health and safety

“It’s impossible for me to this because….”

“There’s no way I can do it that way”

“It’s difficult for me to do it that way because…”

“If I did it that way, ____ would happen”

If you’ve heard statements similar to these it’s probably because your employees have obstacles or barriers in their way of performing and doing things the way they’ve been trained or instructed.  In this final blog series I’m going to discuss how to approach obstacles and barriers that get in the way of employees doing what they’ve been trained to do.

Continuing on with my blog series on the four common reasons why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained, I’m going to take a closer look at perception.  The scenario I’m going to use as the basis for this is one which is occurring in many hospitals and long term care facilities around the country:  caregivers not using safe patient handling (SPH) equipment to move patients.  This has become a source of frustration for many SPH program leaders.  As you will see, the lack of SPH equipment use could easily involve all 4 reasons but for this blog we’ll focus only on perception.

In my last four blogs I’ve discussed four common reasons that contribute to why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained and know to do:  habits, perceptions, obstacles and barriers.  Before we can address them we obviously need to determine the root cause.  We need to know the answers to these questions:

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.

Have you ever seen an employee continue to do some “unsafe act” or not use the safety equipment provided to them just after they’ve been trained in the new policies and procedures?  If you have you’re certainly not alone.  Unfortunately, this is a common frustration of safety professionals everywhere.  I’ve personally experienced this on more than one occasion, especially early on in my career.  I’ve also had colleagues ask me if this has happened to me and what I’ve done about it.

In Part 1, I stated that successful ergonomics programs manage risk and optimize human performance and reviewed key elements of a successful program.  Now that we know ergonomics is not about safety, we need to convince the C-level and operations people that ergonomics truly is a worthwhile investment.

ROI Justification Models

There   review the top 3 ways that can be used to convince management to implement ergonomics programs.  Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Reason #5: Absence of Continuous Improvement—Real Time Metrics

If the CEO came to your office and asked, “How is effective is our ergonomics program today?” what would be your answer?  Would you even be able to answer?  What would your answer be based on?  What metric or measure would you base it upon?

Often times we measure ergonomics and safety success based only on the numbers and costs related to worker injury.  Those numbers, whether are good or bad, do matter, but they only matter for yesterday.  They don’t tell you what is going on today.

All too often I hear safety professionals lament that safety is compromised for increased productivity.  They tend to be dismayed by the fact that the focus of the operations managers and corporate level executives are to maximize efficiency and productivity as much as (humanly) possible.  For the safety professional, the focus is on employee health and safety.  It’s not the safety professionals don’t want profits and it’s not the corporate executives want injured employees, however if the corporate executives are forced to choose between safety and productivity the choice will almost alway

I was meeting with a health and safety manager recently who shared that his manufacturing company’s H&S numbers weren’t very good. His supervisor wasn’t happy with the numbers and was given the directive to improve his numbers and rejuvenate the H&S culture of the company.  He went on to say that the safety committee met on a regular basis but the employees didn’t really want to be there.  In short, the company lacked energy and enthusiasm for safety.