Abstract
Presently, ergonomics is associated with occupational health and safety and related legislation, and not with business performance. Therefore, companies perceive ergonomics as a “must” and not as a “want”. In order to strengthen the position of ergonomics and ergonomists, we discuss the opportunities to link ergonomics explicitly to company strategies and business goals. Conceptual models are presented and examples are given to illustrate the present and desired situation. It is concluded that ergonomics has a clear potential to contribute to business strategies and goals. In order to utilize this potential, considerable changes must take place within the ergonomics community by moving from a health ergonomics paradigm to a business ergonomics paradigm. <div><br></div><div>Keywords Corporate strategy, human factors, business, management, paradigm shift, future of ergonomics</div>
Highlights
The value of ergonomics is beyond health and safety
In an essay in a management journal, the sociologist Charles Perrow [72] argued that the problem of ergonomics is that there are not many ergonomists working in companies, that they have no control over budgets and people, and that they are seen as protectors of workers, for example not blaming human errors to the workers but to the designers and managers of the systems
In this paper we suggest a new direction for getting ergonomics accepted in the business community to enable the use of its full potential
Summary
This discussion paper emphasizes how --while maintaining health and safety of the consumers and workers-- ergonomics can add value to a company’s business strategy to create competitive products and services For this discussion we employ the broad description of ergonomics, proposed by the International Ergonomics Association (IEA): “Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.”. Hal Hendrick, the former president of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA), wondered “Why it is that organizations with their strong need to obtain employee commitment, reduce expenses, and increase productivity, are not banging down our doors for help” [40] He suggested that there are too many examples of bad ergonomics, that ergonomists –wronglypresume that others are convinced of the importance of ergonomics, and that the benefits of ergonomics are not well documented. Among other things, that people think that ergonomics is to design chairs, ergonomics is common sense, and that organizations first design the technical system and consider ergonomics
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