Cognitive Ergonomics Enhance Workplace Performance (12/21)

Cognitive Ergonomics Enhance Workplace Performance

Workplace ergonomics is an important issue for companies of all sizes. However, most of the discussion revolves around the physical factors of ergonomics, such as lighting conditions or repetitive-stress disorders. To maximize employee performance, companies should also embrace principles of cognitive ergonomics that enhance workers' thinking, processing and creativity, says Jay Brand, organizational behavior specialist and psychologist at Haworth, Inc.

"Today, work is primarily cognitive work," says Dr. David Woods of the Institute for Ergonomics at Ohio State University.

"Understanding how people do cognitive work is important, then." Cognitive ergonomics, commonly called cognitive engineering, comprises just one of several sub-disciplines within the study of human factors and ergonomics. "Research and applications within this sub-discipline seek to understand how people pay attention, remember, think, reason, make decisions, work together, communicate, and generally interact with their physical and social environments, and design their tasks, tools, artifacts and environments according to these general cognitive tendencies," explains Brand.

"In more colloquial terms, as Don Norman says, 'Things can make us smart, and things can make us dumb'," Woods explains. But, he says, understanding that there is a difference between the two is not enough. "We need to help design new tools that make us smart in different kinds of work settings."

Workers, for example, can only hold about seven thoughts in short-term memory, so they off-load important information onto "cognitive artifacts" such as sticky notes, file folders and stacks of paper. To take advantage of this, companies should provide knowledge workers with spaces that allow them to most effectively display their visual reminders, and "create extensions of their minds," says Brand.

Besides increasing productivity and reducing training times, cognitive ergonomics' unique contribution is to help workers deal with situations that are beyond textbook operations. "When the pace of work is high, when performance is most critical, when disruptions occur, cognitive engineering can help you understand why that situation is difficult, what strategies your best performers have developed, and design new information displays and support mechanisms to help all work more expertly," explains Woods.

Though the specific application of cognitive ergonomics hasn't been around long enough for its particular benefits to be documented over a wide range of products and services, Brand says companies who have systematically incorporated ergonomics factors have experienced any where from a 1-to-3 to a 1-to-50 cost-to-benefit ratio in terms of return on investment.

Brand suggests companies that do not consider cognitive ergonomics are giving up "the opportunity to reach the full potential of their workforce, their work processes and the usability of their products and services. They will most likely also experience significantly more costs as a result of worker mistakes, as well as the legal costs of product liability issues."

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) provides information, materials and documents necessary to design, develop, implement and assess a corporate- or company-wide ergonomics program.