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Monthly Archives

May 2011

May 01
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DO I NEED TO MAKE AN ACCIDENT REPORT?

By Personal Perspective

The first few moments following an auto accident can be an extremely confusing, emotional, and frightening time. As such, it can be difficult to know what accidents need to be reported and what your insurance might require.

There are some types of accidents that will always need a response from one of the local law enforcement departments, such as Highway Patrol, Police, or Sheriff. Each law enforcement department will have a jurisdiction, meaning that which department responds and takes the report will depend on where the accident occurred. For example, an accident within the city limits will most always be handled by the Police. Regardless of the responding department, you should always make a report when an auto accident involves elements such as an injured person, severe damage to any vehicle, and/or a driver flees the scene of the accident.

Your insurance company might also require you to stay on the scene and report the accident, even in cases where the other driver flees the scene of the accident. Some insurers will accept a counter report. A counter report may be provided by the responding officer for you to fill out, or you might need to go to the nearest station to complete the form off scene. Counter reports are fairly commonplace in larger jurisdictions when the responding officer sees that the vehicles involved are still in working order and no one is injured. In any event, just make sure to remember to get a copy of the counter report for your insurance carrier.

Even if the accident doesn’t involve one of the above elements, there are certain situations where it can be very helpful to have a law enforcement response and accident report. For example, the other driver might admit blame and offer you cash for your damages, but refuse to give you his/her insurance information or contact information. Even if the other driver does offer you his personal contact information in such a situation, you still have no way of knowing if the information being provided is factual. Another example would be you forgetting to collect all the important information and crucial details of the accident because you’re stressed or confused from the accident.

Making a police report can be very helpful in any of these situations since it will involve the law enforcement officer collecting/verifying the driver’s name, address, phone number, car tag, insurance information, accident details, injury details, and so forth. Basically, most any detail that would be needed in court or by the insurance adjuster will be documented in the police report.

Lastly, even though a police report will be necessary for many accidents, you should still always try to remember to write down all the information yourself. Depending on the jurisdiction, it can often take weeks to months for the insurance adjuster to request and obtain a copy of the accident report. On the other hand, the adjuster can initiate the investigation immediately when you’re able to provide the insurance information on the other driver(s).

May 01
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INSURE YOUR BOAT IN AND OUT OF THE WATER

By Personal Perspective

Millions of Americans take to the water each year during boating season, traveling the coastlines, rivers, lakes and canals. The watercraft range from simple rowboats to jet skis to small motorboats to luxury yachts. Boat owners spend significant amounts of money buying and maintaining their boats. The need for insurance protection when the boat is on the water is obvious, but many boat owners question the need for it during the off-season. However, insurance is just as important when the boat is in storage as when the owner is using it. A typical Boat insurance policy provides a package of coverages, including:

  • Damage to the boat, motor, and trailer
  • Damage to portable property used in the maintenance and operation of the boat, including things like anchors, life jackets, oars, tools, skis and surfboards, lights, and fire extinguishers
  • Damage to other types of property, including sports equipment, clothing, and other personal effects
  • Damage to equipment on shore, such as boat covers
  • The cost of recovering a sunk or stranded boat
  • The cost of emergency service and towing
  • Damage to non-owned or substitute boats
  • Loss of fishing tackle
  • Liability coverage for injuries or damages for which the boat owner is legally responsible
  • Coverage for injuries the boat owner or others on the boat suffer in an accident with an uninsured watercraft

A boat owner will need these coverages if their boat gets into a collision with another boat, or if thieves steal scuba gear from it, or if fire damages the motor. However, losses are still possible while the boat is out of the water. Progressive Insurance reports that nearly two out of every 10 boat claims it receives from northern states occur between Labor Day and Memorial Day, when most owners are not using their boats much. Some examples of losses that could occur:

  • The building which houses the boat during the winter burns to the ground.
  • Vandals damage the boat in the middle of the night while it’s in the owner’s driveway.
  • A neighbor’s child, playing in the owner’s yard, runs into the boat stored there and injures his head.
  • Someone steals the boat and its trailer from the yard at a repair shop.
  • While the boat is stored in the yard, heavy snow melt causes a flash flood that damages the boat’s interior, including the mechanical system and the radio.

Some insurance companies offer “disappearing deductibles,” where the deductibles for collision and damage losses from other causes decrease by a certain amount for every claim-free year. Those companies will grant this benefit only to boat owners who keep their insurance continuously in force with them.

One of our professional insurance agents can provide advice on the types and amounts of coverage a boat owner needs. We can also recommend insurance companies that have expertise in boating, good claims-paying practices, and reasonable prices. Insuring a boat all year round can be expensive, but compared to the cost of a large uninsured loss, it may well be worth the cost.

May 01
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INSURANCE PITFALLS OF COMMERCIAL OFFICE LEASING

By Business Protection Bulletin

Business owners who lease property for their businesses must be aware that every lease is unique. Any lease you sign can affect your insurance needs drastically. The best suggestion is to have the lease carefully reviewed by your legal representative and insurance broker before signing on the dotted line.

Insurance Considerations and Commercial Property Leases

Key insurance factors to consider include:

  • Obligations and rights of tenants and lessors regarding disputes will vary from state to state.
  • Confirm that the person signing on behalf of the lessor has the authority to sign the lease. Otherwise, the lease could be void should the owner suddenly sell the property.
  • Ensure that the premises will conform fully to required building codes or any other statutory requirements, and that the lessor will absorb all costs to make it so. The same should also apply to any equipment or machinery already contained within the premises which is to be used by the tenant under the terms of the lease. The costs of any required repairs or alterations should also apply to contaminated property such as the removal of asbestos.
  • Incorporate an ‘all risk’ property insurance policy for the full replacement value of the tenant’s equipment, inventory, fixtures, performed alterations, belongings and supplies in the event of a loss.
  • Obtain an ‘all risk’ installation floater for any repairs or alterations that have been agreed upon between the lessor and the tenant.
  • Consider purchasing an (ISO) Insurance Services Office Endorsed Commercial General Liability coverage or Comprehensive General Liability policy which should contain Broad Form Contractual Liability coverage, Fire Legal Liability coverage, and Premises Medical Payments coverage.
  • Purchase Business Interruption insurance to cover all required expenses, including rental costs and fixed costs which might result due to the destruction or damage of the lessor’s property, for at least nine months.
  • Include additional insureds such as employees, the lessor and their agents as your insurance coverage applies to personal and bodily injury.
  • Include coverage for plate glass, earthquake and water damage. Coverage should also include fire and vandalism.

Insurance requirements as they relate to leasing business property can be complicated. This is true especially as your insurance needs relate to the agreed upon terms of the lease itself. Your rights and obligations pertaining to a lease should be reviewed and negotiated by someone qualified, just as your business insurance needs are best reviewed with the assistance of one of our insurance brokers.

May 01
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PREPARING FOR YOUR WORKERS’ COMPENSATION PREMIUM AUDIT CAN SAVE YOU MONEY

By Business Protection Bulletin

When your insurance company issued your Workers Compensation policy, you paid an estimated premium for the term of the policy. This rate was based on the nature of your business and your estimated payroll. However, once your policy expires, the insurance company conducts a premium audit to gather data about your actual costs for the applicable policy term. If there is any shortfall, you are responsible for the difference between the original estimate and actual premium.

Naturally, you want to keep the difference between the estimated and actual rate as low as possible. Consider the following list of tips:

  • Have all necessary records available for the auditor.
  • Break down your payroll by classification code so that the auditor doesn’t have to classify any unexplained payroll. Leaving the decision up to the auditor could result in having the payroll placed in the highest classification.
  • Separate overtime wages from regular wages. This allows the auditor to discount the overtime wages back to regular wages.
  • Exclude tips, severance pay, meal and travel advances and bonuses paid for inventions, because none of these are included in Workers Compensation premium calculations.
  • Divide uninsured subcontractor billings into material and labor costs since you are only required to pay premiums for labor. If you don’t have an actual split, figure on 50% for each. One important exception to this is for heavy equipment operators who are employed as subcontractors. In this case, use a third of their total billings as reportable labor costs.
  • Don’t include short- or long-term disability payments in the data given to the auditor because these are excluded from premium calculations.
  • Be sure to cap all covered officers’ payroll at the maximum for your state.
  • Exclude wages paid to employees who are on active military duty because their wages aren’t included in premium calculations.
  • Present the auditor with all Certificates of Insurance for covered subcontractors so you aren’t charged for them.
  • Classify all employees in the lower-rated payroll classifications if you aren’t sure about where they should be classified. However, you should never deliberately misclassify an employee.
  • Be sure you make the auditor aware of all employees who do only clerical work and are physically located away from the shop floor. These employees qualify to be classified in the lower rated clerical codes. If your clerical staff isn’t physically separate from the shop, you should consider changing their work location.
May 01
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PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS BY PREVENTING EMPLOYMENT BIAS CLAIMS

By Business Protection Bulletin

Norma is an assistant manager at a video store. After feeling very sick for a couple of days, she goes to the doctor and is diagnosed with strep throat. Since her employer provides sick time benefits, she calls the store manager and tells him she cannot work that day. He dismisses her illness as “just a sore throat” and orders her to report for work. She complies, but the strep infection takes most of a week to go away because she could not rest. On the third day, she calls in sick again, despite the manager’s obvious displeasure. Six weeks later, the manager terminates her employment, citing declining sales as the reason. Norma believes otherwise and files a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Since the great recession began in late 2007, complaints like this have become common. The EEOC reported that it received almost 100,000 job bias complaints in 2010, a new record. More than a third of them were from employees who felt their employers retaliated against them; another third were race discrimination claims. Why is this happening? Employment law experts believe the recession has a lot to do with it, as dismissed employees have had trouble finding new jobs. They also believe the EEOC has stepped up enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. However, they also point to internal problems with employers.

Some employers might perform only those activities that they believe will give them an effective legal defense should an employee sue. They write anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policies into their employee handbooks, make supervisors attend training once a year, and then call it a day. However, these things by themselves might not be effective. Policies do no good if managers do not enforce them. Training that does not address trends such as discrimination and retaliation complaints will not stop them from happening. In addition, if managers do not monitor whether this training changes supervisors’ behavior, supervisors might conclude that the company is not serious about it.

Employment Practices Liability insurance covers an employer’s legal liability for wrongful acts against employees, including discrimination and retaliation. Insurance underwriters will look at an employer’s policies and training practices, but they will also consider its claim history. Underwriters will be wary of insuring employers with a record of frequent complaints against them. If they offer coverage at all, they will charge higher premiums to account for the perceived higher risk.

To prevent claims and keep insurance premiums low, employers should consider these measures: * Study financial results to determine how much these types of claims have cost or might cost in the future in terms of settlements, legal costs, time more profitably spent on other matters, workplace morale, insurance costs and other areas.

  • Ensure that you have strong policies in place against discrimination and retaliation.
  • Require supervisors and managers to attend training to prevent these kinds of claims. Include in the content of the training discussions of what is and is not permissible when it comes to discrimination and retaliation. Make it clear that performance evaluations will include incidents of discriminatory behavior.
  • Create a workplace culture that does not tolerate illegal activities of any kind. Senior managers should conduct themselves in ways that model the behaviors they want to see from subordinates.

Experts say that recessions always breed increased discrimination complaints against employers. However, that does not have to be the case with every employer. Effective training costs money, but that cost is far less than the cost of insurance deductibles, higher premiums, demoralized workforces, and damaged reputations. Discrimination and retaliation claims hurt a business’s bottom line. Preventing them makes both economic and moral sense.

May 01
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DOES CONTRACTOR’S INSURANCE COVER REMOVING OF UNDAMAGED PROPERTY?

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

An electrical contractor runs miles of wiring through what will be a three-story office building. Following completion, the contractor tests the wiring, finds it satisfactory and leaves the job. After other subcontractors hang and paint the walls and do other finishing work, the general contractor tests all systems. This time, the electrical system fails. The GC summons the electrical contractor back; after more testing and diagnosis, the contractor concludes that there are faults in two segments of the system on different floors and adjacent sides of the structure. Fixing the problem will require tearing out the finished walls and a few appliances attached to them (a dishwasher in an office kitchen area, computer network equipment, etc.). Tearing these things out, repairing the faulty wiring, and reinstalling the walls and finishing them so they look flawless will cost much more than simply fixing the electrical problem. The cost is far beyond what the contractor can afford to pay out of pocket. Will its Commercial General Liability insurance help? The answer depends on the state where the building is located.

The ISO CGL policy covers the insured contractor’s legal liability for physical damage:

  • To tangible property, including all resulting loss of its use, or loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured; and
  • Caused by an occurrence, which is “an accident, including continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same general harmful conditions.
  • In addition, the policy states that it does not cover the insured’s liability for property damage:
  • To work or operations the insured performed or which a subcontractor performed on the insured’s behalf, if the damage arises out of any part of the work and it occurs after the work’s completion; and
  • To other tangible property that is unusable or less useful to the owner because it includes the insured’s work that is known or thought to be defective, deficient, inadequate or dangerous, if fixing the insured’s work will restore the property to usefulness.

Some courts have ruled that the CGL policy covers the cost of tearing out and reinstalling undamaged property when that is necessary to fix the defective work. A 2002 federal appeals court ruling in a Washington state case said that the removal and destruction of other subcontractors’ work due to the insured’s defective work is property damage, as the CGL defines the term. The court also said that the insured’s performance of defective work met the policy’s definition of “occurrence.” A 2010 decision from Washington state reached a similar conclusion — unintentionally providing defective products to an installer was an “occurrence,” and removal and replacement of other suppliers’ products and work was “property damage.” Courts in Alaska and Oklahoma have ruled that the policy provision that excludes coverage for unusable tangible property did not apply because of a second provision that gives coverage back for loss of use resulting from sudden or accidental injury to the insured’s work. The courts felt that installing defective components was done accidentally. Conversely, courts in Arizona, Maryland and South Carolina have held that tearing out and replacing undamaged property is not physical damage caused by an “occurrence” because it is not an accident. Rather, the courts saw it as a cost associated with a project. Since the courts differ so much from one state to another, it might be helpful for a contractor to know in advance what a particular state requires. The contractor’s insurance agent might also know which insurance companies have a history of paying for these types of claims. The contractor could find that it is worthwhile to buy coverage from these companies even if they charge higher premiums

May 01
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KEEP YOUR RISKS OF DEFECTS LOW ON GREEN BUILDING PROJECTS

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

As concerns grow about the potential effects of global warming and people pay more attention to reducing their carbon footprints, green construction is becoming a larger part of the solution. A McGraw Hill study found that in 2008 the value of green construction starts might have been as high as $49 billion, and it could reach $140 billion by 2013. Building owners are attracted by energy cost savings, tax incentives, and the good publicity that comes from using an environmentally-friendly facility. Although green construction has become a lucrative business for contractors, it carries some risks that conventional construction methods do not have or have to a lesser extent.

Much of the difference between green construction and conventional methods is in areas of emphasis and materials. Green construction, because it is relatively new, uses new materials that might not have a proven long-term track record. The focus of a green building is energy conservation; objectives such as moisture control to prevent mold growth receive less attention. Also, compared with conventional buildings, green buildings allow more air in from the outside, with potential impacts on building occupants’ health. Before construction begins, contractors must work with the project owner to identify the specific green objectives the owner wants to accomplish. With that knowledge, the contractor can determine how much additional risk the objectives present and create risk management plans to deal with it.

Price pressures can also be an issue. Green construction can be more expensive than conventional construction, yet project owners might be unwilling to pay a large premium for it. Contractors will be under pressure to hold costs down. This might cause them to take shortcuts that could increase the risk of creating defects in the building. The owner and contractor must work together to create a plan that balances cost savings with sound construction practices.

Green buildings carry a risk that their components might not perform as well over time as do those of conventional buildings. Because they stress innovative techniques and materials, green buildings use materials that have not undergone the years of testing that conventional materials have. Green construction favors using renewable resources and emphasizes insulation to reduce energy use. Conventional buildings use materials with a history of good performance and emphasize keeping water and other elements out. To reduce performance risks, contractors should arrange for peer reviews that predict how materials will interact with other materials and building systems, predict how the building will hold up in actual use, and analyze waterproofing and humidity control capability.

Although green buildings are a relatively new concept, building owners expect them to perform at least as well as conventional buildings over the long term. Contractors who erect them might be vulnerable to lawsuits if a building fails to meet the U.S. Green Building Council standards. The USGBC offers its LEED certification to buildings that meet standards; the council can also revoke certification if it finds that a building is not performing as expected. Losing certification can harm a contractor’s reputation. The peer reviews of materials and systems should help to reduce this risk.

The green construction business is almost certain to grow rapidly during the next several years, and contractors will naturally want to take advantage of that. To reduce their risks, they should work with organizations such as the USGBC to get education and training on materials, construction techniques, and risk management. Together with peer review of materials and collaboration with project owners, these measures should help contractors complete quality and environmentally sound buildings.

May 01
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THE IMPORTANCE OF AND KEY POINTS ABOUT BACKGROUND CHECKS ON POTENTIAL EMPLOYEES

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

In the current economic environment, businesses everywhere are trying to cut expenses anywhere they can. The survival of many businesses will depend on figuring out where and how to save money.

One big expense comes from finding, interviewing and vetting, and training new employees. However, the repercussions of not knowing who you’re hiring can be even more costly. One of the most important elements to hiring a new employee is performing a background check. Just one poor hiring decision can be very costly to most businesses. In fact, hiring decisions can often make the difference between a business failing or thriving. Thirty percent of small business failures are directly caused from employee theft, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Pre-screening potential employees thorough a background check is one of the most cost effective tools to protect your business, lessen the risk of hiring unacceptable employees, and make sure that you’re making smart hiring decisions. Here are some key points about background checks:

Liability Protection. Small businesses usually skip performing a background check on a potential employee either because they’ve developed a false sense of trust and ease from working so closely with their employees or because they don’t understand what the legal liabilities can be from not screening and performing background checks. Either way, skipping background checks can open the door to costly legal liability. All businesses that have employees interacting or providing a service directly to customers have a liability if one of their employees harms a customer or has a previous history of wrongdoing. Businesses, especially small to medium ones, often can’t survive after the resulting lawsuit. Aside from the negative aspects, business owners might also find that their insurance provider will offer a discount for performing new hire background checks.

Reputable Vendors. Buying instant public records from a database doesn’t constitute a background check and can still leave you liable. These databases usually don’t do any fact checking or update their existing information with any regularity, if at all.

To best protect yourself, your employees, and your customers, you should find a reputable and trustworthy background screening company. This is the best way to make sure that the data on the potential employee is up-to-date and accurate.

Do keep in mind that since background check vendors come in various shapes and sizes and offer a range of different services, it’s also important to find a vendor that offers the right services for the size and needs of your business. When choosing a vendor, you might want to make sure that a human-manned toll-free number is available to assist you around the clock. You might also want to do a background check of sorts on the vendor by asking for customer reviews and searching for any negative information about the vendor on the web.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act. Sometimes inaccurate data might be found on a background check or an employer might violate a job applicant’s privacy rights; The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was set up to guard against such from happening. Compliance involves employers obtaining written consent from the applicant prior to running a background check and notifying the applicant of the source of any background check information used during the hiring process. The latter of the two is where employers get into trouble using databases.

Only Purchase Needed Information. Some vendors will encourage you to purchase anything and everything they find on the potential employee, at a hefty price none the less. If your business niche requires such an extensive background check this is fine, but more often than not a basic background check will suffice.

A Web Search Can Supplement Background Checks. Employers should keep in mind that anyone can put anything that they want to, true or not, on their social network profile, blog, or personal website. So, this type of information should never replace an appropriate background check. That said, many employers are using these portals as a supplement to the background check. A lot can be learned about a person just by reading the types of things they blog or write about on social network sites. You might find a person exhibits just the traits you’re looking for and is passionate about their occupation. On the other hand, someone that updates their blog with a post about how they hate old people might make you think twice before hiring them in your assisted living facility.

May 01
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AN AUTOMATIC EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATOR SHOULD BE PART OF YOUR WORKPLACE SAFETY PROGRAM

By Workplace Safety

Many understand that cardiac arrest is a serious problem involving the heart, but most don’t know the specifics of the subject, just what a killer it can be, or how to respond when it occurs in the workplace.

Quick Facts about Cardiac Arrest. Cardiac arrest is when the pump function of the heart suddenly stops. Ventricular fibrillation, also called V-fib, is where the lower chambers of the heart quiver instead of normally contracting. Pulseless ventricular tachycardia involves an extremely fast heartbeat, but without effective cardiac output in the lower chambers of the heart and no effective pulse. These irregular heart rhythms can cause the heart to suddenly stop pumping blood out to the rest of the body. The most common cause of a sudden cardiac arrest is a heart attack involving either of the above irregular heart rhythms. Bradycardia, which is a slow heartbeat, accounts for a small number of cardiac arrests.

The causative factors are vast, including illegal drugs and certain prescription medications, respiratory arrest, drowning, trauma, choking, and electrocution. A previous diagnosis of heart disease may or may not exist. Sometimes a cardiac arrest occurs without any apparent causative agent.

Someone suffering a cardiac arrest will suddenly collapse, be unresponsive to verbal stimuli and gentle shaking, and cease to breathe normally. The person will also have an absent pulse, but those not medically trained should look for signs of circulation (normal breathing, coughing, twitching, movement, and improved color) instead of checking for a pulse.

Once the heart fails to pump blood to the rest of the body, it only takes four to six minutes for brain damage to begin. Without immediate appropriate treatment, the victim can die within minutes. It’s estimated that 95% cardiac arrest victims die before they ever reach the hospital.

Chance of survival is decreased by seven to ten percent per minute of delay until defibrillation, when CPR isn’t performed. The sudden cardiac arrest survival rate is 48-74% when CPR is immediately initiated and defibrillation takes place within three to five minutes.

Should You Have An Automatic External Defibrillator? Automatic External Defibrillators (AED) have become commonplace in schools, casinos, and airports. Knowing the above facts, employers should definitely consider having an AED as part of their workplace safety program. After the electrodes are applied to the victim’s chest, the device evaluates cardiac wave patterns. If the machine finds an abnormality, such as ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia, it sends an electric shock to the heart to return it to a normal rhythm.

The operation of such a machine may send the red flags of liability up for some employers. Thanks to every state having Good Samaritan laws covering lay rescuers using an AED and the civil liability immunity provided by the Federal Cardiac Arrest Survival Act, you don’t have to worry about liability issues. An AED isn’t like the advanced defibrillators used by medical professionals. In fact, The American Heart Association says that since an AED automatically analyzes and shocks, it be safely operated by trained lay rescuers. The machine is compact, portable, battery operated, easy to use, durable, and lightweight.

Aside from the potential for any employee to have an accident or underlying medical condition, American workplaces are seeing more and more employees working long past retirement age. Depending on the response of emergency services can lose precious minutes, and since the amount of time elapsed between cardiac arrest and defibrillation is directly linked to the survival of the victim, an AED can mean the difference between life and death. It just makes good sense to have at least a few of your employees trained to operate an AED.

May 01
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WHAT IS ERGONOMICS AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ME?

By Workplace Safety

Although the term ergonomics was first used in the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t until after World War II that the field known today as ergonomics really began to shape product design and human interaction with surrounding elements.

What Is Ergonomics? Today, ergonomics is something frequently touted by an array of professionals, from marketing and IT experts to those in the health care field. The problem is that some have a very specific and straightforward idea of what the term ergonomics means and others try to make anything and everything fit the term. The result is many that are seeking information on ergonomics walk away from the subject more confused than ever.

Evidence of the premise of what’s now known as ergonomics can be found by looking at ancient Hellenic civilizations and early Egyptians that used many ergonomic principles in their tool and workplace designs. The word is actually derived from two Greek words – ergon and nomoi. Ergon means work and nomoi means natural laws. So, ergonomics is the science of work and the human relationship to work. According to The International Ergonomics Association, the technical definition of ergonomics is a science discipline that’s concerned with comprehending human interaction with other elements of a system -and- a profession that uses data, principles, methods, and theory on a design so that it can be optimized for system performance and human well-being. A much simpler way to describe ergonomics is the science of making things around us both comfortable and efficient for our usage. Those that practice within this field are called ergonomists. Ergonomists are concerned with the science of work. They basically study work to determine how it’s performed and how it can be performed better. Ergonomics becomes useful to most every profession in that it attempts to make improvements to whatever work is being done by making things (products, processes, and services) around us more comfortable and efficient.

What Does Ergonomics Mean to Me? Now that the definition of ergonomics is clearer, users can better understand what they are most concerned with – how they use a service or product, how it meets their needs, and if they will like using it. The answers to these questions can be found by looking at the comfort and efficiency involved with ergonomics.

Comfort and efficiency go hand and hand, as comfort is one of the most important aspects of whether or not a design is effective. It goes far beyond just having something soft. Comfort in the mental elements of a service or product and during human to machine interaction are key concerns in ergonomic design.

Physical comfort in the human-machine interaction is often the first thing noticed during usage. Having this physical comfort from how the machine feels is important to users. Essentially, you aren’t going to continue to touch something that doesn’t feel good to you. Not touching it means you aren’t operating it, which thereby makes it useless. Any designer will tell you that usage is the only true measure of design quality. It’s their job to come up with inventive ways to increase the usage of their product or service. And, as mentioned above, comfort has everything to do with how often an item is used. Comfort also comes from mental aspects. What a product looks and feels like, its durability, and ease of use helps us make a mental evaluation as to if the quality of an item is congruent with what it costs. The more ergonomically designed a product or service is, the higher the quality and value perception about it will be.

Efficiency can essentially be viewed as making a process easier to perform. This may be in the form of making something more physically efficient by reducing the amount of strength required during the process, making something faster by reducing how many steps are involved in the process, reducing the amount of training or knowledge required during the process to make a task easier to complete and allow more people to safely perform the task, reducing the amount of parts composing a product to make repairs and upkeep easier, and so forth.

Much like comfort, if something is more efficient, then it’s easier to do, more likely to be done, and more likely to be done more often. Although often complicated by extensive technical terminology, the basic premise is that comfort adds to ease of use and ease of use adds to comfort, thereby making products more useful.

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