What’s Wrong with an “Aging Workforce”?

Aging workforce” is a term often heard throughout corporate America. Most of us have read how, over the next decade, the 45-and-older crowd will grow to an unprecedented percentage of the working population. This reality became sparkling clear to me in a recent discussion with a client about employee tenure.

In our efforts to assist with controlling workers’ comp costs, we know high turnover makes it more difficult to perpetuate an injury prevention culture. Moreover, the statistics tell us that employees with less than one year experience are more likely to sustain injuries than the average worker.

This well-known information, along with a host of other reasons, makes lowering turnover a common goal for all organizations. At least I thought it was until a few weeks ago. For the first time, during two different interviews with two different organizations, I was told, amazingly, that the problem with turnover was there was too little of it!

Here we have companies that are managed so well that employees don’t want to leave. That would seem to be a good thing; but the concern of these companies was that employees were aging and becoming more prone to injury. They performed the same or similar tasks for years and were beginning to “break down” more often. Unfortunately, the production benefits of experienced employees were being outweighed by the costs of work-related injuries.

I was being told that these companies were being “hurt”–not by workers’ comp fraud, where lazy employees feign work-related injuries, but by good employees who had worked for these companies 10, 20, even 30 years. These companies were trying to figure out how to “early retire” them or somehow make them go away.

Coming from the school of having one’s cake and eating it too, how can this dilemma be solved? How can we enjoy the production and morale benefits of long-term employees while lowering workers’ comp costs?

What if there was a way to teach people, no matter what age, how to manage their musculoskeletal health on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year basis? How valuable would it be to employees, their families, employers to know how to prevent physical pain and to know how to relieve incurred physical discomfort, how to prevent or forestall the accumulation of physical stress that turns the “aged” into potential liabilities?

These companies had employees who for years had been making widgets and lifting things, but doing so incorrectly. A lack of basic body management skills caused inadvertent, frequent physical stresses that over time contributed to fatigue, discomfort, and for the unfortunate, pain and injury.

Despite what you may read or hear, cumulative trauma that contributes to life-altering injuries is entirely controllable. As our employees age, they do not have to be victims of worn-down bodies. Being 50 today is not what it was a generation ago.

The 50-ish generation is still a vital group, amazingly receptive to learning techniques that reduce pain and discomfort and highly motivated to live without pain.

Experienced employees for many companies are a huge asset. The optimum solution is to give them the means to stay healthy so they can remain contributors to the organization versus being seen as a liability.

Cumulative Trauma Disorders
The physical stress caused by long-term sustained postures or repetitive activities can be mitigated by simply knowing how to change positions, sometimes very subtly, to better share the muscle and joint workload, and knowing how to perform job tasks in ways that are more friendly to the body.

There are also specific work stretches called “reverse posture” that can provide tremendous relief to overused muscles.

Work stretches is a term we use instead of “stretching break” because most stretches that we teach are done while working. Part of knowing how to manage your own well-being is knowing how to quickly relieve tension when experiencing it.

An example of a reverse posture work stretch comes from our experience with a large airline, where flight attendants were experiencing shoulder and mid-back tension and other disorders. Part of our solution for the mid-back discomfort was created after observing:

After learning more optimal techniques for the above that eliminated reaching or modified it, flight attendants learned how to relieve tired back muscles by doing a chest extension, which in effect was a reverse posture stretch. By placing their arms behind them and stretching in this position it precisely addresses the muscles engaged while reaching.

What is better: flight attendants on the job for 20 years with 20 years of physical stress packed into their muscles? Or flight attendants on the job for 20 years who know how to prevent physical trauma or relieve it as it is experienced? What a difference this type of knowledge can make in work-related injuries and quality of life issues.

Each task they performed was evaluated, better or different techniques were taught, and task specific stretches for those tasks were given to put the flight attendant in control of how they felt and that could be applied to off-work activities as well. The result was 63 percent reduction in back and neck injuries.

The beauty of this practical approach was how it was trained. Modules that required repetitive drills of these more optimal techniques created an”enlightened” stage where flight attendants discovered the value of applying these techniques. Because body mechanics and posture cannot be “forced,” employee buy-in is crucial. Employees must realize that discomfort and pain is not just the result of aging, but arises from a lack of education of what causes our bodies to accumulate physical stress in our necks, shoulders, backs and wrists, and how to prevent and alleviate that stress.

This training methodology has been applied to countless job descriptions in the private and public sector with similar results; employees enlightened and motivated to apply proper body management techniques at work and at home.

An aging workplace does not have to be a problem. We all remember what it felt like to be without pain and discomfort. We can’t turn bck the clock, but we can help people to lead healthier and more productive lives.

Dennis Downing is CEO and founder of Future Industrial Technologies, Inc., a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based workers’ compensation consulting firm (www.backsafe.com).