| Shock tactics wake people up to their safety responsibilities |
When your associates start to yawn or nod off
as you talk once more about lockout/tagout, or housekeeping, or
slips and falls . . .
Studies of serious lost-time injuries and workplace deaths point
time and time again to the human factor.
Charlie Morecraft, who runs Phoenix Safety Management, knows all
about this, and he has made it his mission to wake people up to
the need for safety vigilance, all the time.
Engineered safeguards, safe operating procedures, strictly enforced
safety rules, all make a poor defense against injuries and deaths
unless workers sincerely believe in safety, actively promote it,
and take personal and joint responsibility for protecting themselves.
Unfortunately it is easy for workers to pay lip service to safety
responsibility, while privately they adopt a casual or even a cynical
attitude.
The rot can set in easily, says Charlie, especially when nothing
bad has happened for a long time: "Workers adopt the attitude,
'I've done this so long I know just how far I can go', 'safety procedures
are overkill for new workers', or worse, 'Safety rules are for softies'."
When people turn off their safety antennae, something must be done
to wake them up, Charlie says.
Charlie got his own wake-up call in a way that he does not wish
anyone to repeat. Charlie worked in an Exxon oil refinery for 27
years. He took safety short cuts for many years with impunity, but
then, as he says, one terrible night he "paid the price".
(See Charlie Morecraft's Story,
next article.)
Charlie is a firm believer that safety is everyone's responsibility—jointly
and alone. It's a team effort, involving management, every work
crew and each individual team member. Prior to his injury, he could
never see management as an ally in safety. He admits that his attitude
to management was 'us and them'.
"I was a Teamster. To me, management was the enemy. Exxon always
proclaimed that safety was number one. But I never thought they
were serious. What would you expect them to say? ‘Profits
are number one, safety is number two’?”
It was only after he suffered terrible injuries, that Charlie realized
that management took its safety responsibilities very seriously.
It was he, Charlie, who didn't.
When Charlie thinks about this, he gets angry. Angry at himself.
He wants to convey that anger to everyone who works in potentially
hazardous conditions, and who has a casual attitude to safety. He
wants people to be emotionally involved in safety. He wants them
to see that all the safeguards, all the administrative procedures,
the safety rules, the protective equipment, won't protect them from
themselves. They have to take charge of their own safety, and make
safety "job one".
If you sense that people are being casual about safety, if they
seem to take short cuts when no one is looking, if people are paying
lip service to the need for safety, Charlie has some suggestions:
- Recognize that enforcing the rules isn't
enough. Rules alone will not keep your associates safe. People
must work safely because they want to work safely.
- Troop out all the war stories you can
find. In every industry, there are horror stories of people taking
short cuts and seriously injuring themselves. Run through one
or another of them at every meeting. Show workers how vulnerable
they are if they don't follow safety procedures.
- Make it personal. Show team members
their statistical chances of an injury, and talk about what it
will mean to Joe or Mary on your team, if they suffer a similar
injury.
- Stress that workers are not only responsible
for themselves, they are responsible to co-workers, and to those
they hold dear. Show them who pays the real price of injuries.
"You can't work, and are on disability. Workers Comp. may
pay for a roof over your head, but who is going to take your kids
to the ball game? How is your spouse going to manage while you
spend months or years in hospitals or recuperating?" The
real cost of a serious injury, Charlie Morecraft says, is paid
by families. If you don't owe it to yourself, you owe it to them
to work safely. No relative of a worker who is injured or killed
on the job is going to be proud that their spouse or parent was
killed or injured because he was so tough he ignored safety procedures.
They are going to be left with the empty feeling that it was all
avoidable, and whether they are angry or sad, they won't be able
to avoid thinking how stupid, how irresponsible, he was.
- Insist workers watch out for each other.
Many people have the attitude "If my co-workers want to take
short cuts, that's their business", or "Do as I say,
don't do as I do". Charlie says that he used to think like
that. He doesn't any more. If his fellow workers had had a more
positive attitude to safety, maybe Charlie Morecraft would have
too. “Safety responsibility,” he says, “means
setting a good example, and seeing that your
co-workers work safely too."
You know you need to use shock tactics when:
- workers can't tell you the safety rules
- a macho attitude to PPE and safety rules
has crept in
- you have to remind people to wear their
PPE
- you haven't had a lost time injury in
ten years and workers are becoming complacent
- you ask for questions at a safety meeting
and there aren't any
- workers wear sun glasses to safety meetings
so you can't tell if they are asleep or not.
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