Ergonomic Approach to Restore Organizational Climate and Teamwork Potential in a Restructuring Context

This chapter explores how human factors and ergonomic approach can be used as a framework to improve organizational climate. It presents a case study that uses this approach to mitigate conflicts within a documentation and service department with 40 workers. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the intervention process: demand analysis, problem definition, implementation, and recommendations, and it concludes with a discussion on the utility of this approach to transform work. The intervention used a mixed-method approach based on qualitative and quantitative data, participatory techniques, and environmental risk assessments. This approach helps develop a comprehensive sociotechnical exploration of the problems, the creation of collaborative solutions, and redesign of the workspace. The main findings of this intervention revealed that (a) there was a cognitive dissonance among senior, middle management, and team members regarding the problem; (b) organizational and procedural policies that do not align with actual work dynamics were encouraging adaptive but unofficial practices; (c) the workspace layout was inadequate for collective tasks; (d) suboptimal environmental conditions were affecting activity performance; and (e) there was a lack of awareness of workers’ collective voice regarding their activities. Based on these findings, we show how an ergonomic intervention can address these issues systematically by encouraging a collaborative search for solutions among work teams, organizational leaders, and technical teams from human resources, infrastructure, and services.