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!

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.

Whether at work during a safety investigation or sitting in the principal’s office explaining why your paper reads like the Wikipedia entry on the same subject (maybe is ’cause I wrote that, too), here are a few of the FGA’s for why someone took a shortcut.

1. I know the procedure says to shut the machine down, but by clearing the jam on the fly we saved 4 minutes of production.
2. Jimmie told me to.
3. I was afraid that if I went through the major intersection, a policeman might see me holding my beer.
4. I didn’t think anyone really read the middle pages of the term paper.
5. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have won.
6. I was being creative.
7. Because the way you showed me to do that takes too long.
8. Because if we get ahead on our production, we can stay in the break room from 3 to 5 playing cards.

Don’t be in a hurry to the point you look for short cuts. It’s OK to fix processes and make them easier. In fact, every business values that. But short cuts that compromise your safety or the safety and integrity of others are not worth it.

Is there a short cut that is worth taking? Tell me about one that is a good short cut.

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!

If he had fallen a little bit to one side or other of the roots, he may have been bruised but OK. Bad luck was hitting the roots, bad choice was trying to reach too far. We should have gotten down and moved the ladder to where we needed it to be. I think of this every year when I get out the big ladder to do my Christmas lights.

Anyway, there are a few moments of personal safety that I would like back. None of them had serious consequences, but the outcomes could have been much worse. I can’t be lucky forever!

1. When Mikey Franco encouraged me to take the short-cut path down the hill to the valley by my childhood home. I tumbled, rolled, and screamed, and in the end I had a few scratches and bruises. It was not a short fall. It could have killed me.
2. When I drove my VW hatchback into the side of another car that had spun out on the freeway in a snowstorm. By the time I saw the other car, the best I could do is try and steer between the car and the guardrail, but steering wasn’t really working. I was driving too fast for the weather. Seatbelts saved my life.
3. When I was installing some new equipment early in the engineering part of my career. Long hours and frequent changes to machine adjustment led me to reach in where I shouldn’t have. I walked away with a contusion, and I’ve seen others lose fingers doing the same thing.
4. Driving in another snowstorm 10 years later because we had tickets to see a play in Schenectady. Nothing happened. It was just stupid.
5. Driving after alcohol consumption. I did it, more than a few times. But one time in particular I’d like to have back. Not because of anything that happened, but when you don’t remember how you got home, and you realize you drove, that’s just wrong. That was over 30 years ago and taught me a lot.
6. Oh yeah, and the time I picked up the hot end of a just-burned-out sparkler. You never do THAT twice, but wish you had never done it in the first place.

All things considered, I’ve been pretty lucky when I’ve made bad choices. How about you? Any do-overs?

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!

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.

In my second or third year as a team leader, I was making a safety presentation to my team. I was reading a lot about Deming at the time, and the whole notion that quality, managed correctly, reduces cost. The same applies to safety.

When employees are fully trained and expected to work safely, the investment involved in getting them there pays off. They stay safe and remain able to work and contribute. They never become a non-contributing expense. One of my machine operators said “You’ve always been a proponent of safety Tim, but the way you just explained it, your interest is in lower costs, not my safety. If I didn’t know you, that’s what I would have understood you to say just now.”

This was a smart guy, a team member who had worked with or for me for at least 3 years at that point. He was trying to explain to the newer employees in the room that I cared more about their personal safety than they might think I did from listening to me. I assumed they already knew that.

I asked if that mattered, if working in the safest possible manner was it’s own reward, and something we do for ourselves and our family. The truth is that my employer at the time had a tighter standard for safety than many of us had. Things we might do at home to save time or money – like use a chair instead of a steady ladder – were simply not tolerated in the workplace.

But would people work more safely because they thought I was genuinely concerned for their safety, or because the consequence of discipline for not following rules was something they could not afford?

It occurred to me that I did not care about motive. I just wanted them to work as safely as possible. If they didn’t have a personal motive, then part of my work was to help them get one.

What’s your motive for encouraging safe practices at work AND at home? What is the motive perceived by your employees? Does it matter?

Let’s be careful out there.

The reactions are interesting, and reflect my experience. It seems that some people know it’s coming and are committed to fulfilling the assumption. Others are shocked, tearful, angry, and even in deep denial.

It is difficult to predict the outcome of a meeting like this, which is why I recommend that some sort of security action take place. If I am working somewhere that has security personnel, we generally stage them nearby. If not, we ask a few people in the immediate area to work in a different office and put some supervisors nearby in case they are needed. While I have been nervous quite a few times, I’ve never had a fearful experience.

So I always get a kick out of the end of Top Chef, when one of the contestants is told “Please pack your knives and go home”. I don’t really want a fired employee to first get a hold of their most dangerous tool before they walk out the door. One precaution I would take is to say “We had your knives packed up while you were in here, and they will be delivered to your home”.

But reality TV is not so real, and I’m sure they aren’t considering this approach as an example of the right way to terminate an employee.

What security steps do you think are necessary in a true termination? Have you ever been truly afraid at work during a time of layoff or reduction?

It’s all a part of staying safe. 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.

The fact is, he can’t do it alone. He needs help.

One of the people who can provide help is the Explorer. You see, every advance in safety just creates a doorway to new possibilities. But if we wait for the next accident or injury before we explore – through investigations of what went wrong – it will be too late.

The safety explorer is looking beyond today and beyond the current solutions to see what else is possible. She brings ideas that others could not see because they are busy in the “now”. And that’s good, because someone has to take care of “now” as well. We can’t all be driving to the next destination.

Do you see yourself as the explorer? Are you looking to the horizon at what we haven’t yet learned and trying to figure it out, or are you busy commissioning the design for the safety tee shirt you want to give away to promote safety? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

It takes a diverse set of talents to make real progress. In the next few weeks I’ll introduce some to complement the warrior and the explorer.

Let’s be careful out there!