E-News for February 2000
Greetings ALMA Members,
I’d like to pass along a couple of Laboratory Safety issues that have come up at our local lab managers meetings. There seems to be a rise in the incidence of repetitive motion injuries over the past few years. While the relationship between this type of injury and activities in the workplace is more nebulous than many other types of injuries, they still lead to lost time incidents, workman’s compensation claims, and affect the company’s safety statistics. Computer usage by the employee both at home and in the lab contributes to the problem but lab tasks such as emptying sample bottles, washing glassware, or pelletizing samples can also produce these types of injuries. As lab managers, we should be aware of these at risk behaviors and make sure that repetitive tasks are performed in an ergonomically correct manner and that the analyst has the correct equipment to minimize strain—an ounce of prevention…. The increase in repetitive motion injuries may also be related to the growing popularity of longer work schedules such as the twelve-hour shift. Some labs that have adopted these schedules have also implemented job rotation so that the analysts don’t have to perform the same motions for the entire shift since there is some thought that injuries are more likely to occur as the muscles tire.
Safety Incident was reported involving a lab analyst mixing a solution in a graduated cylinder. As the cylinder slipped from his hand and fell into the sink, he tried to catch it and was badly cut by broken glass. While injuries of this type are relatively rare, spills and other incidents with graduated cylinders are more common—the tall narrow design of this equipment makes it inherently unstable. Most labs use some type of guard on these cylinders, some have switched to plastic where possible, and at least one manager has removed them from his lab entirely. After studying how this equipment was used in the lab, he concluded that it was not precise enough for the quantitative analyses and that graduated beakers were good enough for preparing the solutions where the graduated cylinders were used. You might want to review the usage in your lab.
There is an article in the latest issue of Research Technology Management (Vol. 43(1)) entitled “Compensating Todays Technical Professional” that might be of interest. This study by Howard Risher examines “best thinking” in pay practices at 41 major R&D companies. Components of leading-edge compensation programs include broad-banding, competency based pay, recognition bonus awards, success sharing payouts, profit sharing payouts and stock ownership opportunities. Broad-banding assigns several jobs of roughly equal importance to a broad salary range and allows the manager to determine individual salaries based upon prevailing market levels and individual performance. An interesting aspect to this system is the opportunity to promote an individual one or more times without moving them to a different salary band. Competency based pay rewards employees for gaining new skills. It was also mentioned that companies are placing more emphasis on market alignment and are throwing out the traditional “internal equity” considerations. In these programs, bringing in new hires at higher wages than current employees is a perfectly acceptable practice. Cash incentives are growing in popularity as a way of rewarding results. The structure of these incentive programs varies from payouts based on profits to payments for successful completion of important projects. The intent is “line-of-sight” alignment of individual efforts with business goals. The article also mentions an increased emphasis on recognition and reward practices. The author writes:
“If anything, the concept of a job, with defined duties, is somewhat artificial in an R&D setting. In the parlance of the compensation field, the phrase ‘person-based pay system’ refers to pay systems that focus on the individual rather than the job.”
I think these systems also apply to our knowledge workers in the analytical labs.
Many companies have installed or are installing enterprise computer systems such as SAP or PeopleSoft. I am interested in how these systems have impacted your lab operations, both positive and negative. Send me your experiences and I will try to summarize for a future e-mail.
If you have any comments, cost saving suggestions, opinions, etc. let me hear from you .
Wayne