Getting Employees to Report Near Misses
Discipline is a double edge sword—necessary to enforce safety policies but also a potential chilling effect on the reporting of dangerous conditions. Near miss reporting is an excellent example of the negative impact discipline can play. Here’s the problem and a Best Practices solution for resolving it. Why You Need Employees to Report Near Misses In the course of conducting an injury investigation, nothing is more frustrating than to learn that the same circumstances that led to an injury resulted in prior incidents that went unreported by employees because accidents were narrowly missed and nobody got hurt. You hear: “That [...]
The Average Work Desk is Approximately 400 Times Dirtier Than the Average Toilet Seat
According to Dr. Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona, the average office worker has over 10 million bacteria living on its desk - that's 400x more than the average truck stop toilet seat. GROSS!!! It isn't just the gum stuck to the bottom, a study funded by Clorox Co found that the average desk has dangerously high levels of bacteria and viruses. Of course bacteria are not all bad, and common bacteria are found on every surface, but if COVID has taught us anything, it should be just how fragile our personal health, wellbeing, and the economy are when [...]
Your Sedentary Employees are Twice as Likely to Die of Heart Disease
We all know that a sedentary lifestyle is a risk factor for heart disease. The more you sit, the less you move, and the less you move, the more your risk increases. New research published in the journal Current Biology estimates that the average American does about 30 minutes less physical activity a day than an American in 1820. “Instead of walking to work, we take cars or trains; instead of manual labor in factories, we use machines." The study also found that resting metabolic rate — the total number of calories burned when the body is at rest — has [...]
The Power of Storytelling in eLearning
Most people have words they don’t like. For me, it’s office jargon like ‘bandwidth, ‘blue sky thinking’ or ‘pinging’ emails. For my brother, the most irritating word in the world is ‘delightful’. Years ago, he worked at an estate agency where ‘delightful’ was seriously overused; it featured in every advert and every property description. It even trickled down into normal conversation – delightful coffees, lunches, dates and holidays were had by all. Because of this experience, there are few things less delightful for him than the word itself. Why am I telling you this? There’s no chance I’d have remembered [...]
Using Discipline to Make the Workplace Safer
Discipline has gotten a bad rap. In the workplace setting, those who decry discipline include both the administrators who should be dishing it out and representatives of employees who should be receiving it. The end result is that discipline often doesn’t get imposed even when it’s richly deserved. And in the realm of health and safety, absence of discipline is a recipe for disaster. The Discrediting of Discipline Once upon a time, discipline was lauded as a fundamental value. In some cultures, it still is. So why has it become such a bugaboo for us? After all, we would all [...]
Protecting Workers in the Cold
Are you doing enough to protect your workers against the risks of cold-stress? If one of your workers should suffer a serious or fatal cold-stress injury, could you and your company be liable? When Is Cold Stress a “Recognized Hazard”? The first thing to clarify is when cold stress becomes a recognized hazard. It’s not temperature alone. It’s how cold the air actually feels on the body. There are 4 factors that employers must consider in determining how cold is too cold: Temperature of the air; Wind or other factors causing the air to move at a high velocity—thereby making it [...]
How to Provide Cold Stress Safety Training
As with other hazards, worker education and training are crucial to preventing cold stress. By the time they complete their training, workers need to understand: What cold stress is; Why it’s dangerous; How to protect themselves from the danger; How to recognize the signs and symptoms of the different forms of cold stress; and How to respond if they or a co-worker exhibits such signs or symptoms. Here’s how to provide introductory cold stress training to your own workers. GET THEIR ATTENTION: Start out by letting workers know what’s at stake. Explain that being in the cold too long isn’t just uncomfortable but dangerous because [...]
Workplace Safety in 2022
As the Omicron variant is spreading and rapidly becoming the dominant strain across North America, there are resurging issues with testing, vaccinations, quarantine timelines, social distancing and everything that we have all been moving away from for the last few months. You're not alone in feeling like you are perpetually stuck in a grindhouse version of Groundhog's Day - only it's the same six month pattern over and over and over again. You're not alone in being exhausted, or feeling like you just want to throw in the towel. There was a sense of hubris when the mRNA vaccines were approved. [...]
CEO on the Soapbox
The first week of 2022 offers an opportunity to stand on a soapbox and do a little bit of forecasting for the year ahead, so here goes. Between the massive potential fines and civil liabilities for not having a safe workplace and the need to retain motivated employees, employers will focus even more attention in 2022 on workplace health and safety. If you aren’t, you should be! In addition, with Omicron and the further spread of COVID-19, governments and private businesses are leading the way with compulsory vaccinations and policies that basically say “be vaccinated or get fired” and they [...]
Winter Means Training Workers on Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
After over 25 years of preaching and teaching it, I’ve come to realize that safety is a culture, not just a workday activity. It is a part of our lives. Accordingly, successful safety programs need to address not just workplace but home injuries. As the weather turns cold, there is one important home safety topic that I take up with my employees: Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. Here’s what I tell them. High Cost of Fuel Increases CO Risks Mid-fall is the start of the CO season. This is when we start firing up furnaces, wood burners, space heaters and the [...]
Seven Statistics on Working in Winter
From slippery elevated work areas to white-knuckle driving in blizzard conditions, winter poses some serious challenges to workers across much of North America. Here are seven statistics related to working in winter conditions: When climbing onto or off of equipment during the snowy season, workers should maintain three points of contact to increase their stability and reduce their chances of slipping or falling. One way to help keep your balance when walking on slippery surfaces is to keep your hands out of your pockets. Two things to avoid before shoveling snow are caffeine and nicotine, because they increase your heart rate and may cause [...]
COVID Mandate News on Both Sides of the Border
Today (January 13, 2021), the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the OSHA's emergency temporary standard requiring businesses with more than 100 employees to ensure workers are vaccinated against the coronavirus or wear masks and undergo weekly COVID-19 testing. The majority opinion said that although Congress has given OSHA the power to regulate dangers in the workplace, "it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly. Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category." However, SCOTUS allowed the federal government [...]
