Frontline Incident Prevention - The Hurdle: Innovative and Practical Insights on the Art of Safety

By David McPeak

Safety. It’s a basic human need, a workplace right, a misunderstood concept with situational importance, and a challenging word to apply. It’s also a science. To be safe, you need to know about things like electrical theory, ergonomics, and standards applicable to your work. But it doesn’t stop there. To get safety right, you must understand the art of safety: how and why to understand, lead, develop, and protect people.

That’s why Frontline Incident Prevention – The Hurdle was written. Its innovative and practical insights into the art of safety are your essential how-to guide on recognizing hurdles and developing effective run-ups to soar over them. You’ll learn how to lead and protect people rather than manage robots and please systems. You’ll also learn critical lessons about self-reliance and risk tolerance that culminate in proper application of the hierarchy of controls. Reading and applying the insights from this book will make you, your team, and your organization safer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Utility Business Media
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662929069

Book preview

Introduction to the Hurdles

Safety. It’s a word at the front and center of every organization and it’s one of our most basic human needs (Maslow, 1943). We claim it’s the most important thing we do, and yet incidents happen at alarming rates and levels of severity. Why?

Figure 1 Adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

This book will explore challenges (hurdles) and solutions (run-ups) to incident prevention and safety. My purpose in writing it is to clearly define what exceptional safety looks like and explain how to achieve it. Your goal in reading it should be to take the words out of the book and into your jobsites, lives and offices.

Before we can discuss the hurdles and their run-ups, we need to understand what incident prevention and safety are, and dispel the limiting beliefs that incident prevention and safety are the same and that safety is a compliance-based, necessary cost with the goal of keeping people from getting hurt.

Incident Prevention

1) Part of safety involving actions taken, barriers positioned, and controls designed to eliminate or reduce undesired events that cause harm to people, property, and systems.

2) Stopping bad things from happening.

Safety

1) Individual and organizational responsibility to act, think, plan, and work in a manner that prevents harm and encourages growth.

2) Ensuring good things happen.

Exceptional safety equates to caring about people. It is achieved when organizations and employees work together believing it is a competitive advantage for both.

From an organizational perspective, consider gains from cost reduction, contractor selection, culture, efficiency (directly and not inversely proportional to safety), recruiting, retention, and performance.

Safety isn’t expensive. It’s priceless.

Individuals should understand how safety affords them opportunities to protect, improve, and market themselves along with the ability to fully enjoy their family, friends, hobbies, life, and work.

Protect your hands; you need them to pick up your paycheck.

The Hurdles

The hurdles (challenges to incident prevention and safety) are lack of leadership, discounting human factors, pleasing the system, overreliance on you, risk tolerance and the upside-down hierarchy. The goal is to fully define and understand what creates each hurdle and then develop effective run-ups to get over them.

In thinking about the hurdles, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that a lot of organizations have excellent cultures with safety as a core value that achieve high levels of performance.

Unfortunately, almost every one of them developed those cultures and shifted safety from a priority to a value because of tragic incidents. Why is it that people have to be seriously injured or lose their lives to motivate positive change?

At some level, I understand why a child may have to touch the stove to learn it is hot regardless of how hard their parents or caregivers try to educate and protect them. And I get negative and painful experiences are some of our best teachers.

But at the surface level, I have always struggled with why organizations and individuals don’t just do the right thing when it comes to safety. How hard can it be for companies to protect their employees and for people to follow rules and procedures to stay safe and be well?

So, I followed Stephen Covey’s advice about seeking to understand and it didn’t take long for a few things to become obvious (Covey, 1990). First, safety is very misunderstood. Second, it is often easier, and we are encouraged to do the wrong thing. And on top of that, our definitions of right are inconsistent and fluctuate.

Bob’s Pocketknife

Bob works in shipping and receiving and has just cut himself with his pocketknife while attempting to cut a zip tie. Randy is the shipping and receiving manager. Pam is Bob’s coworker. Ron is the facility’s safety supervisor and is interviewing Bob, Randy, and Pam as part of the investigation. He asks each of them what happened and what could be done to prevent recurrence.

Bob: We have a specially designed box cutter we use for cutting zip ties. It works really well, but we lost it. I told Randy we lost ours and he said he would get us another one. That was three weeks ago. What am I supposed to do, not work? I have a job to do, and I’m going to make sure it gets done. We need the right tools for our job. Someone needs to make sure we have them.

Randy: I guess Bob’s daddy didn’t teach him how to use a knife. The other thing is that I have told Bob at least a thousand times to use the box cutter. Matter of fact, we had a safety meeting on that very topic yesterday morning. Who knows what he was thinking. You would think people would be smart enough not to stick their finger in front of a knife. I guess you just can’t fix stupid.

Pam: I didn’t see anything. I was unloading some pallets with the forklift on the other side of the dock. I had my seatbelt on and was following the rules. Bob does his thing and I do mine. I can’t control what he does, but I want you to know I always follow the rules. That would never happen to me. I always use a box cutter.

I’d love to say I made them up but those responses are real. This scenario sheds light on just how complicated and difficult safety can be. It exemplifies a general lack of individual ownership and responsibility along with a culture and systems that encourage undesired attitudes and behaviors. It leads us to examine a few questions.

Who is Responsible?

In the scenario, Bob, the person who got hurt, blamed Randy. Randy, Bob’s boss, blamed Bob’s dad who he doesn’t even know. And Pam, Bob’s coworker, completely absolves herself of any responsibility and takes the opportunity to brag about herself for things unrelated to the incident.

Who is responsible? We say things like I am responsible for my own safety and I am my brother’s and sister’s keeper. But do we really believe them and do they create a paradox? In other words, do we rely so much on other people and equipment to take care of us that we don’t do it ourselves, and do we blame someone or something else when something goes wrong? A B C D E.

Accuse, Blame, Complain, Defend and Deny, Excuses

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. —Charles Swindoll

Not long ago, I was teaching a virtual class about job briefings. To demonstrate a concept we had discussed, I held a post-job briefing near the end of class. When asked how the course could be improved, one participant said, Do it in person. I like seeing people’s faces. My reply was, Why don’t you have your camera on? They responded, No one else does. I didn’t want to be the only one. Have courage and take response-ability (Covey, 1990) for incident prevention and safety, noting A B C D E is the opposite of ownership and responsibility.

The real question here is not who is responsible. That’s easy. We all are. That’s also problematic because it’s vague. The real question is, do the people in the best position for safety and training (operational frontline leaders) and each individual understand and perform their specific roles and responsibilities?

Is Safety Necessary?

I’m not convinced safety was valued. Bob used the right tool when it was easy and took the position that someone should make sure they had the correct tools. Randy didn’t seem to understand his role in task-specific evaluation and training, not to mention things like providing resources and holding himself and his employees accountable. And Pam seems to have a selfish attitude and thinks she can isolate herself.

Let me ask you this. When you hear the word safety, do you think about valuable protection and leaving in the same or better condition than you arrived, or do you gravitate toward negative thoughts like fear of getting in trouble for not following rules you perceive to be overly burdensome, uncomfortable protective equipment that limits dexterity, and complex procedures that take too much time and limit your ability to complete your work? Do you always value safety or is it circumstantial?

The tangible impact of this question comes in the form of workarounds. I take my rubber gloves off to work with small nuts and bolts. We have software programs related to certain data, but everyone uses personal spreadsheets instead. I am compliant with personal protective equipment (PPE) and other requirements only when I fear someone may catch me. We purchase a new piece of equipment and step one is to take the guards off and disable safety features to make our work easier and ourselves more productive. In other words, we work around the way we know we should work. As Odie Espenship, one of my favorite speakers and author of Target Leadership (Espenship, 2013) says, The pulse of the way things are done must beat in rhythm with the pulse of the way things should be done.

It may be fair to conclude that the answer to the question is safety necessary is, it depends. It depends on the individual and organizational culture and values. Unfortunately for most, that makes it situational, meaning there are times we act as if we think safety is necessary and times we