ECN Forum Forums Safety Discussion and News Occupational Safety Discussion How do you ensure safety of staff?

we spend a disproportunate amount of time on worker safety,no matter how much you tell some people,it just doesnt sink in!!

Hello everyone! OSHA Professor is back from extended training assignments.
Permit me please to comment. I empathize with your frustrations, and those frustrations are not so uncommon as one would think.
Safety in the workplace / jobsite involves more than just preaching rules and regulations. It’s more of a safety management system combined with culture change.
I once gave a talk to electrical contractors in New York City (where I once lived and worked) and they all said “we gave our people GFCI’s to use on the job and they just lost them. What can we do”? Well what would you do if they showed up on the site without their hard hats, or safety shoes etc? Would you just say what can we do? I don’t think so! Isn’t it a condition of employment ljust like the hard hat. You would tell an employee without the hard hat to go home and get the hard hat before entering the job site.
You manage personnel! You manage capital resources! You manage work schedules, materials acquisition for jobs, etc,etc. So why can’t safety be managed? Answer, it can!
Various models including an OSHA model for managing safety & health also called safety and health programs is posted at http://osha.gov/SLTC/safetyhealth_ecat/index.html
and http://osha.gov/SLTC/safetyhealth/index.html
i) Management leadership and employee participation;
(ii) Hazard identification and assessment;
(iii) Hazard prevention and control;
(iv) Information and training; and
(v) Evaluation of program effectiveness.
The links above can assist with culture change and implementation of the overall program / system.
Lets face it if an employee was continually messing up on the execution of the installation specification requirements per code and job order requirements what would you do? Do you have work rules? Do you communicate those work rules and their import to employees? Do you follow up to insure they are in fact following those rules? Do you have a progressive discipline plan to deal with recalcitrant workers? Some would say that sound a little hard line but compared to say someone showing up late and leaving early for work or continuously damaging / wasting / kinking conduit while bending, what would an employer do in those cases. Combine this “mater of fact that’s the way it is “with genuine concern for the workers safety and “walk the talk” culture change can be achieved.
OK enough rambling for now. Thank you for the forum folks. Good luck and be safe.
OSHA Professor

sparx,
Welcome to ECN, mate!.
Good to see another of you Australian guys joining in on our Forums.
Regarding your reply, I couldn't agree more,
with some people it takes a near-miss or the real thing to teach them a lesson.

What a great question and I would have to agree with Scott on his reponse. One thing I would like to add though is safety is as much about attitudes as it is about behaviors. Without having the proper attitude about safety, you certainly will not behave appropriately. As Dr. Scott Geller says...Safety must become a value; our priorities change from daya to day, but our values stay the same. All of us out there trying to make safety the #1 priority by putting it first on meeting agendas and haging banners is a great start, but if we do not get the employees on board with THEIR safety process and allow them the freedom to make the right choices, we will neevr achive that utopia of an "injury free" workplace.

As trumpy pointed out in his orginal post, he can't be there all the time and he can show them how to work safely and even demonstrate it, but it's what happens when he leaves that counts!

Bryan www.SAFTENG.net

Bryan,
I agree, you can only teach your employees(or work-mates) so much, but also you shouldn't have to stand there and hold thier hand, in case something does go wrong.
Also, I feel in a lot of industry workplaces, there is an "US and Them" mentality, where the management couldn't really give two hoots about the staff safety, until there is an accident causing serious injury or death.
And then questions like How? and Why? are asked by these very same people.

Bryan,
Thanks for mentioning me. I have to say that I really like your website. I have used it for a safety presentation at my company.

Trumpy,
One way to "sell" safety is to look at the total cost of an accident. There have been a lot of studies that show that accidents cost much more than the actual cost. Some say anywhere from 10 to 50 times in indirect costs. So a $100 accident would cost at least $1,000 to the company. I forget the math at the moment (I am at home so I do not have all my papers), but it usually means that the company has to have an extra $30,000 in sales to cover this small accident. I can get you more info when I get back into work.
Scott

So...fear of retribution is the premis of OSHA ?

simply fodder for more 'Us & Them' IMO.....

Hey sparky,
I thought that sort of thing only happened in NZ(the old fear of the stick thingee)
You guys have a more thorough and likeable Safety system over in the US, you agree?.

Sad to say it's not Trumpy.

A good parrallel is our 'War on Drugs' in America. In 20 years it has amounted to a miserable failure, even some of the people who started the program admit to this now.

It is simply a means of employment, as well as a means of supplementing these orginizations through forfieture.

We have some 70,000 inmates , for noviolent crimes of mere possesion incarcerated in an overflowing penal system here.......

The Iron Fist approach is the same with OSHA, they've had 30 years here and created nothing more than an US-THEM environ.

They have lowered themselves to become the hitman for bigger biz here, lobbied to slap down small biz.

Our our Congress televised it's shredding of this a while ago, consider.... a public flogging of one branch of goverment administered to another is not the norm ....

Hearts and Minds are what need to change, and this cannot be legislated here or anywhere else.

I have nothing against safety, contrary to what some may interpet my past posts here.

I just feel that our 'Safety Biz' in this country's approach is akin to shooting one's self in the foot

One of the 'underreported stories of 2002' here is OSHA's declining efficy.....

Sparky,

What are your suggestions?