Just when you think you’ve sanitized your workplace, some joker finds something you overlooked in safety.
I travel all over North America speaking at safety meetings. I wander through a lot of airports, stay in a lot of hotels and eat in a lot of restaurants. I’ve gotten pretty good at traveling. It doesn’t bother me much. My favorite, though, is driving into the rural parts of this great continent.
Rural travel sometimes has its disadvantages - like, when you buy the 44-ounce bladder-buster coffee before the long drive. Small-town taverns and bars are always open for weary (and full-bladdered) travelers. Sometimes, you might even see something surprising that changes your philosophy.
For me, it was a small sign posted on top of the urinal in that hotel bar men’s room. “Please do not eat the urinal cake.”
“Is it a problem?” I asked the owner.
“Once, and it cleared out my bar on a Saturday night when EMS arrived. Now we have a sign,” he said, head shaking.
What You Learn From Dumb Things
The first time I ever saw the sign, I chuckled at the stupidity required to engage in eating a urinal cake. But then I began to look around. Standing on rickety chairs to change light bulbs, cutting the lawn in flip-flops, trimming heavy tree branches without head or eye protection and even wrestling with six or seven grocery bags and awkwardly fumbling for keys just to save a second trip from the car. People do stupid things – without giving any thought to their own safety. These are as dumb as eating urinal cakes when you get right down to it.
Fall off the chair while you’re changing a light bulb and break an arm and you’ll use a step ladder next time. Back the mower over your exposed toes and sheer off some skin and you’ll put boots on forever. Have a heavy tree branch fall and knock you out and you’ll have a hard hat and eye protection on next time.
Your Experiences Dictate Your Choices
You are the sum total of everything you have ever done in your whole life. Every decision, event and experience of your whole life has put you exactly where you are today. You should be a little afraid of that. Think about it: every decision you have ever made and every event and experience of your whole life has given you the results you have so far. On top of that, you are exactly the person you are as a result of everything that has ever happened in your past.
How you embrace safety, how you communicate with your fellow workers, everything you do is based on the experiences of your past: your willingness to speak up, your work ethic, your care for your fellow workers, your courtesy. It’s all a result of your upbringing and your past experiences.
Ever notice that people who have never faced a serious incident look at safety in a far different way than those who have faced imminent danger? That’s part of the life process. Make a mistake in your past and you’ll make a different decision next time - you hope.
Safety Can't Catch It All
Safety programs, unfortunately, are just like that: they are more corrective than preventive. Just when you think you’ve sanitized (removed hazards) your workplace, some joker finds something you overlooked – requiring you to develop a new safety procedure.
There’s no accounting for what the safety-dense will do in the workplace or at home. The trick is to make sure you reduce the idiot-factor at hiring time. Or better yet, if they already managed to get past HR, assemble the high-frequency or high-likelihood-of-risk employees and ask them to study your workplace looking for things that could go wrong with it and things they might try before they actually try them.
Sometimes the safety manager is too smart to see what “others” might see as a simple shortcut.
Your high-risk workers are the best people to help you identify potential “shortcuts” and incidents (tweet this). Then, you can mitigate the risk before they try it. You will have accomplished two things: you will have removed a risk and you will have forced your high-risk worker to actually think about an outcome he or she may not have seen. Either way, one more risk is eliminated.
And if you want to ensure that you're communicating effectively with your people, download my free e-book below.
