Recently, an interesting task appeared in my functional area – office risk assessment. I want to share the thoughts that came to me during this work.
Certainly, production areas are priority units for risk assessment; there are far more hazardous and harmful factors there, and risks associated with these factors occur more frequently. We understood this, but nevertheless, we also identified a direction for office risk assessment.
You know, in my career, I have rarely encountered companies that were concerned with preserving the health and quality of life of office employees. There are more priority areas for focus, and therefore this category of personnel receives less attention due to acceptable working conditions. In reality, when you look at the diagnoses of office employees, they include cervical osteochondrosis, vision deterioration, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other diseases associated with static and psycho-emotional overload. It is not hard to guess why these diseases are developing on such a massive scale.
In the risk assessment, we followed the approved methodology step by step.
1) Description of processes/operations.
2) Restoration of the basic state.
3) Hazard identification/risk assessment.
4) Development and implementation of risk control measures.
First, we described all operations related to office employees. And, although there are risks common to all employees, they can differ depending on the functional role. For example, the work and rest regime when working on a PC should be organized depending on three types and categories of labor activity. If you work at least 50% of your working time in Group A – that is, reading information from a monitor screen with a preliminary request – that is one type of activity. If in Group B – this is data entry work, i.e., you are typing on a PC – that is the second type of activity. And the third Group C – this is creative work in a dialogue mode with a PC, which includes our trainings, meetings, briefings, and sessions with colleagues – and that is a third story. The point is that different categories of labor activity can systematically affect our health in different ways. The most difficult is Category B – there is a risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, vision loss, and the development of cervical osteochondrosis.
In addition, in the risk assessment, we highlighted processes associated with certain unique duties of different categories of office employees. For example, administrative management employees use regular utility knives in their work when opening correspondence or parcels. The company had already recorded injuries related to utility knives, which increases the probability of recurrence. A control measure for such a risk could be replacing utility knives with safety knives, whose design prevents direct contact with the employees' hands.
Speaking of facility management employees, they also have unique functional duties. They perform a range of tasks related to the assembly and transportation of office furniture. In this work, risks associated with cuts, bruises, splinters, and the physical strain of the labor process can also arise, which need attention.
There are office employees who regularly visit production areas. These include HSE specialists, equipment reliability engineers, and other services inextricably linked to production. We add production-related risks to them; meanwhile, the probability of such risks increases, and the severity of consequences may grow.
Next, in the second stage of the risk assessment process, we did a lot of work to restore the basic state of the office, where all non-conformities were eliminated, from cluttered workstations to faulty equipment. This stage allowed us to restore the basic state in the offices and bring workstations to a single standard, which significantly reduced the probability of ergonomic and other risks.
In the third stage, we moved directly to hazard identification and risk assessment. The goal of this stage is known to us all: to identify, assess, and demonstrate the risk not only of an accident but also of an occupational disease that may manifest many years later.
Already at the first stage of hazard identification and risk assessment, we discovered that despite the employer's efforts to provide employees with everything necessary to reduce ergonomic risks, employees themselves sometimes make mistakes in the safe organization of their workstation.
There are plenty of examples: working with a single laptop whose screen size does not provide comfortable information reading. Or using a laptop without a stand, which forces the employee to strain neck muscles by tilting the head forward. Or conversely, a monitor positioned too high, which forces the worker to tilt their head back and again strain neck muscles.
Or, for example, chair armrests should be raised to the same level as the desk, and those who simply did not know about this faced carpal tunnel syndrome because the upper part of the hand was suspended, and the load on the wrists increased. Often, employees do not take regulated breaks when working at a computer. They work in insufficient lighting. Most often, many of them do not use the recommended eye and hand exercises as a preventive measure. Very often, office employees with a hybrid work format (office/remote) allow the boundaries between work and personal time to blur, which leads to psycho-emotional (professional) burnout.
In the end, after some time working in such a systematic mode, diseases arise that will later be quite difficult to recognize as occupational.
After all obvious and non-obvious risks were assessed and described, we moved on to determining how we would manage these risks. The process of determining risk control measures can be no less exciting than the risk assessment itself if your solutions are non-trivial and do not violate the classic hierarchy of control measures by effectiveness. Let me remind you that the most effective measure is the elimination of the hazard/risk, followed by hazard substitution in the hierarchy, and then descending to engineering controls, administrative measures, and the use of PPE. But if we talk about office employees and another risk control measure related to ergonomics, this is exactly where a non-trivial solution arises: it is necessary to work primarily with the employees' responsibility for their own health and quality of life, with a conscious attitude toward their own safety. And we at Krastsvetmet have already proven that this is possible and effective.
Risk assessment as a whole is an excellent tool for identifying non-obvious risks. Managing such risks is not difficult. And if we subsequently/in the future prevent diseases associated with what seems at first glance to be safe office work and preserve the quality of life of employees, then this difficult but interesting work will definitely pay off with our own preserved health and quality of life. After all, by and large, each of us in the HSE days community is an office employee ourselves.