An Ounce of Prevention

In my opinion, safety professionals have one of the most difficult yet satisfying careers there is.  They spend their time working with employees to help them get through the day and back to their loved ones unharmed.  They are some the hardest working people I know.  When incidents occur, their hours can be 24/7, and they constantly live with the always present chance of have to deal with serious injury or even death.  They balance executive demands with the reality of corporate budgets.  They need to be tough on workers yet show them the respect and kindness they deserve.  The great safety leaders spend most of their time thinking about and trying to prevent injuries. 

If you ask any safety professional, they will all tell you that preventing accidents is far less costly than fixing them.  Just as productivity experts have been saying for years, that improving productivity depends on predicting and preventing process failures rather than spending the bulk of your resources after failures have occurred.  So to, companies need to predict and eliminate hazards that can result in injuries.

Safety incentive systems should focus on rewarding the prediction and prevention of incidents.  By reinforcing prevention in a positive manner on an ongoing basis, you can change behavior and decrease accidents.  Prevention is far less costly than correction. 

All injuries may or may not be preventable.  But all bad safety habits can be changed by using the proven tenets of behavior based safety and then rewarding the change with positive reinforcement.  In the case of safety, the old adage holds true.  

 An ounce of prevention can save a pound of cure.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net.

An Exercise on the Various Myths About Safety Programs

Why do you believe what you do about Safety? Do you question accepted norms without evidence based on your own safety culture?  Do you use critical thinking to help you in your quest to help your employees to work safely?

Following are five topics or accepted “truths” within the safety world that seem to be proven facts and are rarely questioned.  They are dogma to most, but are they really? Whether you agree or disagree with them, the real positive in this exercise is to take an honest appraisal of what you think of them with regard to your own safety culture. 

1) Safety is #1

Is it really?  You see it all the time in website copy, on company brochures, on the backs of work shirts, on vehicles, posters, on just about anything.  You see various iterations of it. It is often adopted by the company as the ultimate statement of commitment to creating safety on the job.  But the truth is that companies are not created to be safe, they are created to make a profit for the owners and/or shareholders. Corporate decisions are made every day.  Is safety considered 100% of the time before making those decisions?  If not, Safety is Not #1.

2) Counting Injuries is the best Measurement of Safety

Reducing the number of accidents and injuries is almost always the number one goad of any safety incentive program we’ve analyzed, but is it the right goal?  Wouldn’t reducing unsafe behaviors be a better one? Safe/unsafe and injury/uninjured are not linked to safety.  Workers do unsafe things all the time and avoid injuries.  No injury was the outcome, but how it was achieved was not by being safe.

3) Zero Accidents/Injuries should be a Commitment

No injuries can and does in many cases mean you were lucky. These types of goals can also motivate some very wrong behaviors like hiding injuries through reclassification and accommodation.

4) Passing a Safety Audit Means You’ll Be Safe

Standards and audit systems are ubiquitous in the safety industry. Many have impressive names and have been created with “world-wide” input making them sound even more impressive. In reality, these are almost all “opinion based” with little or no scientific evidence to support them. Passing an audit doesn’t guarantee anything, just that you “passed the audit.”  You may want to read the results of your audit with a view toward what it may not be telling you. 

5) All Incidents Are Preventable

The use of the word “all” makes this statement wrong.  To make it right means you would have absolute power over all things and absolute power doesn’t exist in humans.  A better way of looking at prevention is to consider that all unsafe behaviors can be changed.  And when you change unsafe behaviors reducing accidents follows. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net