Readers — Allow me to tiptoe off topic, slightly, to print this comment that came a while back in response to “An Insane Focus on Safety, Including the Hazard of ‘Eating Bread.'” As you know, Free-Range is all about battling hysteria when it comes to the idea that NOTHING is safe enough for our kids. When I see evidence of this beyond parenting, I realize our mission, more broadly, is to fight back the creeping conviction that only by non-stop focusing on safety and its handmaiden, DISASTER, can we be considered responsible.
Which is a long way of saying I really loved this comment.
Dear Free-Range Kids: My workplace has an unhealthy obsession with safety, so much so they built an automated system with only two real functions:
1 – Submit “Hazard Detection Forms” –HDFs — a tangle of paperwork where you list a threat to life and limb you witnessed and how to make sure it never happens again.
2 – Submit our timesheets. We’re contract and outsource types, so it’s all about billable hours. No timesheet submitted, no money for the company, no paycheck for you.
There was always an unofficial quota of 2 HDFs per month. Everyone thought it was a pain, but most of us office drones ignored it. It was more for the field guys, you know? Guys who spend their days in the guts of chemical or power plants, or driving out to God-knows-where to muck about with nonfunctional gas lines. They could make two a month easy: Hell, see one bear and one car accident by the side of the road during the 4 hour commute and you’re set. Hell, if you find an improperly tagged valve you can do your job AND fill out an HDF all at the same time. But us? Not really. 40 of us crammed into a tiny office on the border of suburbia and urbia? The biggest danger was knocking someone when you moved your chair back to get up. Any threat to life and limb would be spotted and fixed before you knew it.
We were berated in every one of the fortnightly safety meetings for not “pulling our weight,” getting ranted at by the company Napoleon about how the office is the deadliest environment in the world, more so than an ice-slick catwalk in January. (No, really, he said that.) Apparently in an office, complacency is the Great Satan. When you’re within spitting distance of a phosgene line you’re damn well careful, but in an office you won’t see the danger until it gets you: Spilled water on the floor, asbestos in the walls, a mountain lion popping up in the server room…. Offices are killers! You must always be alert!
A few months back, Napoleon went on the offensive: Now, you HAVE to submit two HDFs a month or get locked out of the automated system. Get locked out, can’t submit timesheet, don’t get paid for your work until you fill out the safety paperwork and are allowed back in. Our paychecks are essentially being held hostage once a month until we prostrate ourselves on the altar of Safety.
So, of course there’s now a metric ton of BS flying as 40 people try to find threats of mayhem over the same quarter of a city block. If you went by reports you’d assume this quiet little building and parking lot is home to half the city’s spilled beverages, dropped nails, diseased rodent sightings, lamps and heating elements by curtains, near-miss car crashes/hit-and-runs, dropped extension cords, leaky gas and oil tanks, violent homeless guys, etc.
It’d be safer in Kandahar than this horrible place that our HDFs have built. – Office Guy
46 Comments
CNN Holds Meeting to Determine What Stories To Run To Scare Us All Day (The Onion)
Seems like we could help this poor person get their paycheck by coming up with some “safety” issues.
Lets see….starting with the most obvious: Paper cuts. When all of the paper is gone, then he can claim spread of disease from employees who no longer have tissues to blow their noses.
Oh, and if they get hand sanitizer, the risk of people drinking it and getting drunk. Especially pregnant women.
Letter writer seems like a whiny tart. I do EHS for a living so in order to not burst a blood vessel commenting on the nonsense of this “letter” and the obvious disconnect and sense of entitlement he and others like him have I am gonna go back to goofing off on facebook since my day today is relatively slow.
@crazycatlady- paper cuts COULD legitimately be a threat to live and limb in a few years when, as reported on the news yesterday, superbugs will be resistant to antibiotics. Why? Because we’ve irresponsibly overused antibiotics as a way to create a sense of control over illnesses that don’t even respond to antibiotics! How’s that for full circle 😉
LOL! That cracked me up!
I wonder of being terrorized by a micromanaging paranoiac who’s hallucinating danger around every corner counts as a workplace hazard?
Gary, can you amplify on what’s unreasonable about being upset that you have to file hazard reports in order to get paid for doing your actual job, when you work in an environment with no real hazards. and you don’t actually work in EHS?
Here’s my contribution — paper clips. They’re an attractive nuisance. They’re just lying there, begging you to play with them and unwind them in a boring meeting, and the next thing you know, someone’s eye has been poked out!
“Gary, can you amplify on what’s unreasonable about being upset that you have to file hazard reports in order to get paid for doing your actual job, when you work in an environment with no real hazards. and you don’t actually work in EHS?”
Because in any type of work environment safety is everyone’s responsibility. We are not talking about things done at home but things that are company policy as well as falling under the purvey of governmental regulatory agencies, specifically OSHA if you live in the US but this persons use of “fortnightly” makes me wonder if they are a US company.
Instead of trying to explain why it is important that hazardous conditions/near misses are reported I will let you read it yourself.
http://crsp-safety101.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-safety-triangle-explained.html
And saying something like “hen you work in an environment with no real hazards. and you don’t actually work in EHS?” shows the exact disconnect I mentioned earlier.
I work for the fourth largest company in the world in our industry and can tell you that regardless of if you work in production, the labs or Admin safety is a key element.
Office personnel getting their feet caught on the rats nest of wires under their desk when they back out from their desk and go to get up from their chair and walka way only to trip and fall may seem like a clumsy “accident” but the fact that most Admin personnel do not see their areas as dangerous is misleading and can be very costly.
Huh. Sounds like the disconnect is coming from the “unofficial” quota of two reports of something hazardous in the office environment EVERY two weeks and what is logical and reasonable.
I can understand encouraging people to be aware of their surroundings and keeping safety in mind, regardless of whether they are at work, home, or out in the field somewhere. Home tends to be a place where many, many accidents occur… in my experience, far more than in an office environment, but I concur there are hazards to be aware of no matter where you are.
The defense of this practice of insisting on reports, and the number of reports, and the frequency of reports seems odd to me, though. Could there not be simple encouragement to be on the lookout for things that might constitute a hazard, or reporting “near misses,” instead of threatening people with punishment if they don’t “produce” reports of hazards on a schedule?
Making people more aware of workplace hazards is one thing. I’m all for providing a pathway for employees to share real concerns. However, is it legal to hold their paychecks until they submit workplace hazard forms? Especially if it is not inherently part of their jobs? And why on earth would you want to create a situation where recognizing and reporting actual hazards gets lost in the pile of coerced, invented threats? Also, is the company creating unnecessary liabilities? You take out the argument, “what a reasonable person would think was a threat.” For example, multiple employees expound on the inherent danger of staples. . .someone breaks a nail or gets a cut from a staple. . .the wound becomes infected. . .and the company is open to a lawsuit because staples were an identified threat and the company did nothing to remove them from the workplace. . .
Yet another reason I worry about what sort of world we are leaving to our children.
“Office personnel getting their feet caught on the rats nest of wires under their desk when they back out from their desk and go to get up from their chair and walka way only to trip and fall may seem like a clumsy “accident” but the fact that most Admin personnel do not see their areas as dangerous is misleading and can be very costly.”
By “not a hazardous environment” I don’t mean an environment where there are no potential hazards, of course. I mean an environment where the work is not generally fraught with hazards.
Of course there are things like trip hazards, etc. But the problem comes in when you force every employee to come up with two new potential hazards every month just to get paid. Depending on how many employees there are in a single environment, this could get really ridiculous, especially if the hazards like the one you describe actually get corrected when noted.
I don’t think the point is that she doesn’t want any part of documenting actual hazards, it’s that the standard set has more to do with keeping the safety officer happy than with workplace safety. What if there are five employees, and only nine actual uncorrected hazards noted in a month’s time? Should someone just make up something stupid, or should someone not get paid? The numbers game is the wrong approach here, and saying so doesn’t mean someone doesn’t want to take workplace safety seriously.
“And why on earth would you want to create a situation where recognizing and reporting actual hazards gets lost in the pile of coerced, invented threats?”
Bingo.
Perhaps the hazard of stress over having your paycheck held hostage by a nonsense make work process?
Or the stress of a badly designed policy?
Honestly, take it the boss and HR, and if in the US, your local wage and hour board. Even if the W and B rules no complaint, it eats HR, legal and executive time.
I wonder if the hyper-vigilance isn’t some sort of liability issue. If their insurance or worker’s comp program forces them to do something like this. They have to be able to say…”See, we did everything possible! We even held back their paychecks to make sure they paid attention to their safety!”
I’ve got two: Sitting stationary at a desk all day, every day can cause blood clots and strokes, etc… And people losing their homes and no food on the table if all the issues are corrected (since there are only a finite number of plausible hazards in an office) and they insist on more HDFs instead of passing out a paycheck. If they keep getting the same complaints, then they could be sued for not doing something about it when the problem was identified. There’s a need for the reporting of legitimate safety concerns, but this here is ludicrous.
If you HAVE to submit them, just keep a running list of imaginary ones and fire off some dangers.
1. Continuously played Christmas music makes employees mentally irritated and more likely to want to stab something.
2. Fumes from perfumed employees cause headaches and nausea.
3. The Dunkin Donut munchkins (also known as *fat balls*) left for employees to eat in the break room contain trans fat and are clogging arteries and killing us.
4. All stairs should be replaced with padded ramps for those who wear high heels because they could trip.
4. Hot coffee. It burns.
5. Gum chewing. Choking hazard.
I would just sit in a bar after work with friends and make up a big long list.
Lenore, please send this to Scott Adams (Dilbert). I swear he used a glossy document I once sent him from my husband’s well-known company as a storyline. It detailed the “14 strategic thrusts” that the company was going to undertake (and never did). It was hysterical, because it went on and on in the same vein. It actually seemed like something from “the Onion”, but wasn’t.
We once had to encase a machine with moving parts in a clear plastic cage in the name of safety. In spite of the fact that only trained operators were allowed in the room with the machine, and that all moving parts were enclosed, it was deemed too hazardous on its own.
So, at a cost greater than the value of the machine, the cage was built. The only problem was that the machine needed the test parts swapped out every 5 minutes, but it was a 55minute process to dismantle the cage so as to be able to access the parts.
You can never be too safe…
Can you submit the same two reports each time? There must be some objects that could constitute a trip hazard – chairs for example. And you must have some pointed or edged objects that could constitute a risk of laceration – scissors or pens or pencils for example. Simple.
Not getting your paycheck over bureaucratic nonsense definitely sounds like a threat to me…
And this still makes me want to come up with the most idiotic “threats” that could be lurking in an (fictional…) office (or similar workplace), like developing a Silly Walk or being unable to not mention the war to a colleague with a German last name or so.
ABC Insurance inc. has a policy. Offer the customer two options in their insurance policy:
Pay $$$$$ for insurance OR pay $$$ AND show evidence they are continually improving safety.
Therefore, the employees that are not submitting paperwork (so they are eligible for cheaper premiums) are not pulling their weight. Whether or not the ‘hazard’ they find is significant or not is irrelevant. In fact, they can be amazingly condescending as making the employees take a test:
If your ear itches, it is safe to use a sharp pencil to scratch it True or False.
I HATE that creeping safety focus is becoming an everyday thing. Once time I entered the premises of a business. This was a one off thing and I was only waiting in reception for 2 minutes. However I had to go through ‘what to do in the event of a fire or bomb threat’, speech so that I could wait in reception!
ABC Insurance inc. has a policy. Offer the customer two options in their insurance policy:
Pay $$$$$ for insurance OR pay $$$ AND show evidence they are continually improving safety.
Therefore, the employees that are not submitting paperwork (so they are eligible for cheaper premiums) are not pulling their weight. Whether or not the ‘hazard’ they find is significant or not is irrelevant. In fact, they can be amazingly condescending as making the employees take a test:
If your ear itches, it is safe to use a sharp pencil to scratch it True or False.
I HATE that creeping safety focus is becoming an everyday thing. Once time I entered the premises of a business. This was a one off thing and I was only waiting in reception for 2 minutes. However I had to go through ‘what to do in the event of a fire or bomb threat’, speech so that I could wait in reception!
Safety is now a religion. Thou shall think about safety with all thy heart, all thy strength, and all thy mind.
I’d submit a hazard report about the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome due to typing up hazard reports!
Someone should make a documentary on all this stuff, and then label it ‘comedy’ for the rest of the world…
This makes me so sad! And I’m glad Gary doesn’t work at my company! There are real hazards (like the broken slate tile in front of my building that I tripped on and sprained my ankle) but if every one of us had to come up with 2 hazards per month, essentially blowing everyday living and working out of proportion, I’d lose my mind. Rather than reporting that spilled drink on the floor – just mop it up and go on!!
I don’t know… I can’t help think I’d be gleefully submitting, in glorious dramatic detail, the most ridiculous two safety hazards I can think of. Monthly.
@Gary: I have to agree that you’re right, that safety is everyone’s concern.
But there’s promoting safety, and then there’s promoting “safety.” Making it a job requirement to report genuine, appreciable, and unaddressed safety risks is promoting safety. If, as happened with the letter writer, you give everyone a formal quota of safety risks that they must report every month on pain of not getting paid, you’re promoting “safety”, because if you do that, sooner or later you’ll run out of genuine, appreciable, and unaddressed safety risks.
And what happens then?
I’d suspect that at first, you’ll start getting reports on increasingly unlikely, even improbable hazards. (So much for “appreciable.”)
Then people will start saving off last month’s hazard reports to copy-and-paste into next month’s submissions.
Then you’ll get people who have some computer skills (I fall into this category), who’ll see if there’s some way they can automate submissions. And if you think submitting completely automated reports, which may not even make sense, won’t work, consider this: two journals recently accepted a nonsense paper supposedly written by Margaret Simpson, Kim Jong Fun, and Edna Krabappel. (As the actual submitter said, “My only regret is that the second author isn’t Ralph Wiggum.”)
Remember that there are 40 people doing this. (Once one person does the automation, it’ll spread.)
After all that, if there are any genuine, appreciable, and unaddressed safety risks? Good luck finding them in the middle of all that crap.
“Then you’ll get people who have some computer skills (I fall into this category), who’ll see if there’s some way they can automate submissions.”
Who even needs computers? Just submit one that says something like “we could be bitten by a rabid dog.” Then substitute the names of other animals. That’ll keep things going for quite a while. Then go back and use the Latin names of all the animals.
And if you’re still really that concerned about eating bread, the smart thing to do is make sure everyone is up to date on first-aid training. Just like you teach people to ‘stop, drop and roll’ if they’re ever on fire – they probably won’t need it but it won’t do any harm, if it’s presented in a matter-of-fact way. Also, learn the difference between ‘partial obstruction’ and ‘full obstruction’. Partial obstruction requires , at most, 1)reassurance and 2) encouragement to cough. That’s it,
I’m a grouch. I would have told Napoleon that he had one week to remove that block or I would sue the company for breach of contract. And I would then have submitted a hazard report explaining how the system was being buggered to generate hazard reports, and explaining that this was a health and safety problem because if Napoleon’s rampant ego caused me to miss a single regular paycheck I was going to kill the stupid sonofabitch.
“And why on earth would you want to create a situation where recognizing and reporting actual hazards gets lost in the pile of coerced, invented threats?”
THAT should be the threat that this person submits, every single fortnight! Something to the effect of: I fear the greatest threat in this office is that a real hazard will be overlooked amid this pile of fake non-hazards we are required to submit just to get paid. I’m growing concerned, because I submitted this hazard last week, and yet nothing was done to change the policy…
But all joking aside, this policy could be easily tweaked to be much more rational. Every pay period, each employee could be required to either describe a risk they witnessed, or click on something that says I certify that I didn’t witness any hazards this time period. That way, you’d have to think for half a second about whether it’s true that you had a perfectly safe two weeks. And then management has their legal “cover,” too.
“Office personnel getting their feet caught on the rats nest of wires under their desk when they back out from their desk and go to get up from their chair and walka way only to trip and fall may seem like a clumsy “accident” but the fact that most Admin personnel do not see their areas as dangerous is misleading and can be very costly.”
did it ever occur to you that maybe those areas aren’t actually dangerous?
I’ve worked in office environments for 2 decades, and the only workplace accident I ever had was a computer screen that was placed on top of a cabinet and fell off, if I’d not instinctively had tried to catch it I’d not now have a bad back.
And THAT was 12 years ago, in an office that was being renovated so stuff was stacked everywhere while rooms were being fitted with new carpets. It was a temporary situation, not the normal way the place was run.
Cables under desks cause you to fall and injure yourself when you get up? NEVER seen that happen in those 20 years, either to myself or any of the hundreds of people I’ve worked with in that time.
And working in IT there were always far more cables under and around our desks than is the norm in office environments.
And cables running over the floor everywhere, not always in special gutters but secured using duct tape.
Not a single accident I’ve ever seen as a result, nothing more serious than a cart or chair being moved around getting snagged for a minute.
You, sir, are making up theoretical workplace hazards, no doubt for a living, trying to get rich from sueing companies over things like that.
Another EHS professional chiming in. First, in my career, I have known of 2 office workers who required knee surgery and one who required care for whiplash type injury after unknowingly getting their computer wires wrapped around their foot and getting up from their chair and attempting to walk. Lots of other office injuries, too, mostly due to ergonomic and slip/trip issues. However, to require a quota of hazard reports only serves to create negativity related to workplace safety, even more so by withholding pay. Being a partner with office staff, listening to their true concerns, and education goes much farther to reduce injuries (and exhorbitant workers comp insurance premiums), than heavy handed forced beaurocracy. I personally don’t know of any safety professionals who would do what this guy is doing. It’s truly ridiculous.
yes, not saying there’s not many office environments that would benefit from improvement…
But that’s mostly not so much accident prevention as preventing long term creeping problems like RSI, sick building syndrome, and stress.
Things like proper office furniture, swivel chairs where adjustment settings actually work and haven’t been broken for 10 years, desks that can be adjusted in height, not packing 5 people in a room meant for 2-3, etc. etc.
And working air conditioning, not just vents blasting workers with air that’s bone dry and either ice cold or scalding hot depending on season.
Having cable runners is nice, and really helps make the place look tidy, but compared to those things it’s a very very minor thing, and all those things and many more are extremely common in office environments, so common in fact that every single office I’ve ever worked in over the last 20 years displayed most if not all those deficiencies.
“You might put in new carpeting, which would off-gas and release organic compounds.”
“I might slip on the stairs when visiting a lawyer in a large office building. I’d be visiting him if you decided not to pay me because I didn’t identify 2 threats one month.”
And for Gary – wanting to get paid after doing your job is not being whiny and entitled, it’s pretty much how having a job works. You can recite that mantra about safety being everyone’s job all you want (you realize you get paid for a reason, right?) but it doesn’t imply, or come close to implying, that it’s everyone’s job to find some arbitrary number of threats each month.
I do some health and safety consulting. If I came in and, each month, every employee had written up 2 complaints under threat of not getting paid, I highly doubt I’d find anything legitimate in that pile – if there was something legitimate in there, I’d only find it after wading through piles of absurdity because – shock – most people are not EHS workers and don’t know how to identify workplace hazards as legitimate or not, nor do they appreciate being told “find 2 unsafe things or you won’t get paid.”
My empathy and gratitude goes out to the author. What an awesome and ridiculous story. His flair is awesome but his situation is ridiculous and terrible. Poor guy. He should look for a career in the field of writing!
I worked in the energy industry for many years, and this sort of thing is pervasive there. As far as I can tell, the emphasis on safety in an official way really started ramping up in the 80s. The actual field locations are quite dangerous, and the safety initiatives and procedures helped a great deal in eliminating needless death and injury there. The problem comes in when, like the story, the same procedures start getting applied with increasing strictness in an office environment.
Just like the original story, we also had to submit multiple hazard identification reports a month, despite working in a harmless office. Requirements to submit more and more things like that kept going up too. And just like them, virtually all of them were for absurd things, like cracks in the sidewalk, spilled coffee, cable routing, driving issues, and even stair-climbing technique. No joke, we literally had classes on the correct way to climb up and down stairs, and were encouraged to write each other up for doing it incorrectly. Okay, it makes sense to climb stairs carefully when you’re on a drilling platform at sea, and the staircase is 50 feet long, hanging over a 300 foot drop to the sea, and covered in rain, mud, oil, grease, etc. But on a 10 foot indoor staircase in an office building? Patently ridiculous, but the same safety rules are supposed to apply.
What really ramps things up to another level, though, is that people have been injured in that office, and none of these safety programs could have ever had any effect in preventing it. The last injury there that I remember is when a poorly installed shelf fell off of a wall and hit an employee, requiring a hospital visit for a severe sprain, I think. Obviously, we’d like to be able to prevent that sort of thing from happening, but no matter how many safety reports you require office workers to write, they will never notice that a shelf was not attached to the wall correctly, and might fall sometime after years of use.
I think part of the problem is that the forces trying to make things safer in general tend not to look at the overall situation and pay attention to common sense and tradeoffs. Wanting to make a safe place for people to work is a good thing, but at some point you have to say that it’s safe enough now, and trying to make it safer will cause more problems than it solves. Same with kids – we all want kids to be safe, and have worked for decades to make the world safer. When that work succeeds and we have a pretty safe world, instead of backing off and having fun in our new safe world, the effort to make things safer still ramps up, and we start getting collateral damage like throwing parents in prison for minor differences in parenting philosophy.
“I do some health and safety consulting. If I came in and, each month, every employee had written up 2 complaints under threat of not getting paid, I highly doubt I’d find anything legitimate in that pile — if there was something legitimate in there, I’d only find it after wading through piles of absurdity because — shock — most people are not EHS workers and don’t know how to identify workplace hazards as legitimate or not, nor do they appreciate being told “find 2 unsafe things or you won’t get paid.”
”
Worse. People will start to create marginally unsafe situations just so they have something to report…
Nothing big. Just a few electrical leads running over the floor, not where anyone will trip over them but a vacuum cleaner could get stuck and pull them out of the socket.
Or a fire door left propped open because it’s easier to move about that way, when regulations say it should be closed.
JT – maybe, but why bother? You can always find something to write, and it’s less trouble than actually going and creating something unsafe. However, the bottom line is I wouldn’t want to come in each month and read a bunch of reports like this – whether people were just being “creative” or actually creating unsafe things to write about.
Do they have the legal right to do this???
The corporate office of the company I work for had a higher injury rate than all but one of the plants, which led to them implementing a similar program for observing safety.
Partly that’s a good reflection on the plants, but the rate they had was that nearly half of employees would have a lost time accident over the course of 30 years.
I see people above joking about sitting and blood clots. Well, a friend of the family died from sitting too long, so I’m not going to complain about reminders to get up and walk to another workstation and talk to someone instead of e-mailing.
Or proper lifting technique moving boxes of printer paper, or monitors at a proper height.
For our program, we offer an incentive to the best observation and improvement each month, and we also allow positive observations, where the comment is “This is done really well”. Overall only about 5% identify a risk.
A couple months ago I saw a guy using a laptop screen as a second screen all day, and he was having to look down. Herniated disks suck, so we got him a second monitor. No big deal. Something doesn’t have to be death and destruction to be worth improving.
Requiring hazards be found is misguided, but I also think we’re possibly only getting part of the information. The “Napoleon” deserves the opportunity to provide a rebuttal. maybe some effort should be expended not on complaining, but on trying to make the program better.
@Safetygeek: “beaurocracy”
Hmm, prettifying bureaucracy? Must be a sarky bilingual pun! 😉
Pingback: Maggie's Farm
Completely true story: in my huband’s old computer-modeling office, someone managed to cut himself on the shards of a three-hole punch that broke on the downswing. Management confiscated every three-hole punch in the place for safety testing, then left a single one out on a table with a sign reading “this one is safe to use.” My husband finally quit rather than attend back-care classes, after a tense 3-month standoff with first his boss and then the local vice president, both of whom were terrified of what would happen if they couldn’t submit a report vouching for 100% compliance by all workers in their sector.
I think Gary needs a vacation : )
Put down staples on your list of hazards. Ever get one caught on you nail, ouch!
I also work in the safety field, and agree with many of the other commenters with this background (except for Gary, who seems to not realize that the “Napoleon” in the original story has the wrong attitude (and potentially an illegal method?) in withholding paychecks in lieu of hazard reports. Safety observations (both positive and negative) and “near miss reports” are a useful part of most H&S programs in order to improve the safety culture of the company, and get it so that people think about their environment and what they’re about to do, before they do it. We have a target of one “safety observation” per employee per year, but it’s measured on an office basis – not per employee basis. I.e., our office of 65 people aims for 65 submissions per year, but the majority of those come from our field staff, although some useful ones come out of the office too (bad ergonomic set ups, bookshelves not fixed to walls in EQ country, etc). It’s well known in our company that having a quota doesn’t encourage good reporting or improve safety outcomes – it just alienates the workers and gums up the safety program with hundreds of low-value observations. We encourage reporting by periodically offering prizes for the most useful observations – i.e., ones that other staff can learn from or that resulted in obvious benefits to worker safety.
The idea with these observations is that the more that people make them, then they’re more likely to see unsafe conditions/acts before they turn into something more serious like a near miss or an injury incident or fatality. E.g., I see an electrical cord laying across a hallway & report it as an observation (and also either remove the cord or tape it down before someone trips on it). That is way better than noticing it & fixing it when I trip on it but don’t hurt myself (reported as a near miss), or when I trip on it and do hurt myself by banging my head on the corner of the nearby desk (reported as an injury incident).
I have often thought about how my H&S role conflicts/relates to my
role as mom… at work we have a 4 prong approach to thinking about work tasks:
1. what are you about to do?
2. what could go wrong?
3. what can you do to reduce the risk? and
4. who else do you need to tell about the risks?
When I think about non-free range parents using this approach, the results could be terrifying:
1. my kid is going to walk to the park alone
2. they could get kidnapped/get lost/hit by a car/fill in the blank with all sorts of (perceived) risks
3. (I don’t think most non-free rangers would get to 3 or 4 – they’d be so freaked out by #2 that they wouldn’t let the kids do anything.
But taking that 3rd step (and also thinking about the likelihood & potential severity of the hazard) actually helps to be a good free range parent (in my opinion). Yes, kidnapping, getting lost, hit by a car, etc COULD happen (albeit very unlikely for the kidnapping especially). But that is what #3 is for… I’ll teach my kid about traffic safety & how to cross the road, I’ll make sure he knows his neighborhood well enough to find his way home, and I’ll teach him (without freaking him out) that talking to strangers is ok, but that going places with them isn’t, and what to do if gets a bad vibe from talking with someone. (and #4, he should tell me or his dad where he is going and when we can expect him back).
So the “safety culture” that is taking over the corporate world is actually somewhat useful in parenting too – as long as you take a realistic and pragmatic approach, and don’t become the “Safety Police” like Napoleon in the original story.
Anyway, sorry – that was a long ramble – I hope it makes sense?