Worker Education and Behavior Change in Ergonomics

This course examines how worker education, communication, and behavior-change strategies can support effective and sustainable ergonomics. Participants learn why simply providing information or teaching "proper body mechanics" is often insufficient to change workplace behavior and how worker engagement can be used more effectively as part of a broader ergonomic intervention strategy.

Participants examine the role of education within the hierarchy of controls and learn to distinguish problems that can reasonably be influenced through worker behavior from those that require changes to workstation design, equipment, workflow, production systems, or other aspects of the work environment. Emphasis is placed on avoiding the common mistake of using training to compensate for an exposure that should be addressed through engineering or administrative controls.

The course explores practical approaches to ergonomics education, including adult learning principles, task-specific instruction, demonstration, coaching, feedback, and reinforcement. Participants learn to connect education to the worker's actual job and identified exposures rather than relying on generic ergonomics presentations or one-time training.

Worker participation is addressed as an important component of successful ergonomic change. Participants examine strategies for involving workers in identifying barriers, developing solutions, testing proposed changes, and providing feedback on whether interventions are practical within the realities of the job. Attention is also given to the influence of supervisors, peers, organizational expectations, and workplace culture on adoption of ergonomic practices.

Participants learn to consider the factors that influence whether a new behavior or work practice will be adopted and sustained, including perceived value, ease of use, competing production demands, established habits, reinforcement, and consistency of leadership support. Strategies for addressing resistance and improving adoption are explored without placing responsibility for poorly designed work on the individual worker.

The course concludes by examining how to determine whether worker education and behavior-change efforts are actually working. Participants learn to look beyond training completion and evaluate changes in worker knowledge, participation, behavior, use of controls, and workplace practices over time.

Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on using education and behavior change where they are appropriate while continuing to prioritize improvements to the work system itself. The goal is not simply to teach workers how to work differently, but to create the knowledge, engagement, and organizational support necessary for effective ergonomic improvements to be adopted and sustained.

Target Audience:

Physical Therapists, Physical Therapist Assistants, Occupational Therapists, Occupational Therapy Assistants, Athletic Trainers, Occupational Health Nurses, Safety Professionals, Human Resources Professionals, Line Leaders, Supervisors, Safety Team Members, and other licensed rehabilitation professionals involved in work rehabilitation, functional restoration, and return-to-work decision-making.

Instructional Level:

Intermediate

Prerequisites:

Foundational knowledge of workplace injury mechanisms and WMSDs and basic ergonomic principles is recommended. This course builds on prior understanding of ergonomic exposure and control strategies and focuses specifically on worker engagement, education, and sustainable behavior change.

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Explain the role and limitations of worker education and behavior change within a comprehensive ergonomics strategy.
• Distinguish ergonomic concerns that may be appropriately addressed through education or work-practice change from those requiring engineering or administrative controls.
• Apply adult learning and task-specific education principles to develop practical workplace ergonomics training.
• Use coaching, feedback, reinforcement, and worker participation strategies to support adoption of ergonomic practices and controls.
• Identify individual, job, supervisory, and organizational factors that may facilitate or interfere with sustainable behavior change.
• Develop strategies for engaging workers in the development, implementation, and refinement of ergonomic solutions.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of ergonomics education and behavior-change efforts using measures beyond training completion.

Educational Methods:

Didactic instruction, workplace examples, case-based analysis, worker-engagement scenarios, education and coaching exercises, and applied development of ergonomic behavior-change strategies.

Continuing Education Units / Contact Hours:

1.5 hours. Full Attendance Required.

Sponsors:

This program is not sponsored by any commercial entity. No commercial support has influenced course content.

Disclosure Statement:

All faculty and planners have disclosed relevant financial and non-financial relationships. Any potential conflicts of interest have been reviewed and mitigated in accordance with continuing education standards.

Cancellation & Refund Policy:

Refunds are available in accordance with Matheson's cancellation and refund policy. Please refer to our Cancellation Policy for full details.

• What education accomplishes that design cannot: making a risk visible, interim management of an exposure, and engaging the worker in the fix
• The training-as-substitute failure pattern, why it persists, and who bears its cost
• Assessment, design, and worker practice as three legs of ergonomic change, positioned within the hierarchy of controls
• The five-question test for sorting a finding to design, administrative change, education and coaching, or education as interim care
• Four ways a design exposure is misclassified as a behavior problem, and how cross-worker exposure variation, observed or measured by wearables, informs the sorting decision
• Applied activity: Sort a set of ergonomic findings using the five questions and state, for each, what education can carry on its own, alongside a design change, or not at all.

• Adult learning principles as constraints on education: relevance, experience, problem orientation, and immediate application
• Why generic ergonomics presentations fail: the wrong problem, the wrong specificity, and the wrong time
• Building task-specific instruction from a finding: the exposure, the practice that changes it, the reason it matters, demonstration and return demonstration, and a scheduled check-back
• Teaching one or two practices rather than many, and matching education to onboarding, post-change, post-symptom, and see-something-say-something occasions
• Adapting instruction for literacy, language, shift, and production constraints without reducing its specificity
• Applied activity: Build a one-page task-specific instruction sheet from an assessment finding, drawing the practice from what low-exposure workers on the crew already do.

• Approaching an experienced worker in a way that preserves rapport and the worker's standing, and why correction in front of peers ends the coaching relationship
• Selecting the single change most worth coaching, and framing it as an experiment with the worker's own experience as the judge
• Why a new movement pattern feels wrong, how long the awkward phase lasts, and the progression from deliberate practice to pattern to habit with cue anchoring
• Reinforcement through immediate, specific acknowledgment and the worker's own perception of benefit, and external-focus cueing within the boundary the exposure sets
• Wearable and app-based feedback and exoskeletons: the conditions under which they help and their task-specific limits
• Applied activity: Plan and conduct a coaching approach for an experienced worker, selecting one change, setting the experiment, and anchoring the cue to a point in the task cycle.

• Worker participation as a structured method with defined inputs: constraint knowledge, solution ideas, and pilot feedback
• Diagnosing resistance from four common sources and matching the response to the source
• The supervisor as the strongest predictor of adoption, and the specific supervisor behaviors and words that matter
• How production targets, incentives, and informal peer norms compete with instruction, and engaging the worker who sets the norm
• Behavior-based safety: what is well supported, what has discredited it, and how an existing program can be redirected
• Learning emphasis: Distinguishing monitoring that supports workers from monitoring that surveils them through data ownership, aggregation, purpose limitation, and worker involvement in configuration.

• Why training completion is not an outcome measure, and what it does and does not establish
• The six-level measurement ladder: reaction, knowledge, observed behavior, control utilization, exposure, and symptoms and injury
• Five-minute structured behavior observation, and counting control utilization rather than estimating it
• Early symptom reporting as a leading indicator through a periodic discomfort survey and a defined response, and reporting leading indicators to sponsors who ask for lagging ones
• Anticipating decay, scheduling re-checks, distinguishing re-coaching from re-training, and separating education failure from design and organizational failure
• Applied activity: Conduct a structured observation and a utilization count, and prepare a 90-day report that leads with observed behavior and exposure.

• Applied discussion is integrated throughout the course using a running case that follows a grocery distribution center from initial finding to 90-day follow-up across three areas: a palletizing lift assist used a third of the time, a repack task with an emerging wrist complaint, and a withdrawn video-monitoring pilot in receiving. Participants practice sorting findings, building task-specific instruction, coaching an experienced worker, engaging supervisors and norm-setters, and measuring whether a change held.

• Assessment includes chapter knowledge checks and applied scenarios requiring participants to determine where education belongs for a given finding, design task-specific instruction, plan a coaching approach, diagnose resistance and supervisor influence, evaluate monitoring arrangements, and select measures that show whether a behavior change was adopted and sustained.

• The Worker Education and Behavior Change in Ergonomics Course Manual, including the toolkit, course worksheets and case materials, course presentations and supporting instructional resources, and writing materials or an electronic device for education-design and coaching exercises are required. On-demand and live-stream participants will also need reliable internet access and a device capable of accessing the course platform.

• Clinical and workplace reasoning is reinforced by applying motor learning, cueing, and graded practice to the production floor while holding a firm boundary: education runs alongside a fix to the work and never replaces it. Participants determine whether a finding belongs to the worker, the design, or the organization, coach a single change the worker can adopt at rate, and confirm through observation, utilization, and exposure measures whether the change actually held.