From the Staffing Experts

ResponsAble Safety Staffing From the Staffing Experts blog archives.

Serious About Plant Safety? What About The Office?

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office safety

For most employers, the bulk of safety emphasis goes toward the shop floor, production, manufacturing, etc.  Machines moving products rapidly around human beings just demands our collective prevention attention.  But what about the office? 

We tend to look at the office environment long enough to see everybody’s going home with all their fingers and toes; it’s all good. 

It’s Not All Good; They Slipping, Tripping and Falling All Over the Place

The Center for Disease Control, CDC, reports office workers are up to 2.5 times more likely to suffer an injury from a fall than non-office workers.  What?!?!?

Yep, office workers get lulled into safety complacency just like anyone will when they don’t recognize the hazards.  There are many potential slip, trip and fall hazards in a typical office setting.

  • • Wet or slippery floors
  • • Objects on floors such as open drawers, electrical cords, carpeting, items left in walkways
  • • Poor visibility or lighting
  • • Use of furniture in place of a proper latter to reach elevated items
  • • Unsafe or unstable footwear

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome anyone? 

If your office workers are careful to avoid all those slip, trip and fall hazards, how are they doing with the long hours on the computer? 

Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS, data reveals musculoskeletal disorders, MSD’s, account for over $ 15 billion in worker’s compensation costs annually. 

MSD’s are associated with many of the type of activities common in office work. 

  • • Sitting still for long periods of time
  • • Poor posture for long durations; improper ergonomics
  • • Repetitive small motor movement such as typing
  • • Lack of work breaks

Lifting Not So Heavy Loads

Poor lifting technique can lead to injury even with relatively light loads.  The act of lifting is intrinsically hard on our back, neck and shoulders especially if we use improper form.  Additional risk comes for people who are not physically fit or have prior injuries that may re-occur with even a small strain. 

Common causes of lifting injuries

  • • Lifting something that is too heavy
  • •Not asking for help
  • • Bending from the waste instead of squatting and using legs
  • • Grabbing with finger tips
  • • Twisting while carrying a heavy item

The risk factors described above are by no means an exhaustive list but simply some highlights to raise awareness around office safety.  The injuries and risk associated with the office environment just don’t tend to get our full attention when stacked up next to heavy industrial settings; but it should. 

Put the same Safety, Health and Environmental zeal into protecting your office workers as you do for any employee.  Make sure your training and accountability for the office staff is on par with any other role but match the curriculum and expectations to the office threats. 

Ensuring your office operates safely is right for your employees and right for your business.  If you want a safe plant, you need a safe office.

Deceptive Winter Hydration

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winter dehydration

With colder temperatures and less tangible loss of fluids, it’s easy to lose track of your hydration. Being mindful of your fluid intake and hydration levels is a lot harder to do when you’re not seeing beads of sweat of feeling the effects of scorching heat. However, this only increases the threat of dehydration.

Dehydration is a year-round threat. It occurs any time you use or lose more fluids than you take in, causing your body to lack what it needs to continue its normal functioning. This can occur regardless of temperature. Appropriate water intake is critical to your body’s functioning, and it will begin to shut down without appropriate fluid levels.

Some common misconceptions for winter months may be that if you’re not sweating you’re not losing as much fluids, or a lack of thirst indicates adequate hydration. However, the winter simply presents new challenges for hydration. The air is drier and requires higher lung functioning. The harder our bodies work, the more fluids are needed. Our bodies are also naturally processing fluids throughout the day, so replenishment is necessary regardless of external circumstances.

Signs of Dehydration

  • • Extreme thirst
  • • Less frequent urination
  • • Dark-colored urine
  • • Fatigue
  • • Dizziness
  • • Confusion

Be mindful of these symptoms for yourself and those around you. The deceptive nature of colder weather may compromise the safety others.

Combatting Winter Dehydration

The first step is mindfulness. Now you know that hydration is a critical component of health and safety regardless of the season.

Make a plan for intaking the same amount of fluids, even when you’re not prompted by thirst. Set a goal for ounces consumed per day and use that to determine effective hydration.

Be mindful that not all liquids are created equal. Common beverages of choice in the cold, such as coffee or tea with caffeine, actually have the opposite effect. The same is true for soda. Water is the best hydrator, but in colder months herbal teas that are caffeine free can be beneficial as well.

Consider the safety of yourself and others as you consider making a concerted effort toward hydration. It is easy to prevent, but also easy to experience. Make a system and implement accountability in hydration on your team.

My Top 5 Safety Audit Findings

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We’ve written about the importance of building and maintaining a Safety Culture more times than I can recall and I would bet that anyone seeing this post agrees that a Safety Culture is mission critical for their business.  One of the tools that helps reinforce and encourage the importance of the elements that make up a Safety Culture is the Safety Audit. 

Routine but unannounced Safety Audits can really help your staff think and act when they see an unsafe condition or behavior.

This post should encourage you to consider whether you or your business could benefit from effective use of Safety Audits by sharing my top 5, or could also be my bottom 5, findings during unannounced Safety Audits.   Deciding upon what order I should put them in was harder than I thought.

No. 5:  The dreaded open file drawers. 

In spite of our numerous training sessions on trip hazards in the office environment, I received a citation for open file drawers on many of my safety audits.  It seems benign to leave the drawer open while you take a few minutes to make copies, but the struggle is real with regard to trip hazards within the office.  Don’t make the mistake of ignoring safety hazards in the administrative areas of your work place. 

No. 4:  Unmarked or mismarked liquid containers.

The mechanical shop was the big offender.  Waste oil in unmarked containers, soapy water solutions used for leak detection in mismarked spray bottles and my personal favorite citation – an unidentified liquid believed to be a motor fuel such as diesel in a coke bottle marked as ok for human consumption.  It’s hard enough to keep your MSDS files accurate and current without the added creativity of some staff.

No. 3: A dry eye wash station.

In a relatively remote work area with limited access to utilities, someone forgot to return water service to the eye wash station after scheduled maintenance.  Of course we audited “right before” they were going to open the valve and test it; just bad timing I guess. 

No 2: Improper or inadequate PPE.

While not an excuse, I was always most empathetic to this one where hand protection / gloves was the issue.  A craftsman using their hands for work will at times feel they need the dexterity of bare fingers to properly perform the task.  Proper procedures and training are critical to aligning Personal Protective Equipment requirements with employee compliance. 

No 1:  Inadequate or blocked egress.

The most egregious, outrageous, ridiculous safety violation I ever witnessed wins the number 1 spot.  A damaged door latch prevented an exterior door to an automotive shop from staying closed.  This door was the only egress at the very rear of the shop so it was also the only way out to avoid any fire, fumes or other hazard that may occur in the work area.  Being a cold winter week when the door latch was damaged, some innovative soul threaded heavy gauge wire through a hole in the door and adjacent frame to firmly secure the door.  Egress from a cloud of fumes or fire would have required long handled metal snips and a clear minded, strong worker to escape. 

There have been many unsafe conditions show themselves during the course of routine Safety Audits over the years.  The examples described above should never occur where the safety culture is mature. 

One tool in your Safety Tool Box is the Safety Audit to identify opportunities to improve your safety culture and help your team to keep safety awareness as the priority it deserves. 

The Top Five Safety Audit Findings above just a few examples of how employees can lose focus on safety.  We would love to hear your stories that may help us all improve. 

Overcoming Safety Challenges in a Turnaround

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safety staffing contractor

If you have planned for a plant shutdown or turnaround, or are currently managing one, then you have encountered the associated risk and safety hazards.  All good employers make safety the top priority while the turnaround will also be evaluated based upon quality, schedule and budget.  

How do you effectively drive high quality work on schedule and within budget without compromising safety?  

Build and maintain a safety culture with accountability.  

There are a lot of moving parts to your turnarounds with multiple contractors and subcontractors.  All these moving parts can threaten the integrity of your safety culture without a solid framework to keep everyone accountable to the safety mission.  

The blocking and tackling required to execute the quality of work, adherence to schedule and budget can begin to push against the zero tolerance nature of effective safety compliance.  While we know recognizing and preventing hazards is key to a safe workplace, as long as humans continue to work, there will be accidents.  Minimizing the risk of incident given that humans are working amongst changing hazards is key.  

How do you minimize the risk of a safety incident on your job?  

  • • Recognize the hazard
  • • Communicate
  • • Act to mitigate the threat 

If you can improve the turnaround team’s performance on these three points, you will minimize the risk of having an accident on your job.  

How do you improve the turnaround team’s performance on these three points?

  • • Assure there are experienced Safety Specialists and Techs working your turnaround
  • • Keep the experienced Safety Specialists and Techs out of the line of production management reporting

By having experienced Safety Specialists, Techs and other safety roles out of the production reporting chain of command, you maximize the total team accountability to the safety culture and zero tolerance mandate.  

Having Experienced Safety Staff means people whose primary role is Safety and who is fully competent in recognizing hazards, communicating effectively and knows how to act to support mitigation of a threatening situation.  

Just as you need your welders to be highly competent specialists who answer to the quality of their welds, so you also need Safety Staff from top to bottom who are highly competent and are not unduly influenced by any competing priorities such as schedule or budget.

It may seem of little consequence to many Turnaround Managers or Planners how the Safety staff is sourced for their project, but the impact of Safety Staff sourcing can be quite significant.  There is wisdom in helping your turnaround employees and contractors succeed by having Safety Staff as a stand alone team; out of the line of production supervision.  Minimize the risk associated with having the “fox watching the hen house.” 

What is a major step forward toward overcoming safety challenges during a turnaround?

Include an experienced Safety Staffing Contractor on your turnaround for all safety related positions where roles are not already filled by the owners’ safety staff.   

We help staff for turnarounds so have to identify these challenges and make it a priority to plan and communicate well so that things go smoothly.

If you are need of temporary labor or safety professionals during a turnaround, give us a call. Even if you have run into an obstacle toward the end of a turnaround, we may be able to provide qualified staff to handle the job. To learn more about the positions we staff and our process, please see here: https://responsablestaffing.com/safety-staffing/

One Good Way to Help Your Safety Staff Stay Focused On Safety

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staff focused on safety

Maintaining a safe work environment requires vigilance.  There are always competing priorities that force tough business decisions where we must guard against anything that might distract us from our safety culture and focus.

A common challenge for business managers in all disciplines is identifying what you should delegate and what you should not.  A few simple tests for when to delegate include:

  • • Are you spending energy and time on things that are not your core competency?
  • • Do you have options for delegation that can produce the desired results?
  • • Are there activities currently required of higher priority in your core competency?

I find a real estate valuation principle helpful in delegation decisions; “Highest and Best Use.”  Just like a real estate investor wants to use property for the property’s highest and best use to receive the best value, so should we seek to use our work time for it’s highest and best use.

Ask yourself, “What should I be doing that produces the most value to my business?”

The biggest obstacle to staying focused on your highest and best use of time is usually a perceived lack of people to whom you can delegate all the things that just need to be done.  There’s a lot to do and somebody has to do it.

I recognized this problem in the safety arena and decided I could offer solutions that would make a big improvement by helping safety managers stay focused on safety.

My company started as a safety consulting firm and after many years of seeing how much time both we and our clients spent on finding, recruiting, hiring, managing and transitioning all the various safety roles in the industrial and heavy commercial work place, I saw the light.  ResponsAble Safety Staffing was born with a new mission.

We help safety leaders stay focused on safety by providing experienced professional safety resources focused only on safety staffing.

Think for a moment about the activities involved to find, recruit, hire, manage and transition between jobs for all your safety related roles.  While critical to your success, those activities are not related to safety.

Staffing all of your safety roles takes a tremendous amount of time which distracts you from your highest and best use, safety.

Some people haven’t stopped to take inventory of the activities that go into staffing safety roles through a typical business cycle so I’ll summarize to make the point.

A typical project will include these fundamental steps and the associated time to get a safety team in place.

Developing and Publishing a good Position Description

Effective recruiting for any position requires a good job description to facilitate clear communication and expectations from initial recruiting contact and on to performance management should a candidate be hired.  A Position Description or Job Description also supports the development of a Job Post

Creating an effective Job Post

A Job Post is distinct from a Job Description in that the Job Post is usually shorter, focuses on the highlights and includes some favorable descriptions of the employer and work environment.  An effective Job Posting will draw far more qualified and desirable candidates than a long, dry job description or poorly worded job post.

Posting Jobs

A Job Post isn’t likely to be effective if you don’t post it in the right places, in the right formats and promoted the right way.  Various job boards have differing applications and it can take some time to learn the ins and outs.

Interviewing Candidates

Interviewing involves many steps in itself but I have lumped them all in an attempt to stay brief.  Contacting, screening and personal interviews are all required to navigate an interview of any one candidate for a job.  When you need more than one or two employees for a job, interviewing can become very time consuming and difficult to manage.

Testing Prospects

A good hiring process should include testing and evaluation to assure only qualified candidates make it onto a job site.  At ResponsAble we test all candidates and require acceptable passing criteria before they can progress in the hiring process.  The testing and confirming of credentials gets even more complicated and time consuming if you are hiring for diverse roles on a project.

Hiring Employees

Our clients incur a high cost every time they hire an employee.  Beyond the steps outlined above, the additional overhead cost associated with insurance, administrative processing requirements, and other benefits can total 50% of the employee’s salary.

Transitioning Employees

For project employees who may not stay for full career employment, you typically have costs and time to transition them out of a given role.  Sort of like unwinding the process costs to hire the employee to start.

The fundamental steps to hire employees to support a project of any size just takes a lot of time.  I can feel the man hours piling up even written in abbreviated form as I’ve done here.

So if you are a Safety Director or Safety Manager and want to keep your safety staff focused on Safety, ask yourself, “Are the recruiting and hiring steps for project safety staff the highest and best use of my or the team’s time?”

There are competent resources available to carry the burden of building a project safety team.  I have built my entire business upon carrying these burdens for our clients.  Consider delegating the staffing process for your industrial or heavy commercial project to people who specialize in doing just that.

If you think there might be a way to place more focus on Safety rather than the administration of recruiting and hiring, I’m happy to talk to you about how we can help.

Recruiting Tips To Build Your Best Team

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recruiting tips

Helping companies with staffing needs is our business and we know the challenges of recruiting talent in today’s labor market.  Our clients have found significant value in staying focused on their core business by outsourcing much of the recruiting burden to us.

But for those who want to tackle recruiting internally, this post shares some basic tips for critical recruiting fundamentals that will help you build your best team.

1. Have an Effective Job Posting

Everybody has a job posting as you can’t really post a job without one; but, you need a good job posting.  What makes a good job post?

  • • An appealing post will describe some positive attributes of the employer
  • • A job post should be clear and concise about the description of the job role
  • • A good post will sound appealing to the target candidate pool
  • • The job post should provide enough detail to clarify required candidate qualifications

2. Advertise Your Job Post to Reach Your Target Audience

Armed with effective job posting copy, you are ready to promote or advertise your job.  There are a few things to consider when promoting your job posts.

  • • Target the right audience and best platform to advertise your job. Different job boards appeal to different candidates so you need to put your jobs on the most appropriate board or combination for the target audience.
  • • Consider the “key words” for search engine optimization, SEO, in the title of your job post. Using effective key words will put your post higher in search results which affects how many people see your job.
  • • Sponsor or promote your post where available to maintain a page one to page two position in search results. Different recruiting sites have differing costs for sponsoring job posts so the optimum dollar amount will vary by recruiting site and the competing or similar jobs on each site.

3. Phone Screen Selected Candidates

A prepared phone interview to screen candidates selected from your applicant pool is an important step in the recruiting process.  The phone screen assures the candidate matches their resume and can communicate the same.  A thirty minute conversation by phone saves time by avoiding wasted time in bad interviews.

  • • The phone screen should include the required candidate qualifications.
  • • Review both parties’ expectations of the job to minimize risk of obvious deal breakers from turning up in a face to face interview.
  • • Get a broad feel for salary expectations from the candidate

4. The Face-to-Face Interview

Be prepared for the face to face interview.  There are several parts to the face to face interview that we focus upon.

  • • Use a written interview guide to ensure you cover all the key points to support a robust interview.
  • • Have more than one employer representative participate in the interview process if practical. It’s good to have more than one perspective for the best results.
  • • The first and most basic element is confirming the person matches the resume or application. Some people look great on paper but struggle to tell you the same story in person.
  • • Include a few behavioral questions along the line of work problems they have solved, communicating in difficult situations examples, obstacles they have overcome, etc.
  • • Character and integrity; arguably the most important traits after basic competency for building a good team. Pay careful attention to character, integrity and reliability indicators throughout the interview.  Ask a few charged questions about doing the right thing even when it costs you personally or how they respond to authority for example.
  • • Be open and honest about challenges of job or work environment. In over 20 years of management, I’ve never seen a job that was not challenging in multiple ways.
  • • Ask the candidate to score their interest level for you at the close of the interview. I am very weary of a candidate who can not sincerely tell me they are interested and want the job.
  • • Lastly, score the candidate privately immediately after the interview. A simple 1 – 10 score with 10 being a perfect candidate and 1 being “really bad fit.”  We are naturally biased toward the most recent interviews so it’s important to score the candidates at the time we meet them.

5. Take the Hiring Process Seriously

This may sound obvious and it should, but I see business peers short cut a robust hiring process with regularity.

  • • Don’t hire a friend or relative because you know them. Interview a friend or relative because you know them every time and encourage them to perform well through the interview process. Hiring a friend is easy while firing them for poor performance is painful for the business, the employee and the friendship.
  • • The hiring process is part of the public relations and branding of your business. Be professional and represent your business as professional to the industry you serve.  It’s a small world.

Following a consistent and effective recruiting process for your business is fundamental to strong performance.  It’s good for the business and good for the employees.  Invest the time to make sure recruiting is done well or find someone to help you.  The strength of your team depends on it.