this isn't rocket science, however, it is consistent activity. An example of this is annual surveys for ergonomics, including discomfort surveys and risk assessments. You can't manage what you don't track, right? Well, that's into place here. And then secondly, training supervisors and workers on identifying ergonomics, hazards and avoiding them. Third processes are in place that enable workers and employers to work together to promote safety and health are in the workplace. Fourth. Continuous removing and reducing exposure to potentially harmful conditions. Two are systematically in play. This is not a flavor of the month. They are taking good, hard, consistent action to be reducing and removing any harmful conditions. So with today's episode, I'm actually going to be including a download because I'm getting into some of the nitty gritty details about tracking indicators, and I don't want you to miss anything. Here are some of the key tracking indicators. That are indicative of this proactive or prevention stage, and this is the stuff that I would highly recommend that you start to measure in your ergonomics assessments processes, however you work with your clients, the percentage of workstations that are at low risk, and this should be evaluated using ergonomic assessment tools. The reduction of musculoskeletal disorder risk scores, and what you can do here is compare the initial and the follow-up assessments using your ergonomics assessment tool. Next, the percentage of employees reporting discomfort. This is important because you want to continually be capturing early warning signs through self-reported surveys. Next up is the time to resolve ergonomics concerns. Specifically, how quickly are these issues addressed? Then you're looking at training completion rates. Who's actually absorbing the ergonomics education? Then here's an example of something that can really work, and it's very simple. Workplace stretching program participation, if that's what. That employer is interested in. It's a simple way to measure engagement in preventative strategies. So where do you go from here with an employer? I think it's brilliant to make annual goals based on these metrics. However, these goals have to be made in place of that workplace culture. There needs to be a budget for you with the ergonomics consultant to perform actions because you're not doing this for free. Every ergonomic assessment, every ergonomics activity, costs you time and money. So that needs to be identified. There needs to be a budget for you and a budget for solutions. You can base this off past performance. The way that you can do this is to look at the past performance at the workplace, including the percentage of the entire workplace that was assessed, and these goals should reflect the number of jobs to assess and have some wiggle room just in case. If there's like an injury at work or a new process or a new line or new equipment that's coming in, we want this to be reasonable for what's going on in that workplace and supportive of overall productivity. This is something that is just measured to get better results for that company because we all know that ergonomics and performance go hand in hand and those Cs of the company do need to know that. You can't have good ergonomics without getting awesome performance, and you can't have bad ergonomics and expect to get good performance too. They are tied together hand in hand. So if you could implement one leading indicator metric as part of your ergonomics process today. What would it be outta the things I just shared with you and why? Okay. I want you to think about activity metrics in this way. If leading indicators are the why, then activity metrics are the what? The actual work being done. Things that we're looking at include the number of workstation assessments conducted, the percent of employees trained in ergonomics, the number of identified versus implemented improvements, the percentage of jobs with a follow-up assessment, and the percentage of concerns resolved in an X number of days. Those are five aspects here that are very valuable to what the actual work that you are getting paid to do. So if an organization isn't getting the results that they want, if they're not seeing a reduction in injury costs and they're not seeing an improvement in quality or production, it's probably around this information here. The amount of work that you do as an ergonomics consultant is actually more in the hands of that business. That business decision maker has to have a good grasp of that leadership quality and budget. And by leadership, I'm looking at this from a combination of vision and experience.'cause we have all these plans here and they need to be a reality. So if someone has a lot of excitement and they're moving in this direction, but there's not a depth of experience when it comes to moving this project forward. They may get sidetracked or roadblocked. I've seen this a bunch of times in my career. They have so much excitement when a project starts and then other things happen, and then the ergonomics program just kind of gets lost behind. That's something to know from the get go so that you as an ergonomics consultant can provide consistent messaging and information. To that decision maker. So the program continues. It's in your hands. So on the other hand, we have to keep in mind that we as outside consultants. We lack the organizational vision. So it is not our program. We are merely giving the tools to management to facilitate the results. There needs to be a huge relationship here between the ergonomics program and the decision makers. The workplace must really understand that investing in ergonomics and moving forward with it will result in big wins A logistics company performed 300 ergonomics assessments in a year, but had absolutely zero follow up. Their injury rates did not change. The next year, they implemented a strict follow up process and within six months, injury rates dropped by 27%, and retention improved very much. Ergonomics is a long haul game. It really is. It's simple strategies, good messaging delivered consistently. What are the most important three metrics that you can share with management on a regular basis that will enhance the ergonomics program? The next thing I want to share with you is lagging metrics. These are usually the hard truths when it comes to ergonomics, and these actually might be the reason why an organization connects with you. Let's talk about results here. These are the numbers that leadership cares about most, and these are things that you need to know as an ergonomics professional. And it's only four, not a crazy amount here. First and foremost, injury rates. How many work-related musculoskeletal disorders occur per 100 employees? DART rate. Those are days away, restricted or transferred. It's a key OSHA metric, workers' compensation claims. This is the financial cost of poor ergonomics and the total cost of ergonomic injuries. And this is usually the craziest numbers, and many organizations are only looking at one cost related to ergonomics related injuries, and that's the medical or the related workers' compensation fees. But there is a crazy amount of indirect cost related to ergonomics, and that can be upwards of double the amount. You can look at the OSHA injury calculator just to see this number, and it is way higher than you could ever dream of. And workplaces need to be educated on that because it is affecting their productivity immensely. These are injuries that may lead a company wanting to reach out to you in the first place because it's negatively affecting their bottom line and they don't know what they can do to deal with it. Remember that activity tracker I shared with you? All those things that ergonomics consultant should be working towards as long as consistent effort is completed towards those. Then these lagging numbers will have no choice to improve. However, it does take time. Think about it. An organization could have been down this path to many, many decades, literally decades. So there's a culture of lack of prevention. So it will take time to change that culture from a reactive ergonomics process to more of a proactive one. Sharing this messaging, that consistent effort will work, but you need to have that CEO management decision makers on board with you. Here's an example of how that works. take this manufacturing company, they ignored their ergonomics reports for literally years and this. Led to a$2 million lawsuit after a worker suffered permanent nerve damage. The final loan was bad, but the real cost was losing their best workers to preventable injuries. And this is crazy, y'all. We are talking about those indirect costs. It's not just productivity in the output of what is being completed. It's productivity in management as well. Think of all the hiring and interviewing and training. It can take up to six months for an employee to be up to their operational level. That is wasted time, productivity effort. So this is real. This is affecting businesses and being able to talk in a way that businesses care about and at high level will get you to where you need to be. Part of this is to really get down into your experience as an ergonomics consultant. In your experience, what is one lagging metric that you've seen most companies are already tracking For them to care about ergonomics as much as you do. We do not wanna share the details of what you're doing or what ergonomics risks is. We wanna talk about the high level parts of this process to start off with. Then if they have questions about the risks and the details related to that, of course you can answer that. So let's talk about this. Management doesn't care about data. They care about what the data means. So when you're presenting, I want you to keep it simple. Start with the problem. What risks or inefficiencies exist? Show the trend. Use charts and comparisons over time. Demonstrate return on an investment, how much money is saved from ergonomic interventions, and then make a recommendation. What's the next step? Those are four aspects that will lead to excellent meetings with management. So you could do something as simple as this. This year we reduced injury related absenteeism by 40%, saving the company$300,000. With additional ergonomic equipment, we can reduce that number even further. So knowing what you know about this, how would you pitch an ergonomic initiative to leadership in under 60 seconds? sometimes I feel that we can get lost in the weeds when it comes to this type of stuff. We're experts in ergonomics, but we have to be able to communicate this in a way that business leadership really understands and can get behind. So how would you pitch an ergonomics initiative to leadership in under 60 seconds? This has also been known as an elevator pitch, so what are the high things that you would share to leadership to best explain ergonomics in a way that they actually care about? Think about that now I know that they don't teach this type of thing in school. But that's totally cool for you because you're gonna be able to really nail this and you're gonna be up heads and shoulders more than your competition because you know how to explain ergonomic initiatives in the way that leadership actually cares about. So think about that. Spend some time here, develop your own Look, ergonomics is always going to cost an organization. This is not going to be free, and it's not going to eliminate all costs whatsoever. The organization just needs to decide where they want their money to go. So do they wanna pay for high workers' compensation fees? Do they wanna pay for high insurance rates? Pay for hiring and training, pay for overtime of other workers. Deal with productivity and quality issues. If there's people leaving work, is there low morale in the workers? These are all huge costs that will no doubt affect the company's profitability, their reputation, whether people wanna work there, attracting quality people. It affects all this stuff. Whether or not they can actually see this directly or indirectly, if they run an organization with people, then these costs are happening. Whether or not management is aware, the alternative here is taking proactive steps towards a proactive employer system. Yes, there's going to be a cost for implementing this style of management. However, it's really going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the more reactive approach that I mentioned earlier, and an organization really has to wrap their heads around that. Examples of cost would be assessments completed, trends, analyze, equipment, purchased. One more thing. This is not a light switch between moving from a more reactive approach to a proactive approach. This takes time as ergonomics consultants. There is no way that we can guarantee the timeframe that an organization will start to see big improvements in their numbers. And if this isn't carefully communicated, then an organization can really miss the plot of the entire program because in this transitionary stage, moving from more reactive to proactive, there is going to be a lot more costs for ergonomics than maybe they have ever done in their entire organization. By that, I mean it's probably gonna be way more than zero. LOL, right? this is also about shifting the entire working culture in that company. And the overall ergonomic safety culture too. It takes time to shift the culture at a workplace. Put yourself in the employee's shoes for a minute. For a decade maybe they have been noticing pain slowly increasing, but what are they gonna do about it? Is there an outlet? Is there someone who they can call at work that can get some help? If there's a reactive approach in a company, then probably not. There's no one to talk to unless they can't work anymore. They wouldn't be talking to anybody probably. I would bet. Most workers would never report an injury and they would just say, Hey, I'm not coming into work. I did something to my back on the weekend. So you can imagine the increase of reporting once there is an outlet for a worker to connect to. And there's tons of literature to support this uptick of reporting injuries, equipment, solutions, you can go to PubMed right now and research that when an ergonomics program starts in an organization, there's a huge uptick of reported injuries related to that. And the cost related to equipment and solutions of the initiatives. Once it starts from scratch, and that's why communicating and messaging this with the employer is so huge that employer has to have the vision and the leadership and the experience to see that this is just part of the growing pains. And we have to communicate that too, to get to where they need to be, that this has to happen. But as. Just for a little bit of time while that organization progresses, and if an organization is expecting this, it will not shock them. And over time of consistent activity with their ergonomics program, then they will see the positive results of lowered cost of injuries and an indirect cost related to hiring, retraining, quality, production, and morale. This is so huge, right? It's that in-between the proactive and the reactive system where the ergonomics program can fall off the track and fail. So your job as an ergonomics consultant is to help them, provide them the information, provide them the support, check in, and get them to where they need to be. Leadership may say, Hey, I thought you said that this ergonomics program is going to be saving me money. Then why am I paying more money every month than I was ever paying before? Or they might say, we were fine before. Why did we even need this in the first place? This will probably flare up because it's sort of an emotional rollercoaster or trust issue here, and that's why you understanding that this is gonna come up and giving them those hard numbers, why they're doing this. The indirect costs, the direct costs will be so important. It works. They just need to stick to the plan and you have to stick to the plan too. As an ergonomics expert, if you are helping an organization with this, you don't have to start with the entire company either. Instead, start with one department. Get the process down, get the communication down. Then once you have the process that will work in that particular workplace that is getting the results and reducing complaints of discomfort. And making the work more productive and you can see an improvement of morale, then set your sights on the rest of the organization, but move in slow, consistent action. The really neat thing with this is that other employees will be seeing the results and they're gonna be talking with these people. They're gonna be pumped for you to visit their department in an organization too. They're gonna be ready for you. And guess what? That work culture is already shifting, and you're gonna get hockey stick results. You are gonna be working with momentum of that organization and you are gonna see results that are way faster and buy-in that is way faster than what it originally took in that first department. It will work. It does take time. It does take consistent effort. Organizations have to see the value of this and be ready to invest resources in that in-between period in order to get where they wanna be. Zero injuries, more productivity, more profit. And we all know know that ergonomics isn't just about comfort. Then why are we using less effective metrics to explain our value to CEOs? At the end of the day, ergonomics is about. Preventing injuries, improving productivity, and improving that company's profit margin. I wanna encourage you to start tracking your key metrics today and make ergonomics absolutely impossible to ignore. There is tons of information in today's episode, so I put together a worksheet that can help you get to where you need to be faster and track your own ergonomic success. All you gotta do is go to ergonomics help.com/numbers. That's ergonomics help.com/numbers, or check the description in this episode and you can get started today. Download it and you're gonna get. All these ergonomics program metric trackers that I talked about and you are gonna be off to the races my friend of success. Hope you guys have a great day and an even better week. Until next time, my friends, I'll see you soon.