BARRIERS: NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY—WORKERS WON’T BE ABLE TO DO!
The last of the four common reasons for why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained to do are barriers. Think of barriers as a thick and high brick wall. There is no way for a worker to do what you’ve told them because a wall is in their way. The workers lack the equipment and tools or authority to they need to do their job as they’ve told. Barriers must be addressed and removed as soon as possible as they prevent the ability to perform the task, perform the task safety and/or take safety precautions that control their and their coworkers’ exposure to risk.
Let’s go back and look at the examples I used in my previous blog on obstacles. In the safe patient handling example, let’s say that Hospital XYZ has only mobile (floor based) lifts available. There is only 1 sling per lift and half of the patient rooms are doubles meaning two patients to a room. The staff have been trained on the lift and instructed to use the lift to transfer dependent patients from bed to chair. There are at least two barriers in this example: The first is the fact that in double rooms there is virtually no room to use a mobile lift unless most of the furniture and the first bed is moved and even then there might not be enough clearance to use the lift. The second is only having one sling per lift. There many issues with this. One sling can easily get lost, the size may not fit all patients and the probably the most important one is the patient safety issue. If the sling isn’t properly cleaned there is definitely an infection control issue. To summarize, mobile lifts in this situation are a barrier because they are wrong equipment for the space and task.
The second example was the foundry and the need to switch sides every hour when working on the conveyor. If the speed of the conveyor was such that the parts were coming down at a rate in which the workers were to fall completely behind if they took the safe way to switch sides. This would be a barrier as the workers truly have no choice but to walk over a moving conveyor in order to keep up with the parts.
The third example was the warehouse delivery drivers. If the route was designed with very little to no cushion to account for any delays the drivers would have to do whatever it takes to make their delivery times. This would put themselves and other drivers (because of their need to go over the speed limit) in danger.
As you can see barriers are beyond the workers control. It is up to management to identify and remove them or make modifications to the job so the workers can perform it safety and efficiently.
What barriers have you seen? What have you done about them?
These are the most common reasons for why employees don’t follow what they learned in safety training and/or policies in general. Next we’ll look at how to address these reasons from an ergonomics and human factors point of view.