Todd Conklin works with companies to help them recover and begin to heal after they have experienced a fatality in their workforce. He has come up with a different, creative way to look why the number of fatalities at work has remained at about 4,700 people a year for a number of years. Our programs of focusing on accident prevention have significantly reduced the total number of recordable injuries, but they have not had much impact on reducing the number of fatalities.
In our work, we normally plan to do the job well and prevent an injury or incident. We do training on how to do the particular piece of work. But, for most of our work, we hardly do anything to look at what can kill a person, consider the things that will prevent the fatality, and discuss the ways a person can recover from the situation when it happens. In work, like a confined space entry, which we all know can be deadly, we do everything well most of the time. But in most other tasks, the training is less demanding and the things that can kill someone are often over-looked.
Here are three questions he suggests that we talk together about before doing a job:
- What hazards do you encounter that have the potential to seriously injure or kill you?
- When your work goes bad what keeps you from getting injured or killed?
- Are these enough?
It will take some time to discuss these fully, so please create the space and the trust in the workday so these discussions can take place.
The people actually doing the work are usually in the best position to have the intimate knowledge required to go deep enough.
Todd’s book, Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict: A New Safety Discussion on Fatality and Serious Event Reduction, is available from Amazon.
Violence at work is a growing problem. Shootings are becoming one of the leading causes of workplace deaths. Many organizations are having the local law enforcement people come in and do active shooter programs. This is a start. Preventing workplace violence has several aspects and becoming aware of how vulnerable your workplace may be, requires a physical-safety and psychological-safety assessment. These problems just don’t happen overnight in most cases. When someone is struggling with a serious problem at home or at work and have to just keep it to themselves, they get more and more lonely and resentful. If they are subjected to bullying and harassment things get bad, quickly. Stuff can build up to a tragedy. (How well do your supervisors know their people?)
As I travel around and watch things happening, I see so many people in a big hurry. We are coming to the end of the good weather so people are hurrying to get outside jobs finished up. Roofers are really busy and not taking the time to properly use and secure their fall protection. I read of a recent 29-story fall in New York City when a guy on a big construction site fell through an unsecured hole in the floor.
A good, proven approach is to have brief start up meetings to review the hazards of the day’s work, making sure we have the right PPE and other equipment in place and used, asking each other about what might go wrong and working to avoid this. We need to look over the schedules and be sure we have the equipment we need and the right people for the work.
Changes in our workplaces keep coming fast and furiously. A recent report released by Price-Waterhouse-Coopers indicates that by 2030 the pressure on workers to perform will be huge. Organizations will be using all sorts of ways to track performance…even putting chips under their workers skin to look at location, performance, health and wellness! They may be tracking safety performance as well. Managers will need to be having “mature conversations” with the people about all this change and the feeling of threat this creates for their people and their jobs. The pressure to keep improving skills and performance continues to increase.
Employee engagement has long been a concern to the U.S. workforce…it is a vital component of employee attraction and retention. Yet, with all the leadership programs targeted to “engage better with employees,” there hasn’t been a significant shift in relationships.
In the June 2017 issue of EHS-Today is an article about engaging and training workers as a foundation block for an effective safety program, while applying critical thinking principles. The intent, of course, is to seek out more and more opportunities to have people involved and participating in safety risk assessment, engaging at a grassroots level for finding solutions and training whole teams in the entire process. At a deep level, each of us knows that having people involved and with you in moving your business or organization forward is a good thing!
I just saw an announcement that the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety was closing after 59 years, to reduce costs. The ISO 45001 Standard is in the final stages and is aimed at improving safety around the world. Yet some people are reacting that it will not make a difference because of management indifference or cost restraints.
Many of you who have been reading this newsletter know that our emphasis is on Partner Centered Leadership. We emphasize the importance of supervisors and managers getting into their workplaces each day and talking with the people. Talking with the people is a key to breaking through to safety excellence. Talking about the risks they face each day, how they are managing them, how their kids are doing, how the safety is doing, how the business is doing, asking them what they see as to ways to improve their own work, asking about problems they are dealing with, etc. Doing this with respect and really listening are vitally important.
The American Society for Safety Engineers (soon to be The American Society for Safety Professionals) in Denver, Colorado, on June 19-22, 2017, was attended by about 5,000 people. This was a record for attendance. There were lots of papers and a huge trade show exhibit. I never saw so much safety equipment and other offerings.
