Fraidy Cats: Is Fear Jeopardizing Worker Safety?

by Phil La Duke

“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”—Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR famously said, “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”.  That was easy for him to say, as president during the Great Depression and World War II he was probably the most heavily guarded man in the western hemisphere. Even so, I think he might have been on to something.

Now we have the Great Recession, and the malingering global economy has created, in many workplaces, a pervasive climate of fear. Now we’re afraid of Cyprus for crying out loud,  Honestly, until about a month ago, I wasn’t completely sure Cyprus was still around, I mean, when exactly did Turkey and Greece stop fighting over it? Finding out that the fate of Cyprian banks could break up the European Union is a bit like waking up tomorrow to find that Malta has obtained nuclear weapons and has decided to become a rogue nation state.  Possible? Sure. Something to be afraid of? Not really.  But one thing we can all agree on is that the economic uncertainty has created a lot of fear in the workplace, and fear can undermine worker safety in many ways. So unless we understand the nature and origins of this fear, we can never implement effective countermeasures.

Fear of Being Injured

Certainly a big fear in the workplace today, especially among older workers, is the fear that one will suffer a career ending injury.  Many people believe that getting injured will not only jeopardize their existing job, but also make it more difficult to find a new job should they become unemployed.  For other workers, there is a real fear that if they raise an issue about safety the employer is likely to move the operations overseas in search of a more relaxed safety standard and a government more sympathetic to companies. These workers are far less likely to balk when asked to do something that is unreasonable risky.

Recently a large manufacturing operation had a hypothesis: layoffs would increase injury claims (mostly fraudulent) as workers preferred to go on disability rather than on unemployment. They did a small study and were surprised by the results. Instances of injury claims (and most notably fraud) decreased. But under recording of injuries skyrocketed. The reason? Workers feared that an injury on their record would make them more likely to be laid off, and what’s more, a medical leave would make it far more difficult to find employment elsewhere if they did lose their jobs. Of course this is only a single example, and one study does not a trend make, but it convinced me, and it convinced my customer.

Fear of Reporting Injuries

Speaking of manufacturers, I was recently on a plane with a supervisor at a very large steel manufacturer.  The manufacturer has been under the gun to reduce its injuries owing, in part, to several fatalities and severe injuries.  The solution? Anyone who gets injured gets a five-day suspension until they can determine whether or not the worker was at fault.  This had the not surprising result of significantly lowering reported injuries.  Workers can’t afford to lose five days pay so they go to their own physicians.  All the while, some block-headed regional safety director takes credit for making the work place safer. When they kill someone, and they WILL kill someone, I hope they put him in a hole so deep even the other convicts will avoid it.  This mouth breather has found a way to make himself look good, improve his record, and impress the executives, but scaring the beejeezus out of the workers.  Yes, there are still these neanderthals working in safety and yes, there are still executives who praise them for not taking any shit from these “so-called, injured workers”/

There are other cases where the fear of reporting injuries can manifest in unexpected ways. In some environments, where a single injury can spoil the safety BINGO or even cost coworkers a quarterly bonus, not only is the fear present its palpable and reasonable. Its unwise to mess with someone’s paycheck in the best economic time, but in a recession it can be downright dangerous.

Fear of Uncertainty

I’m no economist, nor do I play one on television (although I do occasionally lie to women in bars about being one) but I believe the single biggest influencer in lack of consumer confidence was the “share the pain” craze of the last five years. Time was where when their was a downturn the company laid of 10% of the workforce, and the walking wounded who were left behind licked their proverbial wounds and then got back to work. We mourned our dear departed and then went back to our daily routine. But the practice of forced furloughs, unpaid shut downs and other economic chicanery left everyone wondering when the axe would fall. Faced with a feeling of impending doom workers everywhere stopped spending in anticipation of a layoff that would never come. Reductions in staff hurt, but the pain quickly fades. This constant state of fear and worry creates stress and stress, worry, and fear increases our mistakes. The next time someone at your company suggests we “share the pain” you should suggest extinguishing a cigarette in their left eye; if that isn’t painful enough, do both eyes.

Fear As A Performance Influencer

In the Just Culture philosophy they talk about the inevitability of human error. Everyone makes mistakes to err is human, blah blah blah. Even while we can’t prevent people from making mistakes, we CAN increase the likelihood of making mistakes and bad decisions. The things that make things worse—harder to focus, more difficult to think, and make it easier to make mistakes—are fairly easy to identify. Fatigue, stress, worry, distraction, and yes, fear. In these cases the frightened worker is markedly more likely to omit a key step, take a dangerous shortcut, or otherwise increase his or her likelihood of injuring him/herself or others.

An automobile manufacturer with whom I worked saw a strong correlation between employee assistance line calls and injuries. Judging from their data, the safety leadership inferred a strong relationship between people who were worked up about something and injuries and near misses. They may be guilty of causefusion (attributing cause and effect to situations where only a correlation exists) but they believed that they were seeing these performance influencers inaction. As the economic slowdown turned into The Great Recession, both the calls to the hotline AND injury levels stayed flat, but the nature of the calls changed. Instead of calling with job related issues, more and more of the workers called about problems outside the workplace. Problems with coworkers or supervisors were replaced by worries of foreclosures and other financial concerns.

Fear of Loss of Livelihood

Fear of job loss and the subsequent financial consequences can increase the likelihood of workplace violence, as well. Studies in the causes of the postal shootings found a correlation between fear of job loss and the outbreak of the shooting. Postal workers were constantly threatened with the loss of their jobs while at the same time reminded that their limited education and background made it highly unlikely that they would ever have it as good as they had it at the post office. Whether or not these statements were true, workers believed them and when faced with nothing else to lose a handful of mentally ill workers reacted violently.

When fear is replaced by a feeling of fatefulness bad things are going to happen. Companies can only push workers (from the executive suite to the rank and file) so far before the system breaks down and bad things start to happen.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Injury reporting, Just Culture, Phil La Duke, Fear, fear as a risk factor, fraidy cats, worker fear

Wake Up: The Life you Save May Be Mine

By Phil La Duke

I am slowly migrating my posts from my other blog (the decommissioned Rockford Greene International blog that has since been renamed Worker Safety Net) to this blog.  But in the interest of not boring the socks off those of you who used to read both blogs, in each case, I rewrite and give a hard edit to these pieces. In short, while this may not be a entirerly new post I believe it is different enough to be worth the read.)

Tens of millions are spent reminding workers to work safely and be mindful of the many hazards they will inevitably face in the course of their workdays, but scare little focus has been cast on one of the biggest contributors to workplace injuries: the lack of sleep. The tentative recovery has employers gun-shy about hiring and as things pick up workers are increasingly fatigued as they try to do more and more with less and less.

Many of us worry about not getting enough sleep, but how harmful is the lack of sleep? Very. Consider the following:

• Almost A Third Of Us Don’t Get Enough Sleep. According to Fox News, 30% of all American workers don’t get enough sleep (not on the job, of course). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that 50 million to 70 million American adults suffer from sleep and wakefulness disorders.
• Lack of Sleep Makes Us Sick. According to USNews.comlack of sleep has been tied to mental distress, depression, anxiety, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol and certain risk behaviors including cigarette smoking, physical inactivity and heavy drinking.
• Drowsy Driving Is a Major Issue. The most common workplace fatality is a traffic accident on the job. Drowsydriver.org reports that 60% of adult drivers—about 168 million people —say they have driven while drowsy 37% (or 103 million people), have actually fallen asleep at the wheel. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), more than 750 people die and 20,000 more are injured each year due directly to fatigued commercial vehicle drivers, and an estimated 20% of vehicle crashes are linked to drowsy driving.
• The problem is bigger than just highway safety, according to Joseph Hallinan, in Why We Make Mistakes: How We Work Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, And Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average nearly a dozen pilots fell asleep in mid-flight between 2003 and 2007, and when medical students reported working five or more marathon shifts in a single month caused the chance of making a mistake that harmed a patient went up 700%.
• The Economy Isn’t Helping. Apart from the financial problems that keep you up at night, the floundering economy has made the workplace more dangerous in other ways, for example, studies have shown that workers with more than one job were significantly more sleep deprived, so those workers forced to moonlight to make ends meet are more likely to be sleep deprived.
• Sleep Deprivation Contributes to Poor Decision Making. According to Hallinan, even moderate sleep deprivation can cause brain impairment equivalent to driving while drunk AND has been shown to significantly increase an individual’s willingness to take risks.

  In effect, sleep deprived workers make more mistakes, poorer decisions, and take more risks…all things that have been repeatedly shown to increase the probability of worker injuries.

What Can Be Done About it?

The last thing that anyone needs or wants, is another thing for the safety guy to carp about, but all is not lost; experts at the National Sleep Foundation and elsewhere offers tips for getting a good night’s sleep:

1. Don’t sleep in on weekends; maintain your weekday sleep schedules.
2. Wind down. Experts recommend that people establish a regular relaxing routine to transition between waking and sleep. Soaking in a hot tub and then reading a book before retiring can greatly improve the quality of sleep one gets. Make your bedroom sleep friendly—dark, quiet, comfortable and cool.
3. Use your bed for sleeping. Experts warn that watching television or working on a computer (and butchering chickens I would suppose) can impede your ability to truly relax when it comes time for sleeping
4. Avoid caffeine nicotine and alcohol for several hours before bedtime. It makes sense that not ingesting chemicals that increase your metabolism and make you jittery right before retiring won’t help you get restorative sleep.
5. Allow enough to time for sleep. Before you raise your hands in protest that you would if you could, consider that people who get enough sleep are significantly more productive than those who are deprived.
6. Nap. A twenty-minute (no more) nap followed by exercise will make you feel refreshed and provide you a pick-me-up that will make you more productive.
7. Finish eating at least 2-3 hours before your regular bedtime. The act of digesting food takes a lot of energy and things that require your body to work hard make it more difficult to go to sleep.
8. Exercise regularly and complete your workout a few hours before bedtime. The goal of exercise (at least cardio exercises) is to raise your heart rate, increase your metabolism, and generally do the opposite of what you should do right before bedtime. But regular exercise several hours before bedtime will actually help relieve stress and relax you sufficiently so that you can get a good night’s sleep.
9. Recognize that one of the most common reasons for insomnia is worrying about not getting enough sleep. Lying quietly with ones eyes closed can be very restorative, and while it is not as healthy as deep REM sleep, it can be a short-term solution to the sleep deprivation problem.

Safety professionals should raise the awareness of this problem among workers and share tips for getting enough sleep, especially on the night shift or for workers assigned to swing shift.  While there has been no conclusive link between a lack of sleep and mortality, studies have shown that employees who work swing shifts tend to have shorter life-spans.

There comes a point where telling people what they need to do to be safe outside the workplace is intrusive and inappropriate; expecting workers to get enough sleep isn’t one of them. When the worker has a lifestyle issue—whether that be substance abuse or insomnia—that emperils him/herself or others in the workplace it is within the company’s right to act.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Risk, Safety, Worker Safety, getting a good night's sleep, managing personal risk, performance shaping factors, sleep deprivation, Worker Safety, worker safety and sleep deprivation

Road Rash: Business Travel and Injuries

by Phil La Duke

Last Saturday and the Saturday before that I made no posts to my blog. It was an unfortunate result of my having been away on business. This is not an excuse mind you; I had every intention of writing and posting using the infernal timer that has vexed me every time I’ve tried using it. In hindsight I’m glad I waited. This week I’d like to talk a bit about an area of safety that I think goes largely ignored: safety while travelling.
While safety professionals understand very well that a injury sustained while travelling for business is, in fact, a recordable injury and a recordable injury effects your overall Incident Rate and DART irrespective if it happened in a hotel room, a rental car, or an airport. How big a problem is it? In the U.S. the most lethal jobs are consistently sales positions and automobile accidents are the leading cause of accidental death among sales professionals and while other parts of the world the problem isn’t nearly as severe as the U.S., many of the basic hazards that confront business travelers are essentially the same.
Those who travel for whatever purpose are at heightened risk because they are constantly bombarded with unfamiliar stimuli. The subconscious mind takes in millions of bits of information (much more than that actually) and sorts according to whether or not the information is indicative of a threat. The subconscious does this by comparing the information with other information that it has stored in a sort of a database that one collects based on one’s life experience when the new data matches up with benign memories the brain decides that the new data is harmless and disregards it. When the brain detects danger it activates the fight: flight response and floods the body with adrenalin (or releases it in little drips depending on the degree of perceived threat) and well, I think we’ve all heard wild tales of the fantastic feats of strength caused by a good adrenalin rush so I won’t belabor the point here. But when the brain doesn’t quite know what to make of a piece of information it assumes it’s a threat, in much the same way we tell our children not to take candy from strangers (even when everyone knows that strangers have the best candy!) Are most strangers a threat? Certainly not (although the 24-hour news machine often creates the impression that there is a greater danger out there than there really is), but if we assume a stranger is kind and harmless and he or she turns out to have malicious intentions our child is left unprotected and likely victimized, but if the inverse is true and our child avoids contact with a benevolent stranger there is no harm done.
When we travel we are bombarded with a barrage of unknown and uncategorized data and our brains treat that data as potential threats. As the brain collects more and more information that we are in danger it raises the adrenalin drip and our bodies get stressed. Stress, in addition to creating long-term health problems also inhibits our decision making process and causes us to make more errors. (So basically we are making poor choices AND making more honest mistakes.) Add to this the disruption of sleep from which so many travelers suffer and the resultant rise in risky behavior, and you have a circumstance where injuries are all but certain; in hazard recognition terms the likelihood of an injury is greatly increased. Depending on the activity, this cocktail of poor choices, human error, and at risk behavior can be a deadly drink indeed.
Perhaps the most dangerous activity is driving, and again, this is skewed against the U.S. and Canada where fewer business travelers are employing professional drivers, using public transportation, or riding in taxis (although if you have been on anything like some of the truly harrowing cab rides of which I have been a party and you would join me in wondering why there aren’t more business travelers killed in cabs.) Business travelers routinely drive rented vehicles that are largely unfamiliar to them and do so on unfamiliar routes.
Data on injuries of business travelers is seldom accurately collected. Neither the safety professional nor the traveler him/herself is mindful of the need to record near misses, first aid cases, or even recordable—it’s not that they don’t think it’s important they typically don’t think of these incidents as work-related. Think about it: when you are travelling for business where exactly is the workplace? It’s in the airport parking lot, the airport, the plane, the car rental office, in the rental car, at the hotel, at the customer site or remote corporate location, the hotel lounge, the restaurants, and…well you get the picture. And when exactly is a business traveler “off the clock” and does that even make a difference?
Several weeks ago I was on the road and awoke from a deep sleep with the typical dry mouth one gets when living the sweet life that is business travel. I got up to get a drink of water and while returning to my bed in the dark caught the corner of a poorly placed credenza and tore a painful but not life threatening scratch across my soft white underbelly (my side actually but I thought the former sounded better.) I took pictures and sent them to the hotel manager who acted like I was pulling the cockroach in the salad grift from “Paper Moon”. In short, he either didn’t believe me or couldn’t have cared any less, he went so far as to tell me “we searched the room thoroughly and can’t find the piece of furniture in the photo”.
And really should we care? I think so. While my injury was minor it could have been much more severe and had it been I would have had a recordable incident. Had my scratch become infected that too would have been a recordable incident. But the real question is, would I have thought to report it, and if I were to report it, how well received would it have been by my organization. In my case, I work for an organization that takes these matters very seriously, but what about those business travelers who work for companies who preach “thou shalt report” with one breath and “thanks for spoiling the safety BINGO” with the next? I’m not picking on safety incentives here, because, let’s face it, it doesn’t matter where you work nobody is excited to hear about the latest recordable.
Until we find a place where we can welcome injury reporting as a source of important information on our process weaknesses and not a gig against the person injured (and even in the most enlightened workplaces there is still a lingering resentment that our safety record was ruined by one stupid accident.) we will not be able to get a real sense of the risk we face. Sadly, business travelers are least likely to report an injury and at significant risk of injury.

Filed under: Injury reporting, Near Miss Reporting, Phil La Duke, Safety, injuries during business travel, mixed messages for safety, Near miss reporting, Worker Safety

What the @#$@ Is up with the blog?

Sorry for not updating the blog last week.  I have been in Barcelona on business all week and it’s been tough to get to this.  Worse still is I will be in Paris this weekend so the next post might not happen until Monday

Filed under: Safety

The Greatest Threat To Safety Might Be Your Safety Training

 

By Phil La Duke

To assert that most safety training sucks is to reveal no great insight; it’s practically an O’Henry short story: training professionals steer clear of safety courses for fear they might miss some important point and imperil the learners and safety professionals lack the requisite knowledge of knowledge of adult education to construct an effective course. The result is well-intentioned organizations wasting millions annually on weak safety training that not only doesn’t protect workers; it puts them at risk.

There are a couple of basic things you have to decide whether you believe or not before you can draw any accurate conclusion. First, you either believe that safety training protects workers or you do not. (It’s something of a mute point, because in most countries Safety training is required.  It’s not required to be good mind you it’s just required that people complete it.) Second, you either believe existing safety training is sufficient or it is not.

Researchers in adult learning paint a fairly bleak picture of training in general.  Research has shown that up to 85% of the skills learned in training courses is lost before it ever has a chance of making it to the workplace, and further research shows that no skills taught in a class are retained unless the skills are applied within 48 hours of the course.

Before we continue I should make something clear. I use the term “training” not “learning” not “teaching” and not “education”. I know some people bristle at the term, “you train dogs, not people” but I was taught the difference between teaching and training through the following analogy: “you might be in favor of your sixth grade daughter receiving sex education in school, but you probably don’t want her getting sex training”.  Some of you might be offended by that example (lighten up) but I think it creates a visceral mental image of the precise difference between training and teaching.  As far as I’m concerned, education is learning ABOUT something and training is learning how to DO something.

This distinction has profound implications in worker safety.  Safety professionals pull their hair out in frustration, concoct elaborate schemes, and tilt at ludicrous organizational windmills in an effort to influence, motivate, coerce and cajole workers into working safely, when I put it to you these workers were never taught to work safely, they were taught ABOUT working safely.   This might sound like I’m playing semantic games here, but think about it.  What do people learn how to DO in a hazard communication course? That’s not to say that safety education isn’t important, and awareness too, while were at it, but if we want people to change how they behave—and despite whatever position you take on behavior and its relationship to safety I think we can all agree that safe behavior and good decision making is an essential to a safer workplace—we have to first give them the skills they need to behave safely.

This distinction also lies at the heart of why so few safety professionals, academics, and consultants have any real credibility with workers.  Credibility is only really gained when a person knows how to DO the job, irrespective of how much the person knows ABOUT the job.  This creates a problem for safety training; many decision makers assume that subject matter experts will make great trainers because they will have so much more credibility with the learners.  Of course not all grizzled veterans are horrible trainers, but many are really bad at teaching people the skills they need to do a job.  Any time I have endured a training course on any subject where the instructor takes pains to brag about his or her having spent 87 years doing blah, blah, blah…I knew I was in for long, pointless class.

The secret to better safety training starts with a professional designed course. I’ve explored that topic in greater detail in previous articles and blog posts so I won’t go into it much here, except to say that a well-designed course is like having a concrete plan for imparting the skills; a “learning road map”, if you will. The development of the course requires two kinds of expertise: expertise in the content, and expertise in adult learning.  There are no short cuts to this formula. If you try to cut corners you will end up not only wasting time and money, but potentially putting workers at risk.

But a professionally developed course is only the start.  The delivery of quality safety training is every bit as specific and important a skill as any other. Just because someone LIKES to present in front of a group or that fancy themselves a trainer.  A good safety trainer should be an expert in the discipline of training. Of course the instructor has to have credibility in the content, but that doesn’t mean that the instructor has to have complete mastery of the subject and have 150 years doing the work.

In the best classes, either a subject matter expert has been given training in presentation skills or is teamed with an experienced trainer.  But too often those charged with ensuring that courses are delivered simply trust the subject matter expert to “pull together a course” or worse yet, trust them to deliver the “course” they’ve been regurgitating for years.

As I’ve said in so many other posts, the best safety training isn’t the regulatory training most of tend to think of when people mention safety training. Rather the most important safety training is effective core skills training. Unfortunately, this training tends to be even worse than regulatory training and is even less formal than the worst regulatory training out there.  This is where things get dangerous, if we don’t provide quality training in how to do the tasks required of a job the workers will figure out a way to do it, and the way they find to do it will be the most lasting learning.  It’s tough to unlearn something that you learned from your own experience and even tougher to change those behaviors.

Filed under: Performance Improvement, Phil La Duke, Risk, education versus training, poor training makes the workplace unsafe, Safety, safety training, Worker Safety

When It Comes To Unsafe Behaviors There’s Plenty Of Blame to Go Around

By Phil La Duke

If you’ve made even the most cursory read of my articles and blogs you probably already know that I don’t hold much stock in Behavior Based Safety (BBS).  I believe that except for the odd statistical outlier nut-job, nobody WANTS to get hurt and unless they were designed my the Marquis De Sade you processes aren’t intended to hurt people.  If those two things are true no amount of behavior modification—whether it be incentive programs or telling people to be more careful—is going to change much of anything.  But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe unsafe behavior is the single largest cause of injuries, and if so, we have to manage those behaviors.

Before we can manage unsafe behaviors we have to understand the context in which the behaviors occur.  We can’t take effective action unless we understand precisely why people behaved in an unsafe manner.  A couple of days ago an acquaintance told me about how he had been injured on the job during the third week of February on two consecutive years (he was nervously praying for the first of March to come so he could relax a bit).  “It was my own fault,” he explained, “I was rushing to get things done because my boss was standing over my shoulder saying ‘we gotta get this order out’”.  Unsafe behavior? sure;  the fault of the worker? I don’t think so. Most traditional BBS programs focus on the unsafe behaviors of workers. Productivity is sapped as millions of hours are wasted insisting that supervisors watch people work and coach them on their unsafe behaviors.  Don’t the people whose unsafe decisions and insistence and encouragement of unsafe behaviors bear any culpability in worker injuries? I think they should.

Here are some incredibly unsafe behaviors (attitudes + action) up-stream in the process that organizations need to address:

• “I Don’t Care How; Just Get It Done.” Whether it’s manufacturing, or construction, or mining or oil and gas there are supervisors, and site managers, and even executives who reward the people who ignore safety protocols and procedure to “get things done”.  This sends a strong message to the workers: you will get rewarded for violating the rules.  Ask these leaders about this behavior and you will likely get a sermon on how they will never tolerate unsafe work and a worker has a right to go home in the same condition…blah, blah, blah.  But when the rubber hits the road and they are faced with falling behind schedule and giving a nod-and-wink “work safe” while telling the workers that the job must get done by Thursday at all costs.  Workers aren’t stupid; they know that they can take risks and nine times out of ten nothing bad will happen.  They understand that probability favors them not getting hurt and if they “get the job done” they will be seen—and more importantly treated—like heroes.  It’s the guys who get things done who get promoted, get the plum assignments, and get fat raises.  They will take unnecessary risks because they are rewarded for doing so, while the people who work safely are punished.  A pizza party at the end of the month for zero loss time injuries can’t compete with the raises, opportunities, and job security afford to those who “get things done”.
• “I Don’t Care If the Safety Rule Makes It Impossible to Do the Job You Must Follow The Rule.” This behavior is most prevalent among the “command and control” safety professionals who neither know, nor care to know how the work is done.  It’s an ignorance borne out of laziness.  Workers are told they can’t do the job in the most expeditious and efficient manner because doing so is unsafe, are given an unworkable solution, and an expectation to perform to standard. Faced with this choice they take unjustifiable risks, and why wouldn’t they? We can cluck our tongues at the violations of the workers but really whose unsafe behavior is truly to blame for the hazardous situation?
• “What Can I DO? I Can’t Make Them Work Safely.” In the grand scheme of things there is no such thing as working completely safely.  Sure we can work in ways in which we minimize our risk but even the best set of rules can only protect us from hazards that have been anticipated. It’s tough to anticipate every conceivable hazard in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment.  Too many safety professionals act like institutional eunuchs, trumpeting their emasculation to anyone they think might listen.  The lack of a safe behavior can be the same as an unsafe one.  When safety professionals or supervisors turn a blind eye toward hazards—behavioral or physical—the effect is every bit as dangerous as the unsafe act itself.
• “I Don’t Have Time”. The lack of time has become the rallying cry for every aspiring martyr. Where the quality of a person’s work was once the measure of his or her performance now, in many organizations, bellyaching about how little time you have has become the new hallmark of an employee’s contribution.  I have heard so many safety professionals, supervisors, and operations managers whine about their lack of time to get everything done that I involuntarily roll my eyes when I hear it.  What am I supposed to do with that information? Praise you for doing a half-assed job? Sympathize because you can’t manage up? Studies have shown that people tend to do work in the following order: tasks they enjoy, tasks that are easy, tasks that are fun, and then everything else.  If you don’t have time for safety—from the maintenance managers who can’t find the time to maintain equipment or repair facility issues to the safety person who can’t find the time to do a proper incident investigation to the materials manager who doesn’t have time to get stock out of the aisle ways, to the site manager who padlocks emergency exits because he doesn’t have time to discipline the people who are using it inappropriately, to the supervisor who doesn’t have time to inspect the work area to ensure it is free of hazards—you need to either reprioritize your work or get out before someone get’s killed.
• “They Wouldn’t Get Hurt If they would Be More Careful.” Blaming the injured is a staple of many Safety Management systems. I have heard safety professionals describe workers who have suffered repeat injuries “frequent flyers” and plant managers insist that workers are hurt “primarily because they take short cuts to get more ass time”.  I have heard that safety is everyone’s job so many times that I want to vomit.  If safety truly is everyone’s job then where is the culpability for those of us who make decisions who jeopardize the safety of others?

So maybe behavior is a key component in worker safety, and maybe we bear some responsibility for our own behavior.  If safety truly is everyone’s job than there is blood on our hands every time someone gets injured on our watch.  We bear as much of the responsibility for the gore and carnage as anyone. Maybe it’s time we take a hard look at OUR behavior before we start pointing fingers of shame at the injured worker.  Maybe it’s time for us to ask ourselves what did we do TODAY to help worker’s make safe decisions? Maybe it’s time to turn the lens of judgment on ourselves and ask what we could have done to prevent the injury that took the life of a coworker, and how we will change our OWN behavior to help workers make better, safer choices from now on.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Risk, 88% of injuries caused by unsafe behavior, At risk behavior, Behavior Based Safety, improving worker safety, Safety, The myth of 95% of injuries are caused by unsafe behaviors, Worker Safety

Trust Me

By Phil La Duke

There isn’t any magic bullet when it comes to making the workplace safer but the thing that comes closest is trust. No change, no improvement, no carefully crafted organizational change initiative will ever come to fruition until and unless workers trust the leadership of the organization. If workers mistrust their supervisors, the leadership, or the safety professional even the best safety efforts will fail. It sounds simple, but in my career I have seen more organizational change effort—whether aimed at improving safety or changing benefits—fail because of mistrust.

It’s a shame, because every day, we ask—no expect—worker’s to trust us, and let’s face it, in many cases there is scant reason why workers’ should believe us when we tell them that everything will be better if they just do this or that or when we tell them that this time things will be different.

Workers’ Aren’t Stupid (Well Most of Them Anyway)

Workers’ do stupid things, we all do, and like most (if not all) workers are skeptical when they hear that the “flavour of the month” will be the salvation of the workingman. Most don’t want to invest time, effort, and emotions into something that they know in the deepest recesses of their souls won’t last as long as the life of the alpha fruit fly. And with the safety community trotting this dog and pony show after that can we really blame them? Workers want to do their job, collect an honest wage and return home safe unharmed. It sounds simple, maybe even trite, but it’s true.  The problem with getting people to change the way they conduct themselves in a business setting—whether or not they follow the rules, whether or not they take unreasonable risks, and the very basis of their decision-making—depends on the level of trust within the organization.

The Nature Of Trust

When most of us think of trust we think about our willingness to believe that people wouldn’t deliberately harm us, whether the nature of the harm be physical, psychological, or financial, or some other means I’m too lazy or intellectually limited to ponder.  In basest possible terms we count on the fact that they, as The Simpsons barman Moe Szyslak put it, “wish (us) no specific harm”. When we trust someone we count on them to consider our best interests when they act, and not “screw us over” in some way.  Most safety professionals are trust worthy in this respect.  But there is more to trust than just believing that given have a chance your safety rep won’t mug you in the men’s room.  In fact, there are several different kinds of trust.

1. Trust in motives.  When we mistrust someone’s motives it’s generally because we suspect that they have an alternative agenda, about which they aren’t being completely honest and above board.  We suspect that the person we mistrust is putting their own needs  (or the needs of the Elvis impersonator who lives next door, for all we know or care) before our needs, and if momma ever taught us anything it’s that if we don’t look out for ourselves no one else is likely to. When workers mistrust the organization it’s not that they necessarily think the safety professional or the leadership are looking out for themselves at the expense
2. Trust in competence.  Sometimes we don’t trust people, not because we believe they have a larcenous heart, rather because we believe they have cheese and sawdust in their heads.  And when it comes to safety we want to know that the people making decisions about how work is completed actually know what they are doing, that their decisions won’t get us killed or leave us horribly maimed. We may believe that people making the decisions hear t is in the right place
3. Trust in Judgment. I know some safety people who have never met a dumb idea that they didn’t immediately love. The rest of the organization just rolls its collective eye when it hears the details of the hair-brained scheme-d’ jour
4. Trust the facts. It’s one thing to trust people have your best interests at heart and another thing to believe that they have the facts straight and still another to believe that they are properly interpreting the facts.  We live in an age where people are bombarded with facts. Facts without context, facts that are often confused and sometimes just made up. More and more people seek out the most ludicrous information to support whatever they want to believe, and its tough convince them otherwise.  So it stands to reason that workers will openly question the facts presented to them.  Just look at the practice of smokers.  There has been evidence linking cigarettes and cancer (not to mention heart disease) and yet as I write this, countless thousands will spark up another one. Why? Because sometimes even when the facts are known a person simply choses to ignore them.

It takes a lifetime to build trust and only a simple lapse in judgment or bad decision to wipe it out. Mostly trust is built on two things, past experience and consistency. And while we can’t change past experience we can develop a climate of consistency.  People tend to trust what they  can predict.

And let us not forget that trust is a two-way street; leadership can’t expect workers to trust them unless they first trust workers.

Filed under: Organizational change, Phil La Duke, Safety, culture change, nature of trust, organizational change, Phil La Duke, Safety, trust, Worker Safety

Process Improvements May Be Hazardous to Your Healthj

By Phil La Duke

There are a lot of useful things that safety professionals can learn from manufacturing, particularly Lean Manufacturing, yet surprisingly few safety practitioners—even within manufacturing—see the connection.  Two of these concepts that have a profound value on safety and risk are cycle time and takt time.  Takt time is generally defined as the maximum time per unit that it takes to produce something to fulfill the customer’s demands, and cycle time is the time it takes to do one job. Both terms are measures of capacity and key elements of efficiency.

That might not seem to mean much in terms of safety and risk, but it does.

Shorter takt times mean that providing goods (or services) to the customer is happening faster. This fact in itself doesn’t mean very much, but if you consider that to improve efficiency (for our purposes, efficiency will mean producing goods or services as quickly as possible without compromising cost, quality, or safety) you have to reduce your takt time, we start to see implications for safety.  Few of you would argue that “haste makes waste” and in fact, rushing to complete a job introduces the risk of injury, and that is exactly what can happen if we try to reduce takt time simply by cracking the whip and force the workers to work faster.

Similarly, cycle time is the time it takes to do one job. In manufacturing, it is the time it takes  to complete all the tasks at one station and this is typically described in minutes or seconds.  Years ago when I built seats for one of the Big Three auto manufacturers my cycle time was 55 seconds, and our takt time was around 16 hours (the time it took for one car  to go from hunks of metal, plastic, and cloth to a fully functioning automobile.) To improve the takt time you generally have to reduce cycle time.  The key to both these activities is to eliminate waste.  In the discipline of Kaizen there are seven kinds of waste, or muda as they like to call it, mainly so that there job feels like a cool karate class, but then I digress. The seven wastes are:

1. Defects (and rightfully this should include injuries and damage to facilities or equipment, or environmental spills, from a process stand point, when a process fails, whatever the unintended consequence is waste)
2. Overproduction (work done without an immediate order for it)
3. Inventories waiting to be  \processed
4. Unnecessary movement of stock (like moving things around your operation)
5. Unnecessary motion of employees (people having to walk farther than necessary, for example)
6. Overly processing (quality checks or redoing job because it wasn’t done correctly in the first place)
7. Waiting (workers standing idle because they have nothing to do)

All of these sources of waste introduce variation into the process and where there is variation there is risk of injury.  So we want to eliminate waste and be sure that we preserve the safety of the workplace; sounds simple right? Well, predictably, it isn’t.

Apart from the obvious risks of rushing, let’s assume that there is an unidentified hazard in a job (for our purposes, it doesn’t matter if the job is taking orders at a logistics company, running a ride at a theme park, or building jet engines) if the cycle time is decreased it means that the job is done more times a day (assuming a steady flow of consumer demand) which means that the probability that the worker will be injured through interaction with the hazards grows proportionately. Think of like this let’s say you are a shoplifter (relax I know some of you aren’t really shop lifters) and you decide to steal a steak from your grocer. Two things come into play (actually more than two, but bear with me) the length of time to steal one steak (takt time) and the number of times you go back to the store to steal a steak (like any good shoplifter you go back to the same store over and over again because you know the layout and routines of the staff). Unlike the odds of say, flipping a coin that remain 50:50 each and every time you flip it, our scenario is a bit different.  While the coin will never change in a way that will affect the probability our chances of successfully shoplifting are in almost constant flux (security measures are likely to get “beefed up”, the store staff is more and more likely to recognize you and suspect that you may be the thief (assuming you weren’t seen in the act).  To reduce your risk you might decide to steal something else, something that reduces your takt time because it is closer to the exit, or you might decide to lower you cycle time to let things “cool down” before trying it again.

How is this important to safety? Well ergonomic strain can build to create the most costly injuries, and you don’t have to be swinging a sledgehammer to get one. A worker may be able to process invoices safely at three an hour, and might be able to ultimately increase his or her time to say, six an hour, without noticing any immediate discomfort.  But after doing six invoices an hour, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day for a month, he or she may begin to show symptoms of a repetitive strain injury.

There are other exposure risks as well.  Let’s say a doctor sees 4 patients an hour.  Each time a sick person comes in for treatment (assuming it is a contagious disease and not a chronic complaint or injury) the doctor risks getting ill.  If the doctor increases the number of patients (and in turn decreases his or her takt time) he or she increases the likelihood of contracting an illness. You can carry this example to working with asbestos or a radioactive activity. The more times you are exposed to a hazard the more likely it is that you will be harmed by it.

What this means in practical terms is that when we calculate probability we need to remember that: a) we are calculating not the chances that someone will interact with a hazard, but also the likelihood that that interaction will cause harm and b) both the number of times a worker interacts with a hazard and the duration of the hazard are important things to think about when considering probability.

The safety professional must be involved in these efforts to improve workplace efficiency not just to add value, although that is important, but also to ensure that the improvement effort doesn’t just trade one set of wastes for another, in this case, injuries.

Filed under: Performance Improvement, Phil La Duke, process improvement, Safety, Worker Safety, cycle time, exposure risks, exposure to hazards, muds, process improvements, takt time, waste, Worker Safety

Is It Worth The Risk?

By Phil La Duke

On Friday, I left Toronto to drive back to Detroit in a blizzard that at least one weatherman described as “the storm of the century”.  As I headed out from the Toronto office to my car, several colleagues told me to “be careful” or to “be safe”.  While the sentiments were sincere and the intentions well meaning and heartfelt, I wondered how useful this advice really was.

I want to be clear, I value the sentiments that people express when they say be careful, but it really doesn’t change my behavior.  I had a lot of time to think during my five-hour sojourn home—my policy is no cellphone use in the car, but it didn’t matter since my service wasn’t working since I was out of my home country.  It occurred to me that better advice would probably have been “is it worth the risk?”

This is an important topic, because whether you are talking about worker safety,  Just Culture, or virtually any personal or business decision, it all comes down to risk and whether or not the value is aligned with the risk. Despite this, many organizations continue to rely on telling people to be more careful as their primary defense against serious injury or fatality.

For my part, I had business that needing attending to on Saturday, so staying an extra night in Toronto was, for me, not a viable option.  So I was faced with a simple decision: was the risk of driving through a snowstorm worth getting home as scheduled (albeit almost certainly far later than I had planned or expected)?

I didn’t make the decision lightly; the possibility of dying in a blizzard or car accident was not something that I trivialized.  So I did a basic risk assessment, something that workers do every day, whether they realize it or not and irrespective of whether or not they have been trained to properly assess risk.

I looked at two factors as I conducted my ad hoc risk assessment, and they weren’t probability and severity.  Instead, I looked at factors that would increase my risks of accident and factors that would reduce my risks.

Increased Risk

Decreased Risk

Snow Unfamiliar route Icy conditions

Worst of the storm was east of me headed north-east of me The storm was predicted to lighten in Toronto at noon Much of the route between Toronto and Detroit was expected to be clear There were fairly larger cities (Cambridge, Hamilton, London, and Chatham) where I could stop and spend the night if my assumptions proved false Traffic was far lighter than usual I grew up in rural Michigan and have been driving in wintery conditions for over 35 years I used my own car and was well aware of its performance characteristics on snow and ice My vehicle was recently winterized I keep a snow shovel and emergency response kit in my trunk The bulk of my route would be a single expressway (fewer intersections) Leaving afternoon afforded the ploughs to salt and clear the route. I recognized that additional stopping time and slower speeds would be essential. After reviewing the weather patterns and maps I believed that the bulk of my route would be clear.

I made it home safely and without incident.  Some of you may look at my decision as unduly risky, or even reckless, but I disagree. In fact, I believe that I identified my risks and took careful measures to ensure that should my assumptions turn out to be untrue I had contingencies in mind that I could implement.

Many serious injuries could be prevented if we taught workers a similar approach to their work. Instead of reminding workers to work safely we should be assisting them in making better decisions about their jobs, and teaching workers to ask these simple questions can do this:

What risk factors are present today that weren’t present yesterday? The workplace is always changing, everyday the tools get a bit duller, equipment parts are more fatigued and more likely to fail, there are part shortages, facility issues, and let’s face it, our bodies are getting older and a little less able to perform at peak levels.

1. What factors are shaping my performance, and how effectively am I managing them? What are the things that are going on in my life that could take my head out of the game and cause problems? Did I have a fight with my spouse? Is my teenager in trouble with the law? Did I get enough sleep? Am I hungry, angry, or otherwise distracted? Am I hung over? Do I have the flu? While any one of these factors alone aren’t highly likely to cause an injury they add risk.
2. Is there anything in the work area that doesn’t belong here?  Too often work areas become the dumping ground for obsolete stock, unused tools, and the general workplace dross that collects in any work environment.
3. Am I using the right tools and equipment?  Human beings have a natural drive toward expediency and if the correct tool or machine isn’t available they have a wonderful tendency to improvise.  But this improvisation adds process variability and thus risk. (the people who design processes can only engineer the risks out of a process if they can predict those risk, using a spanner as a hammer isn’t exactly the kinds of things they look for in an FMEA.
4. Have I been adequately trained and qualified to do this work? In many cases, workers BELIEVE they have been trained and qualified to do a job when in fact, the “training” they received is little more than observing a demonstration of how an experienced worker does the job.  Too often core training is so poor that a new worker may actually be received less than 10% of the skills that they need to do their job as designed.  Some of you may be thinking, “how does he figure?” well, let me tell you.

   Studies suggest that only about 20–30% of the skills taught in traditional training make it to the work area, and this falls to less than 5% unless the skills are practiced on the job within 48-hours of training (so much for training on Fridays and sending the workers home for the weekend immediately following the session.) So armed with this 5% of the skills the workers need to do the job, they begin working.  They are smart people so they figure out a way to do the job.  They learn safety issues through near misses, first aid cases, and the odd recordable.  They also drift from the 5% of the standard that they were “taught” to follow.  They also discover shortcuts—some actual and valuable time savers and others that increase the risk of injury.  In this case, we now have a veteran worker who is only 5% capable of doing the job as designed (and has 95% out of process behavior) who is tasked with “training” the new guy.  The new guy will probably retain only about 5%, but this 5% has been diluted by the veteran worker’s self-taught, on the job training.   The problem isn’t that the veteran is necessarily teaching the recruit dangerous practices, the problem is that we have no idea how much variation the veteran has added to the process and how much risk of injury now exists in this particular job.  And acting without any clue as to how much risk is endemic to a process is recklessness.

Assessing your risk of injury every time you do a job may seem like a ridiculous expectation of workers, but in cases where the most likely injury is lethal or fatal, this expectation should be institutionalized and enforced.

Filed under: Just Culture, Phil La Duke, Risk, Safety, Just culture, risk, Risk Assessment and Safety, Risk factors, Worker Injuries

Are You Turning A Blind Eye To Hazards?

By Phil La Duke

 “He’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see”—John Lennon, Nowhere Man

Hazards come in many shapes and sizes—from the physical to the behavioral and all points in between.  And the efficacy with which hazards are identified to a large extent shape the overall effectiveness of your safety management system. So what happens when your personal or organizational biases prevent you from seeing things accurately and honestly?

In broad strokes you tend to find the things for which you are looking and scarce little else.  If your organization, for example, gathers most of it’s information about hazards by watching workers perform their jobs they are likely to find a host of unsafe behaviors at the expense of other hazards that are equally (or potentially more) dangerous.  Think you are immune to letting your prejudices getting in the way of your observations and decision-making? Experts would disagree.

“When You Sell Hammers, All The World Is A Nail”—Source unknown

Bias 1: Most Injuries Are Caused by Unsafe Behavior.

Entire methodologies have grown up around the belief that you can reduce injuries by reducing unsafe behaviors.  Irrespective of your personal opinions around BBS, when you believe that worker behavior is the overwhelmingly most frequent causative factor what sense is there in looking at things like poorly maintained machinery, facility issues, or ineffectual training.

Furthermore, many injuries are that ARE the result of unsafe behaviors are in fact, basic human error and may not be proceeded by overtly observable unsafe acts. So the bias toward behavior, even when behavior is INDEED a risk factor, may blind you to other threats.

Bias 2: Severity Bias.   Author David Marx, identifies several biases that he believes can directly undermine worker safety (and public safety). Marx, in his book, Whack a Mole: The Price We Pay for Expecting Perfection Marx introduces the concept of severity bias.  According to Marx, severity bias is the practice of enforcing greater consequences for those events that produce a more severe outcome.  Marx argues that the outcome of at risk behavior is immaterial—that the true risk lies in the flawed decision making and recklessness. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether or not an employee’s actions have never killed or injured someone, the fact that the behavior’s rewards are so out of proportion with the potential for harm is enough to judge it inappropriate.  If we buy into this bias, we tend to excuse inappropriate risk taking—and even recklessness—provided that the behaviors don’t result in an incident.

Bias 3: Professional Bias.  Marx also identifies a tendency to treat behaviors more harshly as one gets closer to the front line of operations.  Research has shown that people tend to let higher ranking professionals off the hook not out of fear of retaliation, but simply because the higher the rank of a professional the more likely that people will assume that the executive knows what he or she is doing and is therefore less deserving of coaching or discipline.  When you exhibit professional bias you create a multi-tiered system of accountability. Simply stated, you have a double (or triple) standard.

Bias 4: Some Hazards Are Just Common Sense.  Another great thinker on the topic of bias as it pertains to safety is Dr. Robert Long.  Long explores the relationship between risk and human judgment in his book, Risk Makes Sense. Long contends that there is no such thing as common sense. According to Long intelligent people make sense of the situation based on there personal experiences, things they have been taught by their parents, teachers, and peers.  To expect that a worker will intuitively assess the risk of a hazard the way others in the population would is unreasonable.  But often we take it for granted that people will understand the intrinsic dangers of a circumstance and fail to manage the hazard as being too trivial, condescending, or even insulting were we to mention it.

Bias 5: The All’s Well Expectation.  In the fantastic book, Why We Make Mistakes,: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, And Are All Pretty Sure We are Way Above Average Joseph  Hallinan takes a critical look at the factors that cause us to…well, screw up.  Hallinan notes that people tend to see the world through rose colored glasses (particularly when they are examining themselves).  This tendency to see things that aren’t there can cause us to miss hazards rooted in the absence of an element.  Remember the puzzles “what’s wrong with this picture?” the same phenomena is at play in our assessments of the safety of the work environment.

Assumptions

Sometimes it isn’t a bias, per se, that gets us into trouble. Sometimes we miss hazards because we make assumptions.  One of the most deadly assumptions is that something is true when it is not.  Dangerous assumptions pervade our work assessments like the assumption that one worker does the job exactly the same as another.  Another such assumption is that the work is done the same across shifts. Because we make these assumptions our hazard assessment is intrinsically flawed.

What’s The Answer?

Putting aside our biases isn’t easy—for one, just because we have a predisposition toward a certain belief doesn’t mean we are always wrong—but being mindful of our prejudices is a great place to start.  If we can find ways to look at the work place differently (for example, listing all the individual actions, like walking, carrying, etc.) we have a better chance of getting a good view of our workplace.  Another useful method of overcoming our biases is to invite someone who knows little or nothing about the process to help in assess the risk.  The fresh set of eyes is likely to yield surprisingly results. A similar, yet no less effective method of hazard analysis is to “swap” an area with another inspector. Like the person with no experience with the process, the other inspector is likely to find hazards that you have walked by a dozen times without noticing.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Worker Safety, assumptions about safety, bias, hazard investigation, Just culture, Professional bias, safety blindspots, Severity bias, Worker Safety