safety tips

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.

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 are 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.

Improving the Health and Performance of Your Employees

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improving health and performance of employees

Employees working in industrial environments face many Health, Safety and Environmental challenges. Managers are tasked with ensuring that employee performance is at its best, which is only possible by making sure that workers are healthy, alert, and ready to perform their roles at a high level.  So much priority is placed upon Safety and Environmental stewardship that general employee health can feel like an afterthought or just not command the attention it deserves.  Following are three important areas of focus for industrial managers to help keep employee Health as a priority in your company culture.

 

1. Build a Health-Conscious Workplace Culture

One of the most important factors in the health and safety of employees is the workplace culture cultivated by their employer. If it is clear to your employees that you value a healthy and productive workforce, they will tend to view these as important qualities, as well. Employers often underestimate just how much influence they can have in forming their workplace culture and the lives of their employees (even outside of work).

Employers should encourage healthy behavior in general. This can take a variety of forms, from giving employees opportunities to express their concerns to encouraging healthy behaviors and rewarding personal health goals. Create and maintain a workplace “ buzz” around health campaigns such as rewarding weight loss goals, sponsorship of company teams in local fitness events, posting and celebrating employee health accomplishments. By capitalizing on employee concerns for their own health and the health of those they work with, managers can go a long way toward ensuring that the workplace is constantly increasing in general health and associated productivity.

The most important part of this process is making sure that your employees feel comfortable expressing their health goals and keeping general health as a topic of discussion. If employees do not feel like they will be heard or worse that managers don’t want to waste energy on the health conversation, they will tend to keep quiet and the positive chatter will die down.  A lack of public enthusiasm makes it increasingly difficult to improve the health of a workforce. To help make your employees more comfortable generating a buzz, make sure to give them both formal and informal opportunities to contribute.  A good way to invite employee contributions is to form a “Health & Activity Committee.”  Invite people who are eager to lead and zealous for the cause to lead the committee with the express purpose of generating participation from the general employee base; and don’t neglect their families.

 

2. Ensure Employees Have Sound Training

As with Safety and Environmental compliance, proper employee training is vital to the health of employees in any workplace.  Be sure to include personal health topics in your Health, Safety and Environmental training.  Examples of topics that deserve attention are the impact of diet on weight control; the benefits of daily exercise routine; proper hydration; the impact of tobacco and alcohol over time.

Routinely provide health data to employees designed to encourage moving to a more healthy lifestyle. This will provide reference materials to refresh themselves on various best practices and encourage healthy choices by individuals at the their own pace.

Check with your employees regularly on what topics they might find of interest. Make sure to ask them for feedback on any health benefits they have experienced over time; weight loss, lower blood pressure, feeling better, more energy.

 

3. Take Employee Health Seriously

Our workplaces tend to support the axiom, “ hard drives out soft.”  It means some hard requirements will always take priority over less pressing activities. The focus on General Employee Health tends to get pushed around by the more regulatory controlled issues of Environmental and Safety compliance.  But Employee Health should be taken seriously.  Employee Health has a direct correlation to business costs, productivity, safety performance, and employee engagement.  A more physically fit workforce will be more productive with lower incidence of lost time.

Both your Health Benefits and Workmans Comp providers, whether a large in house team or independent provider, can serve as great resources for training materials, health data, and benefits to both the company and the individuals.  Take Employee Health seriously for a real benefit to both the company and your employees.

How to Motivate Your Employees to Follow Your Safety Programs

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Among the most common concerns of safety professionals today is the best way to keep employees motivated when it comes to safety. Even when you understand the importance of safety, it can be difficult to encourage employees to get on board with your safety efforts. If you are still seeing a lack of buy-in from employees on your safety program, it may be time to re-evaluate your approach. Take a look at the following best practices for ideas on how to motivate your employees to become more committed and enthusiastic about your safety practices.

 

Include Safety as an Important Element in Your Culture

From the moment prospective candidates arrive for an interview, it should be crystal clear that safety is a core value in your organization. You can do this by including safety training and reminders in the onboarding process. It takes more than just teaching employees about safety in their early days in your organization to keep them committed, however. Make a point of reminding your employees about the importance of safety by introducing a safety topic on a daily basis. This will keep safety at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

 

Engage Employees with a Leadership-Down Approach

It can often be difficult for employees to remain motivated to follow safety programs when they do not see buy-in from their leadership. To avoid this problem, make sure your leadership team is also committed to setting a positive example for everyone. Not only should leaders be held accountable for following the same practices expected of their employees, but it’s also a good idea for leaders to set aside time to encourage feedback from employees.

 

Use Positive Reinforcement

When it comes to encouraging employees to follow safety programs, positive reinforcement can go a long way. With this strategy, you are encouraging employees to repeat desired behavior by offering positive consequences for said behavior. Studies have shown that employee satisfaction tends to rise when employees feel as though they are appreciated by management and actually making a difference. Consider this for a moment. If employees feel as though following safety protocols makes no difference whatsoever, are they likely to follow those protocols? By comparison, when employees understand that following safety practices makes a significant difference in keeping everyone safe and that their actions are appreciated by management, they will be much more likely to follow safety programs.

 

With that said, it’s also important to ensure that safety mishaps are not ignored. Unfortunately, there is sometimes a tendency to simply sweep minor mishaps under the rug. This can be detrimental when you are trying to encourage employee buy-in to a safety program. It is essential for organizational leadership to be diligent when it comes to addressing safety issues. These issues should be addressed as opportunities for learning on everyone’s part.

 

Encourage Employees to Feel Ownership of Safety Programs

Employees are naturally more likely to be motivated and committed to safety programs when they play a role in those programs. This can be accomplished by reminding staff that their commitment to safety practices makes a difference in terms of not only themselves but also their co-workers and the workplace as a whole. Providing employees with a variety of avenues for offering feedback on their safety program is another great way to encourage buy-in and motivation. Organizations can also give safety incentives by allowing employees to serve on problem-solving committees and even conduct safety evaluations.

 

Actually Put Employee Feedback to Work When Assessing Safety Programs

When requesting employees to give feedback on safety issues, it’s crucial that you use that information to reassess the effectiveness of your program. After all, front-line employees can often give valuable information that can help your organization to improve safety practices. Furthermore, employees need to see that their feedback and opinions matter. Make a point to act on feedback in a timely manner and let employees know that their participation is appreciated.

 

Ultimately, employees must be committed and motivated for your organization’s safety program to work. By ensuring new employees know from the beginning that safety is a priority at your organizational culture, using positive reinforcement to let employees know they are appreciated, and listening to their ideas, you will be able to make your workplace more compliant and safer for everyone.