Ergonomics Guidelines

Ergonomics for occupational health practice At the workplace, ergonomics is applied to the design of work equipment and tasks and to work organisation. It is often referred to as occupational ergonomics as it is an important part of occupational health and safety. As such, it aims to promote health, efficiency and well-being in employees by designing for safe, satisfying and productive work. Ergonomics can play an important role in occupational health and safety management where the primary aim is to reduce risks of injury or disease while enhancing the quality of working life. Good ergonomics in the workplace can improve productivity and morale of workers and decrease injuries, sick leave, staff turnover and absenteeism. In occupational ergonomics it is necessary to examine not only the physical design aspects of work or the ‘hardware’, but also areas such as work organisation and task design, job content and control over workload, support and training. The social and managerial environment is important. Usually these aspects require ergonomics to be integrated into the broader work systems. Therefore to determine if an optimum solution has been achieved, the people who perform the work (the ‘who’), the nature of the tasks (the ‘what’) and the context in which they are done (the ‘where’, ‘when’ and the ‘how’) need to be considered. This integrated approach in applying ergonomics will be beneficial for improving occupational health practice in IDCs.