Return to Work

Has new ergonomic equipment yielded only marginal results? Are your employees still going off work for weeks or months at a time? Paying disability to current employees with hand injuries? Cut down on the costs of training by keeping your existing employees at work – and we can show you how!

Each year, millions of workers can find themselves facing the effects of repetitive stress injury (RSI), and studies suggest the yearly cost of RSI can be between $17 billion and $20 billion. The near constant use of a mouse and keyboard, coupled with sitting at a desk in sometimes awkward and uncomfortable positions puts stress on our hands, wrists, neck, and back. The result: things that others take for granted, such as typing up a report or sending an email, become impossible for those suffering from accessibility issues. Speech recognition can help professionals not only relieve the pain of RSI, but also prevent it in the first place and help professionals remain productive without pain or frustration.

Widely regarded as a tool for simplifying time-consuming documentation and reporting processes, speech recognition boasts many other benefits for professionals. For some injured workers, the only way to reduce keyboarding and mousing is to implement speech recognition sofftware such as Dragon. Talking to a computer for tasks like e-mail, letter writing, data entry and report generation can markedly reduce the risk of repetitive strain injuries (RSI). Workers who are currently in pain may feel much better at the end of the day –and are just as productive!

Benefits include:

• Providing accessibility for people with physical disabilities
• Preventing repetitive stree injuries, by enabling hands-free PC use
• The ability to control your keyboard, mouse and application by voice
• Meeting disability management needs, because Dragon is Section 508 certified
• Enabling success from the start with professional speech recognition training, support and services

Beth is a recruiter for an internationally known biotechnology and pharmaceutical company, where she has worked for over twenty years. Approximately 15 months ago, Beth started experiencing numbness in her feet which eventually spread throughout her body and affecting both of her hands.

Fortunately, Beth’s company has a Return to Work (RTW) program and specialists who offer professional grade technology solutions and services to help their injured and disabled staff members get back to work. Her counselor immediately suggested Dragon Speech Recognition. The RTW specialist also recommended professional training. As an outsourced training provider for Beth’s employer, ZephyrTec had trained and worked with other employees at her company, who were located in offices across the country.

Following the implementation of Dragon Speech Recognition and Zephyr-TEC’s one-on-one training, Beth was able to successfully overcome many of the unfortunate effects of her affliction and return to work.

“I honestly feel that I am able to work more productively in all of my work applications because of Dragon and the training I received from ZephyrTec. If I was only working within email, I probably would’ve been able to click where I wanted words to go and speak to use Dragon on its own, but because I use so many applications, there would be no way I would ever be successful at using Dragon without the training.” ~ Beth, Recruiter