As you’re considering how to encourage employees to spot at-risk behaviors and hazards around your work sites, you should assess the level of safety culture that your company has. All organizations have a safety culture; some just have a good safety culture and others don’t, says Dennis Keplinger, a Certified Safety Professional with 30 years of experience in safety and industry. He is also a Certified Hazard Control Manager and has spent the last four years consulting and training on safety matters in construction.
The lowest level of safety culture is the fire-fighting level. “You stick your head in the sand and say safety is not that important,” says Keplinger. “When somebody gets hurt, you say, well, oops. There is not a whole lot of concern going on for safety.”
The next level up from that is compliance. Your objective is just to comply with OSHA standards. “That is not really where you want to be, because compliance means you comply with minimal safety and health standards. You are reacting to mishaps, you conduct inspections, you look for standards, but you are not really where you ought to be, Keplinger says.
You can’t inspect people into being safe. If you have a safety person on the job site, they cannot just cite them into being safe. It is a team effort, and your safety position just makes you part of the team.
The next level up is the one with management systems. We train our folks to do their jobs, and we have various requirements for competent persons, for example. We investigate our accidents to try to determine why they happened. We have a safety policy, we have procedures in place, and people are trained in safety so that we put some effort into accident prevention.
The next step up is to have an excellent safety culture. Safety is part of what we do. When we start a job, part of the discussion will be how to do the job safely, to know and analyze the hazards and make plans to eliminate them. If employees watch out for themselves and others-when nobody is watching-then you are well on the way towards the “excellent” safety culture, Keplinger says.
Safety is not a priority; it is a value. Values don’t change, but priorities do, Keplinger says. Everyone must have responsibility for safety. If an employee spots an unsafe behavior on a job site or sees a hazard, that person has a responsibility to fix the problem or let someone know about it. If you’re in a hurry, or have a deadline to meet, that is not a reason to take short cuts and work in an unsafe way. Safety should be an instilled value that is an integral part of the way people work.
If you recognize and reward people for taking short cuts and practicing unsafe behavior, that is what they will do. If a supervisor says, “Hey, man, I am glad you got that job done ahead of time, but don’t tell me how you did it,” that is recognizing unsafe actions. Instead, safe work practices should be recognized and rewarded, Keplinger says. When you see people doing something right, you should tell them and recognize that, to let them know that you value safe work habits.
We are trying to reduce “at risk” behavior. Various studies have shown that operating error, or human error, causes 60% to 80% of all accidents. People make mistakes for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they have not been trained correctly. Sometimes they are not competent in their ability. Sometimes people think their boss wants something done in a hurry, no matter what.
Incidents where a piece of equipment failed, even though it was inspected, cause a far smaller percentage of accidents. Weather conditions and “acts of God” cause some accidents, but those are a very small percentage of the total.
A Preventable Accident
In one case reported by OSHA, two plumbers working in a trench were hoisted back to street level by riding in the bucket of an excavator. As the excavator operator started to swing the bucket, it jerked and caused one employee to fall 14 feet and strike his head on the pipe in the trench. As a result of its investigation, OSHA issued a citation alleging one serious violation. And OSHA recommended that a work rule prohibiting employees from riding in the buckets of excavators should be effectively communicated and enforced.
Clearly, the problem was an unsafe act. The employees should not have ridden in the excavator bucket. OSHA requires employers to provide an adequate means of exiting a trench, whether it’s a ladder or steps.
Finding and correcting operating errors is like picking leaves on a tree-they just come back again and again. We have to find the root cause of the behavior. We have to ask, “Why is this happening?” If an operator has an accident, did we fail to train him well? Did we correct him when he was not doing things safely? Did we discuss the situation at the start of the job and do a hazard analysis? Did we test people to make sure everybody understands the situation?
If you don’t do those things, then you’re going to find at-risk behavior being repeated. In some cases the cause is a plain lack of knowledge. One company that Keplinger worked with looked at its accident statistics and it found that new employees-those who had less than 90 days on the job-were much more likely to be injured than the more experienced folks. The new hires had not gotten into the safety culture. And, in some cases, they were assigned to do tasks before they had adequate knowledge. So you need to make the effort to train new employees in the ways of safe work habits.
Following are some recommendations Keplinger makes to begin to build a safety culture:
- You can involve safety topics as a part of organizational meetings.
- You can have upper management periodically issue safety communications.
- You can include safety as an aspect of annual performance reviews.
- You can measure your safety performance.
- You can incorporate health and safety issues into regular communications and planning.
- You can ask experienced workers to participate in hazard assessments and development of accident prevention measures for the workplace.
