Insights – Task Sharing
One of Australia’s leading Golf Clubs had an issue with back injury to ground staff. The club felt that moving the hole on a green was the cause as staff reported the strain after hole movement.
The JointAction Solutions Premium was used to assess a number of work tasks being performed by staff and then feed in additional data such as task duration and repetition to determine the consequential risk score.
The analysis showed that raking bunkers, involving extended back flexion with rotation, combined with a high degree of task repeats in a shift, gave a significantly higher risk score than cutting a new hole and filling the old one.
While hole movement did have some sustained bending, the risk score was low compared to bunker raking.
The results of the analysis showed that by undertaking job sharing, allowing task rotation as a risk control to reduce the number of bunkers raked in a shift from 40 to 20, the risk score was greatly reduced.
By using empirical data rather than “gut feel”, the supervisor was able to demonstrate to management and ground staff that task rotation was going to reduce the risk for all workers. It showed that the decision was not a policy matter without substance.
The post control analysis of the tasks was able to determine the effectiveness of the risk control and therefore justify the expenditure to implement the change.
