Workplace Safety Culture

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From warehouses and distribution facilities to the factory floor, thousands of workers depend on safety knives to perform important jobs while providing an extra layer of injury-preventing protection.

Not many people walk around throughout their day with a risk assessment in hand. We should, however, always have an informal risk assessment tool in our mind that allows us to perform at least a cursory assessment until we can dig deeper or in a more formal way.

Construction work zones are dangerous. Every day, workers who step foot on highways and roads risk danger from vehicle traffic and heavy equipment. Completing work is important, but when safety takes a back seat to production schedules, the result can be deadly.

We do what we do to obtain, avoid, or escape certain consequences. Consequences we work to obtain are termed "positive reinforcers." Consequences we attempt to avoid are "negative reinforcers."

It wasn’t until recently that we started understanding that people with different personalities tend to naturally pay more attention to safety attributes like work environment, people, equipment, processes, etc. based on their personality tendencies.

It’s long overdue, according to Dr. Sidney Dekker, who in 2014 wrote an essay on “The ‘Failed State’ of Safety.” Yes, says Corrie Pitzer, who is giving a talk, “Safety at a Dead End” at the American Society of Safety Professionals’ annual conference this June.