Turns out that wasn't an old wives' tale. But how well do you carry out her advice today? At the kitchen table, maybe, when you're setting an example in good posture for your own kids. But what about on the job? You know, the place where you invest most of your time and energy? Is your work well matched to your body and physical condition?

If you're a Bayer employee, chances are good that your job is well matched to your physical capabilities, because Bayer is an industry leader in ergonomics, the science of fitting jobs to people.

Ensuring a Quality Work Environment

"Our people are Bayer," said John Polhemus, Bayer Director of Corporate Safety and Industrial Hygiene. "We value every worker as part of the total Bayer team. And for the team to work safely, efficiently and productively we need to have everyone on the job."

Ensuring a quality work environment that enhances individual comfort is an important factor in keeping people on the job at Bayer's 50 sites throughout the United States. In 1993, the best of existing ergonomics practices were combined into a comprehensive Bayer Ergonomics Process which, according to Bayer's Senior Industrial Hygienist Tim Feeley, meets and exceeds the newly issued Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ergonomics rules. By 1998, the company had reduced ergonomic injuries by 70 percent, an accomplishment that earned Bayer recognition from The Conference Board's annual Ron Brown Award program as a best practices initiative.

Improving ergonomics at Bayer is an on-going process that involves structured worker evaluations for office, laboratory and manufacturing environments, and for sales and technical service jobs.

Ergonomic Evaluation

A trained facilitator (one for every 20 or so workstations) conducts office employee evaluations and awareness training that covers posture, seating, workstation design and environmental conditions, including work load and required work pace.

Laboratory and manufacturing ergonomics programs are implemented by on-site teams composed of workers from health and safety, medical, engineering, line supervision and maintenance and hourly workers. The team evaluates a job, identifies potential problem areas and then brainstorms solutions.

And the sales and technical service workforce benefits from Bayer's ergonomic evaluations of everything from the vehicles it buys to determine how easily boxes of literature or product samples or tools can be loaded and unloaded to the quality of the cases used in carrying VCRs for demo tape shows.

"Ergonomics is a quality of work and a quality of life issue," said Polhemus, a safety veteran with 20 years experience in ergonomics. "Making even simple adjustments, like organizing a data entry workstation so that the input document and the computer screen both are at eye-level in front of the worker, makes that worker more comfortable. Comfort increases productivity and quality of work."

Conscientious attention to providing ergonomically sound work environments is a way of life at Bayer, said Polhemus, and the result is an overall productivity increase with some individual cases as high as 30 percent.

Employee Involvement Counts

The Bayer ergonomics approach is to adjust existing jobs and design new jobs to fit the individuals responsible for doing the work. And according to Feeley, the company has the expertise to make necessary adjustments.

"There are hundreds of safety programs at Bayer," said Feeley, "and ergonomics is at the top. Since 1994, we have reduced our ergonomics incidence rate from 0.63 to 0.28. And that's because of employee involvement. They are solving their own problems."

Bayer's successful Ergonomics Process is measurable in three areas: health and safety, quality and work life and operational benefits, including greater efficiency, reduced medical and insurance costs, and improved product quality.

"On average," said Feeley, "we are saving $1 million a year in direct workers compensation costs and as much as $4 million a year if you figure in what we might have lost in productivity and higher cost for training new workers to replace injured workers."

Some Bayer sites have eliminated all ergonomic injuries. But that achievement is only good for today," said Polhemus. "Ergonomics is a dynamic process. If you want to keep the injuries at zero you have to work at it constantly."

Bayer achieved a Total Recordable Incident Rate of 1.15 and an ergonomic incidence rate of just 0.33 in 2000. But at Bayer any injury is one too many.

"This is a total life issue," said Polhemus. "The ergonomic problems we face at work are not just work issues. If you don't lift properly at work, you probably don't lift properly in the garage or laundry room either. If you don't sit straight at your desk, you probably slouch in your recliner watching football games.

"You know, at Bayer our mission is to change the world with great care. We want our people to take what they learn on the job about ergonomics back home. We want to improve the quality of their life there as well."

Bayer, with headquarters in Pittsburgh, is a member of the worldwide Bayer MaterialScience, a $29 billion international life sciences, polymers and specialty chemicals group based in Leverkusen, Germany.