Each tool brings us an advantage. In physical terms, it is usually a mechanical advantage. But never a thinking advantage. Tools sometimes make us think less. We don’t always anticipate what could go wrong if we use the wrong tool or use a tool in the wrong way. A screwdriver is not a lever or a chisel. A wrench is not a hammer.

Sharpest tool in the drawer

One of the most frequently used tools in any house is a knife. A sharp edge. Table knives. Steak knives. Knives to cut vegetables or remove the skin from fruit. A knife for spreading putty. A knife used in scrapbooking. A pocket knife. A hunting knife. A utility knife, which is usually a handle with replaceable razor blades.

All these knives were designed for specific purposes. Each one should be used as designed, and the user should make sure they are always cutting in a way that does not endanger them or those around them. Use the knife that is sharp enough for the job, has the right length, and that you can apply sufficient pressure to cut with. Sounds easy enough, right?

In my experience, the utility knife is the most mis-judged knife of all those above. In using a utility knife, people frequently use too much pressure so they can get the cut done. High amounts of force, applied to a fine edge, can often lead to a slip that could result in injury. In industries where these knives are used routinely, employees are taught proper cutting techniques, given cut-proof or cut-resistant gloves to wear on their non-cutting hand, and even given careful instruction on how to change the blade when it is too dull to properly cut.

If I buy that same knife at Home Depot, I won’t get that instruction. I might read the warnings, but they won’t all come to mind each time I pick the knife up. And a cut-proof glove? They’re a little pricey for the amount of time the average home owner might ever use the knife, so they don’t get purchased and kept with the knife.

Last week, I had to replace the thermostat in my home. A simple job, but it required a couple of short jumper wires. Three inches long with about three-quarters of an inch bare wire on each end. I couldn’t find my wire strippers – the tool that is designed to do exactly this task. And it does the task well with minimal risk. I did find my utility knife, and with careful consideration and deliberate action, used that tool to strip the wires. To do it safely took some effort. I didn’t just hold the knife to the insulation and cut toward the end. Too much possibility of nicking the wire or slipping and cutting something else. Work was done without injury. It just took longer and involved more risk.

Risk, ultimately, it the thing we are willing to trade for expediency. Does that make sense to you?

The next time you are faced with compromising on tool use, ask yourself what the true compromise is. As what you are giving up or willing to risk in order to get the job done. And if you have employees that you are accountable for, ask yourself if you would be willing to allow them the same risk.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

This leads to a lot of interesting behavior, and too much emphasis at times on the wrong things.

For instance, when the trend in injuries starts to climb, some people go into defensive mode. They direct more and more people to look at the things that caused recent injury and remind people what to do to avoid those things. If they were playing offense, they would always be looking for the next potential situation to avoid, the next hazard to put to rest forever.

When we play offense well, we “run up the score” on safe hours worked, because we are playing such good offense we can’t be stopped.

Truth is, no one has enough players to play safety defensively. You can protect only so much. You need to engage the players – your employees – in the powerful offensive skills of awareness and action.

It’s great to have an incredible goalie or an ace closer to come in and finish the game. But if the offense doesn’t score, it won’t matter. Win, you must.

I’ve worked around big machines my whole life. Machines don’t kill people, but people die from making mistakes while working with them. Machines are totally unforgiving of human error, which is unfortunate because quite honestly, most of us are likely to err each day.

In the snow and ice we had in Atlanta a few weeks back I took this picture of icicles on my roof. Most of the icicles formed exactly as you might expect. Built by the pull of gravity, narrow at the low end with a broad base holding them to the gutter. Most were straight, and they were of varying lengths. But what about the one in the picture? Why the odd forked formation? Was it the result of an air pattern from the nearby bathroom vent that caused two streams to form? Or maybe it was the way the tree branches shaded some of them in parts of the day but not others.

If I had a goal to have no icicles form, I lost control. I would have had to put some heating wires on the roof or the gutters to assure that anything that melted didn’t re-form as ice.

If I had a goal to have identical, perfect vertical icicles, then there, too, I lost control. I may not have been able to prevent this formation, but I could have stopped it before it grew to two distinct legs.

And in safety, we try to control those things, which we have learned through experience, could result in injury or property loss. We see something that looks a little out of control, and we try to adjust it back to normal. When we are well trained, we don’t look for the failure, but we look for the potential for failure. We see things developing that could take us out of control and try to restore order.

When a person is injured or killed in a mahinery related accident, people will frequently say it was a random event. I worked with someone who received a bad hand injury reaching into a machine. He thought that he could do it safely, and had done it without incident hundreds of times. But this one time, there was a factor that was different. Not a major factor, but enough to cause a different outcome. You might say it was a random event, but what wasn’t random was his action. It was planned and reapeated time and again, just without consequence.

Do you see someone do something around machinery that makes you uncomfortable? Are you afraid to challenge them because of their experience doing the job? What if the unexpected happens? Will they walk away or is there a possibility that they could be seriously or fatally injured?

Random events. The definition is clear – you don’t know what and you don’t know when. Something is going to happen. We can’t control that, but we can control how prepared we are for possible events, and what precautions we take to stay out of Harm’s way. And to stay out of the way of his cousin, Potential Harm.

Watch out for random. Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

Refuse to do work that you cannot perform safely.

If you see someone performing work in an unsafe manner, or in a manner that could lead to injury, you are obligated to speak up and stop them.

Both of these require an environment of trust and respect, and a great deal of patience on the part of managers and team leaders. If implemented in an environment that has not historically supported stopping work to look at the safety of an action, then you need to recognize the need to think differently. You need to be willing to praise and acknowledge those that are trying to bring a higher level of safety to their work.

The power of the process lies in obligation #3.

If someone asks you to stop doing something that they consider unsafe, you are obligated to stop, discuss and issue with them, and agree to a safe approach before continuing.

Would this bring your operation to a grinding halt? If so, you likely have too many safety issues on your hands and you need a major overhaul of your safety program. But if you have been chugging along at some “acceptable” level of injury and can’t seem to make progress to a level of zero incidents, I suggest you consider how you could implement something similar in your workplace.

Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Do you have a safety committee that meets on a regular basis? Bring the idea to them and see what they think would be the probability of acceptance. Maybe just reinforcing the idea of the first obligation is the place to start, and you could work on an observation program in the future that would allow you to consider the next two.
2. Can your management or leadership team buy in to this? Do they trust the workforce enough to know that people will use this the right way? You may need to start with that team first, and make sure they could support the implications. You aren’t selling a new safety system here, you are trying to raise the level of safety performance. You will never get to zero injuries without a process that fully engages employees. And you don’t buy that off the shelf, you implement with every day and every interaction.
3. Do you have PC or email access for employees? Consider setting up an anonymous way of submitting concerns or ideas. In one place I worked, we had a simple database set up with forms where people could submit ideas from kiosks that required no sign-in. They could choose to add their name or not, and we continually acknowledged those that submitted suggestions.
4. Are you concerned about how your union would accept a process where employees are expected to “confront” one another? Ask the union leadership to help you problem solve how this could work in your environment. First, help them see how this could lead to better levels of safety. Consider what discipline would look like for someone who chooses not to stop when confronted. If an employee is violating accepted procedures, then management should already be noticing that and dealing with it. Obligation #2 is designed to identify new areas to improve, not to tattle on those who are breaking existing rules.

As far as I can see, there is no reason to avoid employee involvement in improving safety. I see it as the only way to get to world class performance. You don’t need these three obligations to get there, but you need something.

If not this, what are you doing to get to that next level? Remember, hope is not a strategy. Results require action.

Thanks, and lets be careful out there.

My thanks to Trish McFarlane, who’s recent post on preparedness prompted my thinking about how we all can find safer ways to do things. Though not directly related, these ideas can help move past mere compliance and into an environment and culture where safety is first and foremost in reality, not just in our employee handbooks.

What I have seen work is embodied in three obligations that belong to each and every employee. The first one was very simply:

Refuse to do work that you cannot perform safely.

The second obligation puts our power of observation to work. Like the first obligation, it involves a high level of trust and respect. Obligation #2 is:

If you see someone performing work in an unsafe manner, or in a manner that could lead to injury, you are obligated to speak up and stop them.

Sounds simple, right? But imagine you are a new employee, being trained by a 15 year veteran and he is demonstrating a method you can see is risky. Let’s say he’s using a cutting tool without using the protective equipment provided and required. If you’re brave you might point that out and hope that he just forgot. But you might also be concerned that he is going to explain it away . “I’ve been doing it like this for 15 years, do you really think you can tell me how to do my job?”

If we truly care about the safety of our workplace, we learn not to care about someone’s pride in successfully avoiding injury even though they are taking unnecessary risk. We learn to value that doing something in the safest possible way is the best approach to assuring our safety and the safety of those around us.

To implement this obligation, you might start with de-personalizing it. Promote the observation required by having people identify unsafe conditions or housekeeping problems. Something that doesn’t start with a “You’re doing it wrong” kind of approach, but gets people comfortable with identifying hazards. The hard part is in implementing a system for people to report these kind of things that includes putting resolution of the problem in their court. It could be as simple as having them send an email to a safety@yourcorp mailbox that is reviewed everyday. Or a simple database form that gives an individual an opportunity to document what they saw, report what they did about it, and suggest how it could be avoided in the future.

So if an employee notices a small puddle of oil or fluid, they can go to a form to report it, state that they cleaned it up, and suggest that the shop take a look at all the lift vehicles to see if there are leaks that can be repaired. Then, and this requires discipline, the employee is acknowledged for identifying the problem, for taking care of the immediate threat, and the appropriate assignment to follow up on a solution is made.

As employees get more observant, and get recognized for that behavior, they start to see that they can impact safety before an incident and start to challenge one another in their actions.

Now, you might be wondering if employees are really willing to challenge each other, or if they are required or expected to report observations on other team members as well. Will they be willing to name a co-worker who is doing something in an unsafe manner?

In my next and final post on this topic, I’ll explain why Obligation #3 helps tidy that up.

In Part 1 and Part 2, I was explaining the relationship of chance-taking and outcome. Specifically, we wait in line to buy tickets for highly improbable though favorable outcomes (lottery), and we take chances on unfavorable outcomes because we think they are highly improbable (many other aspects of our lives). We do the former out of hope, and we do the latter often in the interest of expediency.

Now, if you want to save your money and bet realistically on the most probable outcome, put your money away and don’t buy the lottery ticket. Put it in savings, use it to pay down debt, buy what you need. Just don’t buy the ticket.  All it requires is a little personal discipline.

In personal safety, at work and on your own time, you also have to apply discipline to NOT buy tickets. You have to:

• Identify the driving conditions and adjust accordingly.
• Research and buy additional protective equipment before you mow the lawn or paint the house.
• Read the labels and follow directions. If something requires extra ventilation, there’s a reason.
• Approaching a traffic light as it turns yellow, if your internal voice says “I think I can make this” your new replacement voice should be saying “Time to brake”.

Taking shortcuts is like buying tickets to an injury. We fool ourselves by saying “If I am just more careful in using this chair instead of a ladder, I’ll save time and money and won’t get hurt.” Doing this repeatedly, you collect enough tickets, and you might eventually have the unfavorable outcome.

Actually, I don’t care if you buy lottery tickets or not. But I worry about carelessness when you don’t even realize you are being careless. Don’t buy a ticket to an accident, make the safe choice, every day.

Let’s be careful out there.

Your personal safety is determined one decision at a time. Sometimes you are dependent on the decisions of others. Other drivers, your doctor, the guy who puts new brakes in your car. But how does your personal decision process work? Do you know? Take a moment to answer these three questions:

1. A ball and a bat cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

Each of these questions has an incorrect answer that many people quickly come to. In fact, in a study where these questions were posed to over 3,000 college students, the average correct score was1.24 out of 3.

Does this mean our intuition is wrong? It all depends on the models we have in our heads. The concept of doubling every day is a geometric progression, which is not in everyone’s day-to-day thinking. Neither is the concept of production planning. But, in the study, people who got all three answers correct were also more consistent in their risk-taking choices. Risk taking, the acceptance or denial of risk, is ultimately a decision process.

What does all this mean? Well primarily it points to the variability of being human. We are not 100% consistent in all we do, including the way in which we choose to protect ourselves. The reason Health and Safety regulations have become what they are is that people don’t always take precautions they could because they are inconvenient, too costly, too time consuming. When the government steps in and says “you must” then people fear the cost of the certain punishment over the cost of the low-probability potential loss.

Are you an independent thinker when it comes to safety, or do you rely on regulations and on the expectation that all products are designed with our safety in mind?

So you can check your scores, the answers to the three questions are here:

1. The bat is $1.05, and the ball is $0.05.
2. 5 minutes
3. 47 days

If you got all these correct, then you have some pretty clear thinking going on. I hope that extends to your choices regarding safety. Don’t forget, let’s be careful out there.

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

]]> http://saferbychoice.com/2010/04/questions-your-first-answer-correct/feed/ 1 http://saferbychoice.com/2010/03/6-safety-ideas-for-your-wallet/ http://saferbychoice.com/2010/03/6-safety-ideas-for-your-wallet/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:20:52 +0000 Tim http://saferbychoice.com/?p=710 My interest in safety began when I experienced a “near-hit” incident early in my engineering career, and when I realized how many of the equipment operators I had known were missing some of their digits. At that time of my life, I was enjoying playing piano and guitar, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose a part of a hand.

It became such an important issue for me that later in my career, when I had a team of about 80 people, I didn’t let a meeting go by without some discussion about safety and the importance of challenging each other over potentially unsafe behavior. One day I began talking about the cost of an accident and one of my people told me he thought that maybe that’s what I was concerned about, saving money. I replied that regardless of what you think of my intent, I offer every employee the opportunity to stop doing work they consider unsafe until we can mutually resolve the issue. How can that be a bad thing?

So at the risk of being all about the money, I recognize that sometimes saving a few bucks is a good motivator for folks. Here are a few ways in which safety can save you money!

1. Practicing good methods around the house with knives, ladders, electricity and stairs can almost guarantee a much smaller chance of heading to the emergency room for a related accident. And under no current or emerging health plan would that be an economical chance to take.
2. Keeping things clean and clutter free not only enhances the value of your home, but reduces the chance of injury and again, those same ER visits.
3. Speaking of clutter, those partially used gallons of paint from all the projects you’ve done over the years could be a problem waiting to happen. Every year or so, someone in your area is having a free disposal day for items just like that. No cost to get rid of them, and no extra fuel for fire or explosion.
4. You know that wobbly old step ladder you got from your grandparents’ house when your father helped them move to a smaller place? It might be the most expensive free thing you have in your house. Throw it away and buy a new one. Yes, this is going to cost you, but think of it as cost avoidance.
5. Have a pest problem in your home? Hire a professional to take care of it. Again, this may sound like a cost, but when you start trying to handle this yourself you are starting by treating the symptom. You may not know where the nest or hive or burrow is. I watched a neighbor go after a hornet’s nest with a power washer one summer evening. It was hanging from a second story eave, just out of reach of the stream, so he imrpovised methods of positioning himself higher. He didn’t get stung at all, but he came so close to falling from the fence he was perched on and it would not have been a minor injury. He was lucky.
6. I know you’ve heard this before, but check tire wear and inflation on all your vehicles regularly. Change those tires before they fail. Don’t wait until the day after the big rain storm when you lost control of the vehicle, do it now.

Safety, like quality, is free. Every dollar spent, along with the right discipline, will save you much more in the long run.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there!

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

Driving is hazardous. It also can be time-consuming, particularly if you live far from work or take a crowded commute. And as I pointed out on my list last week, people sometimes compromise their safety in the name of expediency – they text while driving.

In the world of industrial safety, companies who excel do not depend on the law to tell them what they can or cannot do. They do the things that must be done to assure employee safety. No doubt, many factories are safer than they might otherwise be due to OSHA regulation and supervision, but the best don’t need that. You shouldn’t either.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is a technological fix you can apply to prevent texting while in a moving vehicle. For Android phones, you can buy Textecution, which is advertised as something to put on your teenager’s phone.

Then there’s TXTBlocker, which again is advertised to parents. And Employers.

And coming soon, you can buy iZup (get it, eyes up) for Android and Windows smartphones.

Call records will easily show if you were texting near the time of an accident. But do you really need a software solution? What you really need is a personal discipline solution. If you, as an adult or parent cannot see or understand that this is a dangerous problem, then don’t lecture your kids. If you can, then teach your kids to manage it. Sure, you can pay for the software to prevent it, but there are always going to be new ways to work around software, and kids will figure it out.

Trust but verify. Check the phone records against the time you know your son or daughter was out. They will tell you and you can take the appropriate action. And in the meantime, lead by example. Don’t send or read text messages while you are operating your vehicle. It can wait. Text with integrity.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

1. Litigation. There are lots of sites that tell you of the stupidest warning labels on things. Like the stroller warning that tells you to make sure there is no child in the stroller before folding it for storage (find this and similar warnings here).  As a result things are made safer all the time, and we become less sensitive to failures that could happen. Good that things are made safer, bad that we become less responsible for outcomes.
2. Legislation. Safer cars, safer braking, safer restraint systems – all good. OSHA regulations – also good. Thinking that as long as I follow the rules all the laws protect me – not so good. There will never be enough legislation (I hope) to force everything to be idiot-proof. As I’ve heard it said, we are always making better idiots.
3. Over-Parenting. How much is too much? Almost every parent finds themselves in a situation where their child is hurt and wonders what they could have done or should have done differently. I didn’t make a point of stepping in the way of my kids for everything they wanted to do that I felt was not totally safe, but I did say “NO” when they wanted to play on a friend’s trampoline, which the parents had placed way too close to the side of their house. Even when you try to prevent something, your child may try it anyway and will then learn that you were correct or that you were just too cautious.
4. We’re busy. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of hearing about texting while driving. It’s a bad idea, don’t do it. But in the rush to get through our busy day, it can easily feel like sending this one very important message can be done safely. Busy-ness is not a good excuse for safety shortcuts.
5. Convenience. I’ve stood on chairs hundreds of times in my life. But now when I need to clean the ceiling fan or change a ceiling light, I get out the ladder. It takes more time, but it is markedly safer.

We can’t eliminate all risk. But we can learn to do a better job of assessing risk and making choices that will lead to safe outcomes nearly all the time.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there!

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!