Image Credit: Getty Images / Sergei Chuyko

The opinions, claims, conclusions, and positions expressed in this post are those of the author or person quoted and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, AIHA, The Synergist, or SynergistNOW.

Liberty Mutual’s annual Workplace Safety Index ranks the top ten causes of workplace injuries in the United States based on their financial impact. Every year since 2001, the leading cause has been “overexertion involving outside sources”—that is, injuries sustained during the handling of heavy loads. In both the 2025 and 2026 installments of its index, Liberty calculated the annual costs of such injuries to exceed $13 billion. Invariably, other ergonomics-related injuries appear in the top ten, such as “other exertions or bodily reactions,” which result from bending, twisting, reaching, or climbing. In the last two years combined, these injuries alone have cost U.S. businesses an additional $7 billion.

As Rachel Zoky, CPE, explained during a Synergist Webinar held Sept. 24, many tools exist that businesses can use to address these kinds of injuries, including the Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA), the Quick Exposure Check (QEC), the Revised NIOSH Lifting Equation, the 3D Static Strength Prediction Program (3DSSPP), and the Snook and Ciriello tables for evaluating manual handling tasks. These tools focus on the risks of movements that engage large areas of the body. Zoky, a product manager at webinar sponsor VelocityEHS, noted that common OEHS strategies like job rotation and redesign also tend to address these larger movements. For example, workers with tasks that require kneeling can be rotated into seated tasks.  

What sometimes escape notice, though, are movements concentrated in smaller body parts. “There’s a gap in support for these smaller tasks” where the risk is not as obvious, Zoky said. The hands are of particular interest given that they’re involved in nearly every task. In manufacturing environments, some workers sit all day at workstations where they assemble small parts. Tasks like polishing and grinding also constantly exert pressure on the hands. Precision work like pipetting in a laboratory, which many lay observers probably wouldn’t consider particularly strenuous, requires repetitive motions that can lead to injuries down the road.

“Everything you do requires your hands, so they never get to clock out,” Zoky said, and yet “engineering improvements in general for hands are very infrequently applied for most industries.”  

Hand-intensive work also appears in the Liberty Mutual index, though not as prominently as other ergonomics-related injuries. Hand injuries are accounted for in Liberty’s “repetitive motions involving microtasks” category. Most years, these injuries have ranked in the back half of Liberty’s top ten, landing ninth in 2025 and tenth this year, with a two-year cumulative financial impact of “only” $3.3 billion.

In the webinar, Zoky discusses tools that assess specific regions of the body, including the hands. She also addresses the potential of artificial intelligence to improve assessments of hand-intensive work and offers practical suggestions OEHS professionals can use to influence CEOs and organizational leaders to address ergonomic hazards. To learn more, watch the recording of “Seeing the Whole Job Isn't Enough: Identifying Hidden Ergonomics Risks.” As with all Synergist Webinars, registration and attendance are free.