How and Why To Measure The Quality of Ergonomic Services Through Employee Experience

Medical technology is improving steadily through advances in medicine which are helping people live longer. This is especially true in countries with a strong drive in ergonomic initiatives. On the other hand, rising costs, aging populations, and economic pressures has many countries shifting focus away from ergonomics. Rather than providing more care, ergonomic systems are alternatively focused on providing better services. This means reducing unnecessary services, increasing efficiencies and focusing on the employees.

The Institute of Medicine defines quality healthcare as care that increases the chance of good health outcomes and reflects the most current professional knowledge. Quality is commonly broken into three areas: effectiveness, safety, and the employee satisfaction. Donabedian’s model, which looks at structure, process, and outcomes, is also often used to evaluate quality of ergonomic services. While many ergonomic services and methods exist, only a few best capture quality from the employee's point of view. This is important because employee's directly experience the services and their insights reveal things that numbers alone often miss. Traditionally, ergonomists measured “employee satisfaction” but satisfaction can be vague and influenced by expectations rather than actual quality of ergonomic services. Over time, this shifted toward measuring “employee experience,” which focuses on what actually happened during the ergonomic assessment.

Employee centered services respects each employee's preferences, needs, and values, while involving them in decisions. Measuring employee preferences is one way to understand quality from their perspective. However, employee experience is a broad concept, experts still debate what questions should be asked and how. Therefore, using UX principles can be key to understanding the ergonomic experience.

User Experience (UX) is a concept used widely in design and technology. It looks at how people interact with products or services, including usability, emotions, and personal value. These same ideas can apply to ergonomic services. Usability refers to how effectively and easily employees can use the ergonomic intranet, modules, or services. This includes clear instructions, understandable explanations, and efficient processes. Affect relates to emotional reactions—how the experience made the employee feel.

Examples include politeness and friendliness of ergonomists. Value represents the deeper meaning employees attach to services such as trust, comfort, and feeling respected. There is a clear imbalance in the current tools focus on practical aspects but overlook how employees feel and what they value. Insights from employee interviews mention to dig deeper. Employees who had recently received an assessment left feedback revealing several problems with existing questionnaires:

    •    Many questions did not fully capture the meaning or nuance employees wanted to express.

    •    Some questions asked about things employees couldn’t realistically judge.

    •    Important emotional and value-based aspects of ergonomics were missing.

Today’s ergonomic programs aim to be more employee-centered, but our evaluation tools haven’t fully caught up. By adding more questions around personal value and by rewriting questions so they better reflect what employees actually know and feel we can create more meaningful, balanced, and accurate assessments of ergonomic program quality.