Before I moved to the Atlanta area, I connected in ATL dozens of times. You don’t even have to travel to or from the south to still find your way to the Atlanta airport as part of your trip. I met a passenger the other day who started her morning in Jackson, MS and was trying to get to Omaha. While it might seem logical that she was in Atlanta at that point, she got there by way of Memphis, and from Atlanta was headed to Milwaukee. Obviously, this is not the path from her original ticket, but once her first leg of the trip got disrupted it went downhill.

Yesterday I was heading to Milwaukee via commuter plane to catch a flight home. We were a little late pulling away from the gate when the attendant informed us that we still had to go through de-icing, and so some of our connections were in jeopardy. Almost everyone on this flight was connecting to somewhere else, and there was this collective groan that emerged with the announcement. It was a groan of discontent. I heard the person behind me ask his row mate, “Do you think that’s really necessary?”.

It was sort of painful to walk up to the gate in Milwaukee and see the jetway pulled away from my Atlanta-bound flight, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

When I buy a ticket, or when my company buys me a ticket, the money spent isn’t just for transportation from point A to point B. I am paying for the gate agents, the airport gate fees, the maintenance of the plane, the luggage handlers, and most importantly, the experienced experts who make the calls regarding the safety of a flight. In a weather situation like yesterday’s, I pay them to make the decision to de-ice, even though it will create scheduling ripples throughout their system. They don’t want to delay flights, but they don’t want disaster either. I sincerely believe that if the people on the plane yesterday could vote on the de-icing process, I would have been on the short end of the vote.

On the other hand, why the airline books tickets with a 25 minute connection, in Wisconsin, in February, is beyond me. The boarding process is underway before you even get there.

Do you have a peeve about safety practices that you believe don’t protect you? Would you want to put plane de-icing up to a vote?  Not me, thanks.

The words rang true for me today: Let’s be careful out there!

SaferByChoice is all about that idea. That if we equip people to make the best decisions, we will all be safer. As a result, everyone is better off. Employees are not compromised, and the business runs with less interruption.

I am traveling this week, and awoke this morning to see the scene you see with this post. Not the worst snowstorm of all time, and not a bad one by many standards. But the roads were not clear, my rental was a small, rear-wheel drive car, and the news reporters said local police were asking that non-essential travel be delayed.

Less than 10 years ago I would have convinced myself to get out there, clear the snow off the car, and get to the office. Today I thought about it for a bit, then I realized that I had all I needed on my PC, I had a good wireless connection, and I had a phone. That pretty much meant that my travel was non-essential. I had the face-to-face meetings that I came here for scheduled on Tuesday and Thursday, so there was no reason to rush to the local office today.

If there were someone expecting me in the office today, I believe I would have made the same decision. I am obligated to make good decisions for my company. Good business decisions, good quality decisions, good HR decisions, good safety decisions. I probably could handle the risks associated in driving in blowing snow, on roads that are not completely clean, but I don’t have to. Truth is, if I had an accident, I would be saying that I never should have gone out.

So instead, I was more productive than usual today. No travel time, no one stopping by the office to chat. and for an INTP like me, that makes for a great day!

Are you obligated to be safe? Do you compromise that obligation? What are you going to do about it?

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

When my son was first driving, he told me he thought he was a good driver. I told him he was, but that the real test is how he would handle the vehicle and himself when the unexpected happens. A tire failure. An animal runs in front of the car. Driving in a snowstorm. Now he’s 27, and he’s a better driver than he was before, because he’s gained experience and learned from that. He’s had many “moments of choice” when he had to call on his knowledge or experience to turn into the skid, or ease slowly to the side of the road, or take whatever maneuver the situation may have called for.

If you are in a job that has anything to do with people, especially leading or training them in any way, safety is part of your profession, whether you acknowledge it or not. You are in a position to help prevent accidents and injuries. For you, the moment of choice is happening constantly. You are looking at the equipment, the machinery, the workers, the office, the conditions all around you and trying to make them all flow together in a way that is good for your business. And the safest possible way is good for business.

Have you had a moment of choice today? I’ll bet you have. It may have been a choice regarding taking that cell phone call in the car, or even considering reading or answering a text message while driving. Maybe it was walking through a factory, you saw someone doing something that could be done with far less risk, and you took the time to point out the alternative, or you chose not to.

Did you have a moment of choice this week that you can point to as one that made a big difference, either for your own safety or those you work with? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

Culture is, in a way, a misleading word. It is a collective noun. It represents a collection of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, rituals, totems, and whatever else one tries to look at to define a culture. In business, this includes results.

The most important part is you. By your leadership, your actions, your statements, and your attitudes you communicate your personal part of culture. I could work for a company with a strong culture of safety controls, but that doesn’t define who I am. Maybe I have even stronger (or weaker) views of controls.

When you have an idea, an innovation that can bring a higher level of performance, people want to hear it. They want to understand the value of the idea, and they want to know what it takes to implement it. If it involves substantial change in what is expected of people, we may use “our culture” as the excuse to not proceed. But what about “our culture” can we tap into to make the idea work?

One of my blogging HR friends, Trisha McFarlane wrote an interesting post earlier this week regarding the legacy we leave with our workplace. For me, it’s not so much about what got done, but how I did it and what that means for the future of the company.

It’s not as important to me to measure how many people got hurt while I was a supervisor. It’s more important to me to know we eliminated several causes of recurring injury. It’s more important for me to know that when I left a role, the team’s view and ownership of safety was better than it was before. I don’t care if they credit me with that change, I just care that it happened.

What’s your safety legacy? Are you generating expertise that will be better than you?

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

It might not seem to be a brave thing at first glance, but I have seen bravery in plant managers who are willing to fire someone for a safety violation. It’s brave because it is not a popular decision. It’s brave because the employee involved was trying to keep production up when he reached into the machine. It’s brave because other employees who reported the action now feel at fault, and may never speak up again.

But where I’ve seen it done, it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Whenever I am involved in orienting employees, even when safety is not my direct accountability, I make it a point to let them know how I feel about my accountability for their safety. In short, if they don’t regard their own safety adequately, then we can’t afford someone to watch over them. One hundred out of one hundred times, I will go to an unemployment hearing over a perceived wrongful termination than to the funeral of an employee who I could have stopped from killing himself.

How courageous are your supervisors? Do they have the permission to be bold?

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

Peace-bound or not, it was odd to see people in all kinds of costumes walking around the convention and participating in the annual parade. As football fans from Virginia Tech and Alabama began their tailgating experience Saturday morning, soldiers, orcs, storm troopers, wizards and characters of all shapes and sizes walked down Peachtree Street in Atlanta. College football fans and avid Star Trek fans all gathered in the same place.

Walking through the vendor areas I heard expressions I quite possibly have never heard before.
“Why, that is a fine sword indeed.”
“But an elf would never wear a vest like that.”
“These Wolverine claws can be used as a dicer in the kitchen.”
“Are you interested in upgrading your armor?”

An armor upgrade. Why yes, the perfect solution.
How many times do we propose solutions that we believe protect an employee, but instead we weigh them down with unneccesary burden. Things that don’t help them do their job better, but reduce performance.

In safety, that comes in the expectation to don more PPE – Personal Protective Equipment. In grievance resolution, we create a process to prevent future grievances of this type, but the process consumes organizational energy and resources that could be better placed improving the real processes of the organization. You know, the ones that make money and that should be better than what the competition does.

Do your employees think of protection and policies as armor, because contact is inevitable? Or do they recognize PPE as a seatbelt – you hope you never need it, but when it comes into play you are glad you have it on. More armor is just more cumbersome. That’s fine if you enjoy a role play and dress up a couple of times a year. But it is not the best solution for day to day.

Could you imagine a safety or policy improvement effort aimed at reducing cost by totally eliminating the need for a certain type of PPE? How about eliminating the need for knives as a tool, and coincidentally eliminating the need for cut-proof gloves? Or replace that eight page absentee policy with one page. If you can’t say it simply, you are managing the wrong thing.

It’s a dream, a fantasy perhaps. But sometimes a good dream leads to a real world solution.

Let’s be careful out there.

While I agree in principle, the truth is that some groups on average are higher performers than others. And the least of the best might be pretty darn good. And if I assume that supervisors have the same distribution, well then I might just be getting ranked by a low end supervisor in the first place, and maybe ranking people is one of his low performing areas.

What if you put one hundred employees, who all had some knowledge of each others’ work, in a room with three big circles on the floor. The “average” circle has room for 50 employees to stand in, the “above average” circle has room for 25, and the “below average” circle can hold 25. Tell them to get into the right circle, discuss it among themselves, and be arranged correctly in two hours.

Chaos, right?

Now put the 8 people who mange those 100 in a room and ask them to arrange their people. More orderly? Maybe. More correct? Who knows.

But this is a safety blog, not an HR blog, so let’s turn the focus to safety. Imagine 3 operating plants with identical accident measures in terms of human impact. No fatalities, no lost time injuries, 3 cuts requiring sutures in each facility. No one suffered any permanent disability. One plant has very active safety committees, another has no committees but has 100% attendance at safety meetings, and the third has neither of those distinctions, but has also recorded 350 near miss incidents for the year, where the others recorded less than 100 each. Which plant manager is above average in safety management?

This year’s stats are not enough to go on. You would want to look at all kinds of factors to make that assessment. It was great that no one was killed or seriously injured, but which of these would be a suitable place for your son or daughter to work? None would be good enough from my standpoint. I want them to work in the one with above average safety performance year after year. Not in one period, but over many. These are all below average.

Do you measure safety by failure rates, or by the actions that lead to successful results?

Let’s be careful out there.

Because I’ve had very few injuries in daily or routine activities, I rarely look at how to make my performance safer. With my son’s wedding this weekend, I got to thinking about why you should, at least once in a while, take a look at some of the most hazardous things we do and identify improvements.

1. It’s the right thing to do
2. We are self-protective by nature, but we are not inherently able to identify hazards
3. You owe your family you best self at all times
4. You owe your employer your best professional self at work
5. You owe yourself the opportunity to reach your potential
6. You make a difference
7. You want to see your children grow into adults, and watch them become their own best selves

My daughter and my older son have both asked me to perform their wedding ceremonies, and for that I am grateful. I would not have imagined how impactful it was for me to do that, and it would be a shame to not have been able to do so.

I have another son in college, and a most amazing wife, so I need to continue to work and live as safely as possible, and to take the best care of this one body I have.

What are your reasons to be your best self? Is any excuse to do less good enough?

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 are more clever. Lots.