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“Safety is an attitude.  How’s yours?”  That tagline was one I created for one of my clients as a way to get the staff and management excited and bought into the new injury prevention system that I was assisting in design and implementation.  Attitude is vitally important to success whether it’s in regards to safety, sales, marketing or performance.  A company’s attitude towards employee health, wellness and safety will go a long way into attaining zero work-related injuries.

“It was just an accident.”  “S/he made a bad judgment.”  “S/he behaved unsafely.”

Do any of those causes sound familiar to you?  We’ve all heard these or similar reasons for why an injury occurred.  However, are they the true root cause?  The “cause” for injuries or accidents is typically attributed in some way to “human error”.

Do you think it’s possible to eliminate work-related injuries (in your company)?  Is your (company) goal to have zero work-related injuries?  I frequently ask these two questions to my clients.  The answers (and looks on their faces) are quite varied.  There are those who immediately answer the first one by saying it’s “impossible” to have no injuries.  I’ve sometimes gotten the sense that they think I’m nuts for even asking the question and thinking that it is possible.  With the given response to the first question, their obvious answer to the second question is “No”.

Have you ever thought about the products you use each day and how and why you use them?  Consumer products are a huge category to tackle so I’m going to focus in on an item that most of use and/or interact in some way:  the car.  The “never event” for a car is pretty easy to see—accidents can cause serious injury and/or death.  The design of cars has significant HF/E involved in them—good and bad.

Have you ever had an experience with a product or a machine in which you said to yourself, “This is a poor design”?  Or, have you ever walked into a space (office, store, restaurant, etc.) find yourself saying, “Why is this here and not over there?” or “What were they thinking (when they designed this)”?