The body mapping tool is a useful exercise to help workers identify areas of stress and how this impacts their physical wellbeing. This tool can be used to raise awareness of the impact of stress on the body and to help identify what aspects of the worker’s job may contribute to or cause stress.
Everyone feels stress differently. Stress can impact our mind, body, emotions and how we behave.
We’ve developed a body map for you to use individually or with your teams to find common areas of stress or strain.
Stress in the body
Everyone feels stress differently. It impacts our mind, body, emotions and how we behave.
Your workm8tes might not feel stressed or think they are stressed, but their behaviour or how their body feels might tell a different story.
Using a body map is a good way to capture where stress and strain shows up in our bodies as physical discomfort. Body mapping can be used to raise awareness of the impact of stress on our bodies, and can help identify what aspects of a worker’s job may contribute to or cause stress so you can take action.
The body mapping assessment exercise provides a useful starting point for further investigation. Get your workm8tes to do a self-complete assessment and marking any areas of physical discomfort on the body map. Look for any patterns or common areas of discomfort in your team8tes. Common complaints may indicate that there is an issue with the equipment or the physical environment.
If all team8tes have a sore right shoulder, this is a pretty clear indication that something is wrong with the work setup.
Also consider other factors including age, gender, and height when looking for areas of common stress. It could be that bench heights are wrong for some workers, or tools are too heavy for others.
Taking action early to address the causes of work-related stress and strain in your workm8tes will reduce stress, fatigue, and workplace harm including musculoskeletal and repetitive injuries. This can, in turn, increase both performance and productivity in the long term.
We’ve developed a body map for you, and a template for you to consolidate your team’s findings to help identify common areas of concern. This can be done on an individual basis, or as a group on a shared board.