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Doug Pontsler is Chairman and Managing Director at COVE: Center of Visual Expertise. Launched by the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), COVE focuses on the delivery of its visual literacy curriculum for industrial applications. Doug is the former vice president of operations sustainability and EHS for Owens Corning and retired in February, 2018. He is a past member of the National Safety Council Board of Directors and past Chairman of the Campbell Institute at the National Safety Council.
The topic of “return to work” is certainly front and center. While many organizations have continued to operate during the COVID-19 situation under the definition of essential businesses, there are many who have not — especially consumer facing businesses such as retail businesses, bars and restaurants.
Seeking safety excellence, we focus on creating a safe working environment by identifying the hazards that exist in our environment -- and how we interact with those hazards as individuals.
A discussion in a recent workshop caused me to reflect on the relationship between our work in Visual Literacy and how it integrates with established practices defined by the Hierarchy of Controls. It is critical that through Visual Literacy we improve our ability to see the hazards that can easily disappear into the background.
If you have been following our work at COVE, you know that we are all about the importance of Seeing the Whole PICTURE® so that we can be more effective in our safety processes. It is by Learning to See that we can improve our ability to interpret the environment around us and the things that we are doing so that we can identify hazards and understand risk.
Identifying hazards in the workplace, determining the degree of risk they represent, and taking appropriate action is a fundamental component of any safety management system. While simple to say, it can be more difficult in practice than we might expect.
