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
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