Applied Behavioral Analysis - The Ergonomic Injury Firewall

Before we briefly delve into this two part topic of Applied Behavioral Analysis and Positive Reinforcement, we highly recommend an article in the Harvard Business Review from last year which applies to the second half of this article.  You can read it here.

Part One: Where is this firewall and how can I use it?

Let's clinically bring the question of active desktop reinforcement closer to home and explore it through a brief analogous discussion. 

Hypothetically, you're about to buy a car and you have a loved one who will use it often.  You plan to have your loved one watch a training video about wearing seat belts because, after all, it's proven to be among the top risk factors for automobile-related injury.

You have two choices of cars at this point to illustrate this example:

  1. Purchase the car without an active seatbelt reminder indicator.

  2. Purchase the car with an active seatbelt reminder indicator.
 

* An active seatbelt reminder system employs a point-of-use    visual and/or audio cue for people travelling in cars, reminding    them to use their seatbelts.

Which car would you purchase?

Thanks to the well-understood science of Applied Behavioral Analysis, you will not be able to find a car to purchase today or even within the last 10 years that doesn't have an active seatbelt reminder indicator installed because they are required standard equipment, for good reason.

Prior to the active seatbelt reminder systems, people were just told in classroom driver training and online courses to buckle up their seatbelts.

The answer of which car to purchase is obvious because human beings cannot learn and adopt a new long-term physical behavior modification just from watching a training video or otherwise just being told to do something.  Instead, we only learn to attain such behaviors through repetitive positive reinforcement often with the aid of select simple tools.
 

Music students and practitioners will easily recognize this well-known rhythmic behavior conditioning tool.  The Metronome has been successfully used and found effective since 1815.

Let's return our focus to posture, pacing and computer users. 

For 40 years, Ergonomists and Human Factors experts studied computer related injuries and knowledge-worker productivity. The two major risk areas have been identified – pacing and posture.

We need to take a step back from the trees here to fully appreciate the forest where eventually, U.S. states, countries and the EU have published regulations and guidelines on computer pacing and posture. 

For example, California's Ergonomics Regulations, covering computer use, states: “The employer shall consider engineering controls, such as work station redesign, adjustable fixtures or tool redesign, and administrative controls, such as job rotation, work pacing or work breaks.”

Eventually, equipment manufacturers glued remarkably discreet and unobtrusive warning labels onto their products, and warn users on posture and to take microbreaks in their manuals.  Why?

What is among the top recommendations, based on widespread knowledge?  “Take frequent short breaks: stand up, carefully stretch, or walk around.”

Fortunately, everyone including even children can easily learn better posture and to take brief microbreaks while using the computer, if they have the proper tool.

You have a choice today as you're reading this. You can believe that the world might be wrong and try to duplicate for yourself all of the experts' research, studies and collective peer-reviewed conclusions - OR you can smartly leverage their good work.

The next logical question now comes to mind.  If it's common, data-supported and well-established knowledge that posture and pacing are major factors in reducing fatigue, discomfort and increasing productivity, then how do you effectively employ them and finally realize their value?

A logical new question is raised.  Is it enough to tell someone to sit up and take breaks in a training video?  What about making them watch it 10 times?  Applied Behavioral Science confirms that you still will not evoke a sustainable long term rhythmic behavior modification from those earnest efforts.

 

Applied Behavioral Analysis and Positive Reinforcement

Applied Behavioral Analysis is a 100-year-old science that involves using well-established modern behavioral learning theory to modify behaviors. 

Reinforcement is the most important principle of behavior and a key element of most behavior change programs.  It is the process by which behavior is strengthened, if a behavior is followed closely in time by a stimulus and this results in an increase in the future frequency of that behavior. The addition of a stimulus following an event that serves as a reinforcer is termed positive reinforcement.

ErgoSuite Enterprise has been very carefully designed specifically with these critical facts in mind.

Practicing good posture and taking microbreaks are Desired Operant Behaviors 

An Operant Behavior is one which is selected for its consequences.  It's well-established that the successful conditioning of operant behavior is the direct result of positive reinforcement or punishment. 
 

Behavior modification driven by punishment is not the way of successful organizations, at least in this century.

Since we're not seeking to increase employee stress through punishment, we can successfully accomplish our objectives with positive reinforcement.  This is commonly known as Operant Conditioning.

Decades of research has clearly established that desirable behaviors such as using neutral postures and microbreaking are only learned through repetitive positive reinforcement.
 

» Continue to part two of this article...