Overexertion ranks first among leading causes of work-related injury. What kind of steps can employers take to address such risks before it’s too late? We’ve distilled crucial insights—from scientific research to real-time observations out in the field—into 5 key practices for work injury prevention programs you can use to better protect your employees and improve musculoskeletal health.
1. Screen for conditions
Functional Movement Screening (FMS) is a great way to help employers proactively identify musculoskeletal risks for individuals in the post-hire process, including movement asymmetries and dysfunction. Don’t make the mistake of stopping short at screening—the resulting data is useless without a follow-up plan. Ideally, FMS should be viewed as an opportunity for early intervention. The risks identified in these screenings can be leveraged to provide employees with specific corrective exercises, ensuring these conditions do not accumulate into injury.
2. Implement pre-shift exercise
Although pre-shift stretching remains a popular component of injury prevention programs, there is no conclusive scientific evidence that passive stretching helps prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders.
Modern sports medicine research instead suggests that warming up—much like professional athletes—is the best way to prepare the body for physical activity and decrease injury risk. The physiological benefits of warming up include optimized muscle pliability, joint lubrication, and fatigue reduction, all of which increase the body’s resilience to repetitive stress. Instead of passive stretching, engage your employees in an active warm-up before and after performing job tasks to help them prepare and recover from physical demands of their work. You can read more about the science behind warming up in our free white paper, The Warm-Up Difference.
3. Address at-risk behavior
While bone and joint conditions can impact your employee’s body mechanics, poor body mechanics or ergonomics can also exacerbate musculoskeletal conditions. How can you tell whether or not your employees are using proper body mechanics? By going straight to the source and observing how employees perform their job tasks in real time. After identifying biomechanical risk factors such as repetitive motion or prolonged standing, employers can use these insights to deliver job-specific ergonomic education and individualized coaching efforts.
4. Engaging education
Delivering education that employees can actually use is a powerful tool that companies often underutilize. In order for education to facilitate positive behavioral change, it must be (1) specific to patterns of at-risk behavior or health concerns identified, and (2) designed for employees to easily apply to their daily lives. For example, here’s a piece of best-practice education we utilize to help our clients’ employees lift and lower materials without straining the low back.
5. One-on-one early intervention
No body is the same—that’s why individualized support is an essential part of cultivating a proactive mindset in workplace culture. Athletic trainers are particularly suited to deliver this support, given their high level of expertise on musculoskeletal function, behavioral health, and prevention-first methodologies. As we highlighted in a previous post, facilitating meaningful employee engagement is essential to the success of work injury prevention programs. Coaching on a one-on-one level (combined with being present on-site in the workplace setting) provides a valuable way to tailor support to the needs of individuals, decrease the risk of acute injury, and encourage early intervention of musculoskeletal symptoms.
The workplace setting is full of countless opportunities for prevention. Businesses that are able to identify risk and strategically act upon these opportunities are far more likely to keep injury rates low in the long term.
For over a decade, we’ve helped companies achieve measurable success in injury prevention with an exercise-centered approach. Interested in benchmarking your current program against industry best practices? Contact BIOKINETIX. We’d love to help evolve your injury prevention efforts to more comprehensively address the needs of your company and employees.
