Out Loud Blog

In his newest post, guest blogger and Future Leader in EHS Jason Townsell explains how safety professionals can improve employee involvement by communicating the benefits of an effective safety program.

Every safety program, if not managed and communicated successfully, can run the risk of creating barriers to employee involvement. These barriers can include lack of trust among employees; inadequate training; lack of leadership commitment; and even resistance from partners such as supervisors, support personnel, unions and the work force.

Unfortunately, in my industry – construction – resistance from partners seems to be the main barrier to employee involvement. Construction projects tend to involve many stakeholders, and these stakeholders share the common goal of getting the project built as quickly and as inexpensively as possible.

This production-first goal may cause safety to be pushed toward the end of the priority list. Urging production personnel whose jobs depend on speedy production to buy into a safety program – a program they believe will damage their goal of speed and efficiency – can be a significant challenge. Even so, we must try to navigate around this barrier and overcome these challenges. Otherwise, lives may be at stake.

Forging a Partnership

When two parties perceive a difference in their goals, an inevitable rift emerges between them. Safety professionals, for example, may be perceived in the workplace as existing only to complicate workers’ lives and stunt production. In reality, a safety professional’s goals for a project should mirror those of all stakeholders: to complete the job as safely and efficiently as possible with as little loss as feasibly possible.

These safety and production goals, however, are attained in a different manner. Production-minded employees attain their goals through fast, efficient production, while safety professionals attain their goals by preventing loss.

Because both of these strategies are economically sound, it is possible for the labor force and safety professionals to create a partnership. To accomplish this, safety professionals must abandon the Big Brother mentality and instead adopt a vision that partners with the labor force to accomplish the combined vision of safe, efficient production.

Communicating the Benefits

In order for a partnership to be forged, each entity must understand the benefits provided by the other. In the case of production personnel, the benefits of their services are evident in the bottom line. A safety program’s benefits also are evident in the bottom line, in addition to the other contributions a safety program brings to the workplace. The key is to sell those other benefits.

Numerous marketing campaign studies demonstrate that people are more likely to buy a product when its benefits are highlighted compared to when the competition’s downsides are highlighted. Similarly, throughout my career, I have had greater success highlighting the benefits of a proactive safety program to stakeholders rather than stressing the negative consequences of not implementing a program.

Successfully encouraging all potential partners to buy into the safety program can only be accomplished by comprehensively selling the benefits of a strong safety program. These benefits include greater profits; improved work force morale; reduced insurance costs; industry recognition; greater opportunity in future project bids; and more.

When these benefits are shared and understood, barriers such as a lack of trust, lack of commitment and inadequate training are often mitigated. Only then can the goal of safe production be met.

Guest blogger Aaron J. Morrow is a safety consultant, an OSHA 500 trainer, a Cal/OSHA 5109 trainer and a construction risk insurance specialist.

Safety Shortcuts: The Longest Distance Between Two Points

by Aaron J. Morrow

A man by the name of Louis Binstock once said, “Too often the shortcut, the line of least resistance, is responsible for evanescent and unsatisfactory success.” Simply put, taking shortcuts only results in success for a short duration of time.

We’re all guilty of taking shortcuts now and again, whether it’s not signaling to change lanes, skipping a step on the stairs or using a chair instead of a ladder to reach something on the top shelf. But in the safety profession, each time you take a shortcut you also risk of cutting your career short by suffering a significant injury – or even death.

Breaking Bad Habits

Most of us develop bad habits of taking the occasional shortcut while working. If this is true for you, break the habit now. Your safety and well-being are far more important to your manager, coworkers and customers — not to mention your family — than getting the job done quickly. While your boss may admire and appreciate your conscientious effort to finish the job on time, you won’t be admired if your hasty shortcut results in an injury.

If a rushed job results in an accident, not only could it have an effect on your personal, financial and social life, it also may result in the job taking longer or even coming to a complete stop. How many times have you heard of employees incurring back injuries because it was “faster” to lift the load by themselves instead of asking for help or using a mechanical aid? Or someone falls because he stepped onto the top of the ladder instead of locating another ladder long enough for the job?

We must eliminate this intrinsic need to take shortcuts, but how? Well, we need to allow ourselves enough time to do the job at a safe pace, especially when starting a new job or working in an unfamiliar environment. Just because you’ve done something a “thousand times” doesn’t mean you’re impervious to an accident or injury, so don’t improvise to save time. Going through a daily checklist and having all the proper tools and safety equipment on hand in advance are just a few ways to save time.

It is your responsibility to avoid any potentially dangerous or unsafe job practices. Take the time to lock out/tag out equipment, use fall protection, follow safe ladder procedures and use PPE and the proper tools for the job. This requires planning ahead.

Finally, if you ever feel unsafe working on a job, or feel you cannot do the job safely by yourself, please call your supervisor and/or safety office. It’s a phone call that only takes a second, but it can save your life.

Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig that exploded last year killing 11 workers and causing what has been called one of the worst environmental disasters ever, told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a recent filing that substantial bonuses and raises for top executives were based on the company’s “exemplary” safety performance last year.

Quickly backtracking in an effort to avoid public outcry, the company released a statement apologizing for the wording in the 2010 proxy statement, acknowledging, “Some of the wording … may have been insensitive in light of the incident that claimed the lives of 11 exceptional men last year and we deeply regret any pain that it may have caused.”

The company claimed that nothing in the proxy statement was intended to minimize the tragedy or “diminish the impact it has had on those who lost loved ones.”

In what has to be one of the worst cases of denial I’ve ever seen – or one of the most masterful attempts at whitewashing – the SEC statement submitted by the company said: “Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate. As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”

If the company considers 2010 to have been an “exemplary” safety performance, I’m horrified at the thought of previous and future years. I think that most employers would acknowledge that the loss of 11 lives hardly qualifies as “exemplary.” Here at EHS Today, we pride ourselves on our America’s Safest Companies awards program. I can guarantee that Transocean Ltd. won’t be winning it anytime soon.

To add insult to injury for the families of the 11 workers killed, Transocean President and CEO Steven L. Newman received a $200,000 salary increase and nearly $375,000 bonus in 2010. His base salary will increase from $900,000 to $1.1 million.

I’m certain Transocean calls it justified and well-deserved. I call it blood money.

Guest blogger Aaron J. Morrow is a safety consultant, an OSHA 500 trainer, a Cal/OSHA 5109 trainer and a construction risk insurance specialist.

Learning from a Near Miss

By Aaron J. Morrow

I’m not much of a gambling man (minus the occasional “I bet you can’t make that in the trash from here” challenge) but even so, I’d bet the house that each one of us has had multiple “close calls” throughout our lives.

For example, say you’re driving when your favorite song comes on the radio and you reach over to crank up the volume. Or maybe your phone rings and you look over to see who it is, or you start to drift into a daydream where you are the king and everyone obeys your every command … or maybe that’s just me. In any case, when you look up, you see bright red brake lights right in front of you.

You slam on your brakes, the tires start to smoke and you brace yourself for impact. Thankfully, you just barely miss getting into an accident. After you take a deep breath and your heart stops pounding out of your chest, you think to yourself, “I need to be more careful.”

Investigating Near Misses

A near miss is sometimes defined as an unplanned event that did not result in injury, illness or damage, but had the potential to do so. Only a fortunate break in the chain of events prevented an injury, fatality or damage. It’s easy to shrug off a near miss and not report it or make a big deal out of it, but in reality, it should immediately send up a warning flag that something was wrong, unplanned or unexpected. What’s more, it could happen again.

For every near miss or accident, there are usually several contributing factors, most of which can be controlled. The best way to prevent the reoccurrence of an accident is by looking at those close calls. If you investigate the causes of a near miss, you can take steps to eliminate the hazard.

All close calls or near-miss incidents should be reported to your supervisor so solutions can be sought to prevent an accident or injury from occurring. Solutions may involve engineering controls, administrative controls, additional training or increased communication between management and workers.

Finally, a near miss is a cheaper learning tool than learning from an actual injury or property loss accident. In fact, it represents almost zero cost.

So remember – the next time you barely avoid an accident, don’t simply pass it off as a lucky break. Examine what happened and how that same close call can be prevented from endangering you or someone else in the future.