Meg Honan is a consulting ergonomist for the UC Ergonomics Laboratory and course instructor. She was the Ergonomics Program Manager for Genentech’s South San Francisco site until 2018, where she engaged leadership at all levels, and interdisciplinary teams through participatory ergonomics.
Become an Ergonomist:
Michelle Meyer, Director of COEH Continuing Education, discusses the field of ergonomics, and why to become an ergonomist, with Meg Honan, MS, PT, CPE.
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About Meg Honan, MS, PT, CPE
Meg Honan is a consulting ergonomist for the UC Ergonomics Laboratory and course instructor. She was the Ergonomics Program Manager for Genentech’s South San Francisco site until 2018, where she engaged leadership at all levels, and interdisciplinary teams through participatory ergonomics. This sphere of influence includes workplace and equipment design, process and production engineering, Safety, Health and Environment groups and safety improvement teams to integrate ergonomics into Genentech’s continuous improvement process. Her work experience has focused on employee work areas and work method assessment, and training employee based “Ergo-Advocate” improvement teams within Plant, Laboratory, Field operations, R&D and Office work environments. Meg has also been highly engaged in ergonomics as it relates to expanding the role of mobile devices, and how unassigned work environments and flexible work have transformed the way we work today. She received her Master’s at University of California, Berkeley and is a Board Certified Professional Ergonomist.
Audio Transcript
Michelle Meyer: Hello and welcome! Thank you so much for being here. We're so glad to be having a conversation with Meg Honan today, MSPT and CPE. Welcome Meg.
Meg Honan: I'm really glad to be here. As you said my name is Meg Honan and I'm currently working as a consultant and at the UCSF ergonomics laboratory and I, well, I'm just happy to talk to you all. So, let's go!
Michelle Meyer: Awesome, well we have some questions for you today. First of all, I'd love to tell you or I'd love to have you tell me what is an ergonomist? Can you share a little bit about us about what you do?
Meg Honan: Sure, I became an ergonomist 20-plus years ago and nobody knew what it was you know back then. So an ergonomist is a person who works with people and organizations and the the areas that we work in just to make sure that it it's best suited for the people who need to do the work so making sure that the human or the person is sort of the center of the work who can make it most kind of productive and fulfilling and all of that.
Michelle Meyer: Awesome sounds like a pretty worthwhile endeavor. For someone who's just getting into your field are there any misconceptions about your job and what you do?
Meg Honan: Well I would say the biggest thing is that people really don't know what it is. So you hear about human factors and ergonomics and though we might know all those words individually, we don't, we don't see how they work in a group. So human factors is just people. You know what does it take for people to be able to do something and do something well. And ergonomics oftentimes people think you're just helping people sitting at their computer workstation to be set up more efficiently or with less pain but, human factors ergonomics ergonomics is really a lot more about a a bigger systems approach and systems just means all the different people that you work with in order to get this done at an industry or anywhere that you're working so the people can really be at their best at work. And I think sometimes people think of the word as a little bit too small in scope, so yeah.
Michelle Meyer: I know I personally also used to think ergonomics meant oh right my computer station, my feet, my eyes you know the levels that everything's set up correctly to find out oh it also involves cognitive ergonomics. How you look at a screen, physical, how factories are set up, it's a much broader profession than I had realized previously.
Meg Honan: Absolutely
Michelle Meyer: Yeah, thank you. Can you speak a little to your background? How did you get into ergonomics?
Meg Honan: I started off as a physical therapist and really enjoyed that career and got a chance to work in many different areas of physical therapy. And over the years working with people i had to decide did I want to teach did I want to own a clinic you know what did i want to do and neither had a big interest to me but during the 80s you know I worked with a lot of people a lot of back injuries and all kinds of work related injuries but all of a sudden all these people showed up that injuries to their neck and their arms and their hands the only thing they had in common is that they work in front of a computer so something about all of that put together and treating people and sending them back to the same situation that they came from really made me want to move upstream and say what could you do to prevent these problems? What could you do so that people can be in a better position and work better.
Michelle Meyer: Awesome, thank you so much for sharing that story. I think it sounds like I I feel like I know a lot of people who've kind of started in the PT world and had a similar revelation to you saying actually I want to go a little further upstream in the prevention of the injuries out the gate rather than the treatment afterwards.
Meg Honan: Right
Michelle Meyer: That's awesome. Well what do you enjoy most about what you do?
Meg Honan: I used to i worked at Genentech and i ran the ergonomics program for many years and i used to always say to people I have the best job at Genentech and i was very serious about it so what i love about ergonomics is that you didn't create the situation that you're going in to help you know you didn't make the factory set up poorly, you didn't you know you didn't make the problem happen, but you were almost always part of the solution part of what helped to make whatever the issue was better or go away so it's a very happy job in that way you're kind of part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem, so you know I like that. I you work with such a broad range of people and you'll hear words like a systems approach and and what that really means is that in order to make work happen there are so many people that are involved in that kind of process so you work with individuals who do the jobs you work with their managers you work people that design the plant you work with people that do maintenance you and you work with every level of the organization so you get to know a lot of other people and you understand what their contribution is to good work as well so I like the camaraderie, I like the fact that we worked as a team and and I do like helping people so i would never never roll that out.
Michelle Meyer: I appreciate you bringing that up as an example too. It makes me think of you know in workplace health and safety how important it is to get feedback from everyone not just the managerial level not just the leadership level but really talking with the workers what does your day look like what are you doing on the day-to-day and the information you can gather from the people doing the job when it comes to health and safety is super important, that's awesome.
Meg Honan: Yeah the difference between being a brand new ergonomist and being a somebody who's had a lot of experience who's maybe more of an expert ergonomist it's not that you're that much smarter it's just that you've learned the secret skill which is to talk to people, find out their perception of what's going on, find out their perception of what might improve it or what the biggest issues are, and then make that connection between who can fix the problem who can who can make things better and the people who do the job. So it's really you know a lot of it has to do with if you don't just learn to sit back and listen it's hard to become a great anything but a great ergonomist in this case so that that was really that was a lot of fun.
Michelle Meyer: Awesome that sounds great. Well and knowing what you know now what advice would you have given yourself when you were just starting out in ergonomics?
Meg Honan: You know I got some great advice the first thing I did as physical therapist is I went to a weekend course and it was one of the courses that you see put on actually that COEH put on and i really got to learn early on that ergonomics is a very big field and if you want to do a thing you really have to understand the broader focus of what ergonomics is and kind of how you work you know within the system so i think anyone that's thinking about this career you'd mention physical therapists a lot of people or athletic trainers or a lot of people kind of come in to ergonomics to one very narrow door so they can really only see it from this one perspective and so I spend a lot of time talking because I'm an ergonomist I spend a lot of time talking to those people about hey it's not just you sitting at the table but it's a huge it's a circular table where there's a lot of players and a lot of participants and so just understand from the get-go that ergonomics is more than just looking at computer workstations, you're looking at a particular thing. It's more than getting people to sit up straight. It's more than improving posture. You need to look at ergonomics and it's and it's kind of full scale which is fun not ultimately complex or anything but you need to just look at the bigger picture from the get-go.
Michelle Meyer: Thank you so much.
Meg Honan: That's my advice, yeah.
Michelle Meyer: Well is there anything else that you'd like to share for our listeners today?
Meg Honan: You know I think thanks for joining, thanks for listening. I don't think very many people know about this field and it's a great field. It's a great job. You have a lot of independence, you have a lot of decision making, you are able to work with people and talk to people. You have a lot of strategic partners and that's just really a fan it's an important word but it's a fancy way of saying other people that you have high regard for that all come together to try to make the work situation work you need to understand what the business needs you need to understand what the people need you need to understand a lot more than just what narrow view you come from whether that be I'm just a physical therapist, I'm just an engineer, you know I'm just of this so again it's a great field look at the bigger picture and become an ergonomist it's a great idea.