Workers once relied on canaries, mice and rats to warn them of toxic gas in the atmosphere. Inefficient and ineffective methods of gas detection are now a thing of the past.
Directing the attention and energy of 200,000 people working in 50 countries around the world at one time on the topic of industrial health and safety is no easy task. It takes planning, coordination and, most importantly, the initiative and ingenuity of the employees in each individual facility. And that is exactly what the global industrial manufacturer, Saint-Gobain, did this past summer.
Being in the field provides me with the perfect opportunity to find out what construction workers have to say about safety. We can understand what people are about if we probe a little and then take time to listen.
So you’re considering buying software to help you manage your health and safety programs, and OH&S management system. Good idea...but where do you start?
For many safety practitioners, the daily demand of managing many different types of data and information is becoming increasingly challenging. It’s been said that the safety field is information-rich, but how do you make sense of all that information? And better still, how does all that safety data give you opportunities to improve the way in which your safety system is managed?
When a hazard seems obvious, there is a strong incentive not to worry about it. After all, our workers are smart enough to see it and avoid it. From a practical point of view, our resources can be better spent elsewhere.
I remember a number of announcements, all separated by as much as a year, all announcing the arrival of “good news,†when he and I were co-workers. The most notable being news of his engagement and subsequent marriage, later followed by the announcement of the expected arrival of his first child. Then came the news of the second child and most recently of the third.
The answer to the question in the title is “yes.â€
When we perceive an event as a challenge or potential threat, a physical and psychological response is triggered by the autonomic nervous system. Whether the stressor is external (an oncoming car swerves into our lane) or internal (an anxiety-arousing thought), its onset abrupt (a sudden emergency) or gradual (a long-term unresolved problem), this automatic reaction is essentially the same.
According to OSHA administrator, Edwin Foulke Jr., OSHA’s current “big issues†are: #1 hexchrome, #2 pandemic flu preparedness, #3 global harmonization, and #4 permissible exposure limits (PELs). Among these big issues, global harmonization is likely to become the biggest problem for most employers.
For many years accident measures like the number of accidents, frequency rates, severity rates, and dollar costs were used to measure the progress of the organizational unit because practitioners felt comfortable using them. These results measures did not reveal whether the overall safety system was effective, diagnose what was or was not working, or indicate whether the system was in or out of control.
I bet most of you have used the term guilt trip when explaining personal feelings or when attempting to understand the behavior of others. What do we mean? Can we use this metaphor to improve safety?
Yes.
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