Health issues go beyond ergonomics
The revolutionary changes occurring in the modern workplace carry significant implications for occupational health professionals — implications that so far have gone relatively unnoticed. That’s one of the take-home messages of a new publication from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), titled The Changing Organization of Work and the Safety and Health of Working People.
"Changes have far outpaced our understanding of their implications for work/life quality and safety and health on the job," writes the NIOSH team.
This gap has been identified as one of 21 priority areas for research under the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA), an effort by NIOSH and its partners to target and coordinate occupational safety and health research over the next decade. NORA includes over 500 individuals and organizations outside of NIOSH. NORA’s agenda, as discussed in the publication, targets four main areas of research and development:
• Implementing data-collection efforts to better understand worker exposure to organizational risk factors for illness and injury and how these exposures may be changing. This includes issues such as the demands of work and new production technologies.
• The safety and health effects of prominent trends in the organization of work that have arisen in recent years. This includes strategies such as process re-engineering, organizational restructuring, and flexible staffing.
• Organizational practices and policies that may protect worker safety and health. This includes factors that influence the ability of firms to implement interventions that can help protect worker health and safety.
• A stronger public health commitment to this field of study. "This is mainly a research document," notes Steven Sauter, PhD, chief of the Organizational Science and Human Factors Branch at NIOSH and the project’s team leader. "Each section talks about the concerns the research community has for the way work is changing."
Messages for managers
Nevertheless, says Sauter, the identification of these key issues carries significant implications for occupation health professionals and managers. "Safety and health managers historically have been concerned about things like hygiene and ergonomics, and they may not have given as much attention as they could to the way work is structured," Sauter argues. "When they think about hazards in the workplace, they need to have a world view that’s broad enough to think about how work is organized — the hours of work, the amount of control workers have on their jobs, their relationships with their supervisors and how all of these things are affected by the way work is structured."
Traditional mass-production work processes, notes Sauter, were — and are — extraordinarily repetitive, with employees having very little say in what they do on the job. "But high-performance systems and others that have arisen as a reaction to this model do allow more latitude and control."
Such changes can be good news for employee health, but you’ve got to examine them closely, he warns. "They certainly can lower stress [by allowing employees more control], and it’s one of the things we addressed," he notes. "So we need to make sure that when these systems are implemented they really do afford more control."
Are they really teams?
It’s clear, "even to a layman," says Sauter, that when companies reconfigure their work force into a teamwork structure, it’s extremely popular with employees. Appearances, however, can be deceptive. "Are they really teams?" he asks. "Is it a system wherein workers actually do have voice, or is it really a process that results just from eliminating middle management, in which case autonomy may be lost and workers actually may have a lot more to do?"
In that case, of course, such a structure can be even more stressful for employees, he says, which underscores the need for occupational health professionals to pay close attention to the organizational aspects of work.
"If someone comes in complaining of a [medical] problem, you need to be thinking not just about chemical, physiological, and biological hazards, but about how many hours the employee works, what their interpersonal relationships at work are like, what the nature of the organizational climate is, and what the levels of satisfaction and stress are," says Sauter. "That’s one main message of this report."
The other key aspect for occupational health professionals to be keenly aware of is that with work processes having changed dramatically, organizational exposures have likewise shifted. The term organizational exposures covers a broad range of topics, but one example might be the high level of turnover in the modern organization. "With a larger number of contingent workers and/or new workers that result, occupational health managers need to be aware that some workers may not have the level of experience they should. They may have a high work overload, or they may not have received the safety training they should have," says Sauter, noting that any or all of these could threaten the health and safety of many workers.
[To receive a copy of The Changing Organization of Work and the Safety and Health of Working People, or to obtain more information about related subjects, contact: NIOSH — Publications Dissemination, 4676 Columbia Parkway, Cincinnati, OH 45226-1998. Telephone: (800) 356-4674. Fax: (513) 533-8573. E-mail: [email protected]. Web site: www.cdc.gov/niosh. Steven Sauter may be reached at (513) 533-8157.]
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