Office Ergonomics Course
Project Overview
The task of this project was to give DaVita teammates a way to work more comfortably and feel better at the end of their day. There was no previous training for teammates in the office, only in clinics.
I worked with the teammate safety department which I had previously partnered with for a short teammate safety video using Toonly.
Project Information
What I Started With
I was given a large PowerPoint deck that several teammates had worked on and provided feedback on. It needed a lot of consultation to make something that teammates could understand, act on, and actually find useful in their day-to-day.
* Time estimates are based on instructor-led training from other similar training.
How It Turned Out
This was like changing a pumpkin into a Ferrari. Ergonomics isn’t exciting or sexy, but with relevant examples, humor, and a bit of magic, the content turned into a self-paced masterpiece.
The final course also provides a branching section so teammates can choose their working conditions rather than learning about them all.
Tools Used
The Process To Build The Course
Analysis
With a text-heavy and long PowerPoint, it was time to talk with the subject matter expert and analyze all the content. This wasn’t a case where performance consulting came in handy, but rather a performance-based training strategy. That always helps take the conversation away from content and move it towards performance.
That means the training is focused on what teammates need to do after taking the training. Obviously that’s to work ergonomically, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. You could say tons of information needs to be known to work ergonomically. So, the focus of the conversation here is to look at what teammates actually need to do to work ergonomically.
Providing the right frame of mind helped me work through the content to get to the most critical points, and work with the subject matter expert better to cut the content down to a manageable amount.
Before even reviewing the content to create the ideal objectives, I asked lots of questions. Every project starts with lots of questions and helps focus the content on essentials only. Most of my questions begin with the typical who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Gathering the correct information and asking the right questions from the beginning helps the design process be more successful. In the end, the training was a huge success in performing actionable information to teammates that helped them understand relevant ergonomic information for their specific work environment.
Design
With a text-heavy and long PowerPoint in hand, it was time to talk with the subject matter expert and analyze all the content.
Course Objectives
Creating the course objectives with the subject matter first allowed me to fine-tune the goals and focus on the content.
Once the objectives are created and agreed upon, I work through every piece of content to directly attribute it to an objective. The outline is built in this way to keep things focused, organized, and relevant to teammates.
Here are the objectives that steered the course:
- Apply the neutral/optimal posture to your workstation.
- Make adjustments to common workstation configurations for ergonomic comfort and productivity.
- Learn tips & strategies for your specific workstation comfort and ergonomics.
- Take micro-breaks and exercise breaks to help you throughout the workday.
Those objectives also formed the core structure of the course with four focused and simple modules.
Course Outline
After working with the subject matter expert (SME) to get approval of the course objectives, I worked through the content to pull out the most important information that could be applied to the objectives. Each item in the outline had to contribute to teammates meeting the course objectives.
- Module 1: Intro + neutral position
- Introduce ergonomics in 100 words or less.
- Optimal/neutral sitting position
- Optimal/neutral standing position
- What to avoid
- Module 2: Adjusting workstation (sitting & standing)
- Optimal setup/avoiding reach, mouse/keyboard placement
- Monitor placement/multiple monitor placement
- Standing workstation tip
- Module 3: Improving specific workstation environments
- Option to choose primary workstation environment: Office dedicated desk, office shared desk, remote/home office, hybrid office/home, mostly traveling (can revisit options for different options once they complete the first one).
- Dedicated Office
- Adjust and test.
- Laptop stand to raise laptop
- Keyboard trays for proper alignment with chair
- Hybrid
- Important to understand the adjustments available since they can get changed if not a dedicated desk.
- Use all the tools available to make your work comfortable.
- If no monitor is available, raise the laptop and use an external keyboard if available.
- Use an external mouse if possible.
- If no table but a chair, use a laptop bag to raise the laptop for typing.
- Home
- Set up your home work area as you would an ergonomic office.
- Proper height helps achieve a neutral position.
- Use a laptop docking station, external monitor, and external keyboard/mouse.
- If dedicated space is not possible and no monitor: boost the laptop, use an external mouse/keyboard, or adjust position as best possible.
- Can use an external monitor as the primary monitor, a laptop as a secondary.
- Always strive for a neutral position or as close as possible.
- Traveling
- Treat as a hybrid office setup.
- Get creative in hotel, coffee shop, airport, etc.
- Use tables or counters. Place the laptop on bag or firm pillow to raise if it puts it closer to your eyebrows.
- Laptop centered in front of the chair with a wireless mouse.
- Use a pillow under you for a raise to get elbows at keyboard height.
- Module 4: Break Up Work
- Take typing breaks.
- Arm, hand, wrist, and upper arm stretches.
- Take intermittent exercise/full-body breaks.
- Improve your computer skills (keyboard shortcuts) to improve posture.
- Use mouse shortcuts
- Closing
- Additional resources/where to get help
- Sum up course
The course outline isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but it covers in more detail exactly what will go in the course. It prevents distractions, focuses the course goals, and helps the subject matter expert understand exactly what’s in the course and what got cut from their content.
- Module 1: Intro + neutral position
Timeline
The original timeline was in stone, and it wasn’t a rush. There are always a lot of moving parts during a course and sometimes with everyone’s schedule, timing can be difficult. The original timeline called for about two and a half months including legal reviewed. The entire build ended up taking longer due to issues out of my control. Sometimes content is more difficult for the subject matter expert to gather together than anticipated.
Storyboard
By separating each step into a business partner review process, rework and surprises are illuminated. That means no project I create goes too far without it being reviewed nearly eliminating the chance business partners won’t be happy and require major rework (it just doesn’t happen).
Before moving into the full development process, I put together a brought storyboard consisting of two columns. On the left is a description of what’s on-screen, any rough imagery I might already have, and any description of buttons or what happens on screen. The right side has the narration.
Legal, Compliance, Privacy
Working for a medical company requires everything to be reviewed, even an office ergonomics course. This was no different and the storyboard is the perfect opportunity to have content reviewed. That means I can send it off for review and move on to development and change anything required if the review requires any changes.
Development
After the storyboard is fully approved, it’s finally time to move into the development process. This is a small part of the project because the majority of the time was spent designing and getting everything right.
The beauty of planning well for a project means less rework, more eyes on the work from the start, and once I hit the development process it’s quick going. This entire process can typically (unless other things are going on) be finished before legal, compliance, and privacy are finished reviewing which in my situation is typically 10 days.
I record a lot of my own audio, so that’s where I start the development process.
Recording Audio
Whenever I need to record audio for a course, I pull out my little recording studio that I previously wrote about. The results end up being crisp high-quality audio that people seem to enjoy. I don’t enjoy editing my own voice, but since nobody else has an issue with it, I got over that hangup.
Here’s what my home office recording studio looks like:
Creating In Storyline
Having spent a lot of time in the analysis and design phase makes this part go smoothly. I have a well-thought-through plan which makes it easy to gather the right visuals, figure out the animations, and make it all come together with the audio I recorded.
Here are a few screenshots (without proprietary or private information) of what the course ended up looking like. Pretty slick and an effective way for teammates to learn proper office ergonomics.
Final Review
The course is nearly done at this point, it’s all up to a few final reviews that focus on the visuals only. All other parts of the course were previously reviewed along the many steps of the process.
All final course reviews were done in Articulate Review. There typically isn’t much feedback at this point since it has been through so many review states prior to this point.
So, it’s time to move the course on to the implementation state to get things live.
Implement
In my current role, this step relies on several different groups. The course goes through final QA for functionality and grammar review to make sure it works and follows all brand guidelines. QA occurs in a staging environment before it’s live for all teammates.
Once all changes are made from QA, the course can be made live or held for a specific date. This one went straight to going live so it can be assigned to the correct teammates.
Evaluate
A standard feedback form is collected at the end of every course built in my department. It’s a relatively rudimentary survey that gathers basic data, but it does help guide further improvements in content. It’s not nearly data-driven enough for my taste, though.
For this particular course, it did not have a pilot group, but for some training, there are stages that allow us to iterate and revise as needed as the system and training are released to progressively larger audiences.
After feedback has been gathered, we’re provided with a visual representation of the feedback from the training. That includes open-ended feedback (which gets pretty goofy sometimes) and an NPS survey which is admittedly an extremely poor way to rate training. It’s what we have for now but it leaves room for continuous improvement which is something I live by every day.
Short Video Sample Of Course
Teammate Praise
What I'm Most Proud Of
The humor. It’s a slick course that organized and streamlined the content, but the humor is my highlight. I put several jokes scattered throughout the course and most of them remained in. I was anticipating most if not all of them would get cut out in the review process by the subject matter experts, business partners, or the legal, compliance, and privacy (LCP) review. Only one joke got cut and the rest of them remained. One reviewer wanted to cut a joke but the subject matter experts overruled that request and it remains in the course. It’s my favorite joke, the Ted Lasso joke with my Roy Kent imitation (my favorite character).
I love writing humor into my scripts to liven up content and add a bit of humanity into otherwise potentially dry content. I think overall the content turned out not too dry at all. The visuals really helped bring it to life and explain how to work ergonomically in visuals, the way it makes the most sense for something in the physical world.
I’m also pretty proud that this course is a bit out of my typical wheelhouse. My work mostly consists of technical training involving almost entirely software and how to use it. This had no software component aside from the computer shortcuts. So, I didn’t have a lot of visuals to start with. I couldn’t just assume the person taking the course was sitting next to me at my computer.