Tag Archives: safety

Slips, Trips and Falls Prevention: Using the Hierarchy of Controls and Continuous Improvement

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Fall protection has been OSHA’s most frequently cited safety and health standard for 13 consecutive years. In 2023 alone there were 7,271 violations. These seemingly innocuous incidents can lead to serious injuries, impacting both the well-being of workers and the operational efficiency of organizations. To address this critical issue, organizations must adopt a proactive approach, leveraging strategies such as the Hierarchy of Controls and embracing continuous improvement methodologies.

In this three-part series dedicated to fall prevention strategies, Scott Gaddis—Vice President, Global Practice Leader, Safety and Health at Intelex Technologies, ULC—provides his expert insight into the risks associated with pedestrian safety in the workplace and what employers need to do to mitigate them. Part I looks at common types of slips, trips and falls and how they occur. Part II discusses how risk assessment can help prevent slips and trips in the first place. Part III below examines how the hierarchy … Read more...

Safety First: Boosting Your Organization’s Culture of Safety by Steering Clear of Seven Dangerous Mistakes

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Safety Management Program

As they say, “invest in tomorrow by practicing safety today.” While that may seem to be a very commonsensical statement, common sense is not always common.

With safety being a key component to most post-pandemic business continuity plans, there has been a re-focus on the culture of safety. Most organizations that have a safety-first mantra have put a strong focus on creating effective safety observation programs. According to Chuck Pettinger, Process Change Leader for Predictive Solutions Corp, these programs “bolster employee engagement and provide a great repository for leading indicator analysis.”

While the focus of any safety program is to incorporate best practices and learnings to ensure that your program is founded on foolproof methods, there is also a lot we can learn from their failures. Put another way, we can identify additional opportunities to further test and optimize.


How Multi-Faceted Safety Programs Can Effectively Drive a Strong Safety Culture
… Read more...

Yes, You Should Argue with Success: Why You’re Luckier Than You Think You Are

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Many organizations operate according to the maxim “you can’t argue with success.” In other words, if it works, it’s worth doing. You might have heard this in another guise when someone says, “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done.” 

Graphic of a frontline worker operates machinery while another conducts a safety inspection

But what if you should argue with success? What if what you think is success is simply sheer luck that the small failures that take place unnoticed every day simply haven’t yet aggregated into an inevitable cataclysm that results in injury, financial damage, or loss of life? 

Humans are not particularly good at extrapolating possible negative future outcomes from the information they learn from past events. We’re prone to assuming that if something has gone well when we performed the task on a previous occasion, that it will always go well. As a consequence, we get an inflated sense of our abilities and our skills at handling other similar situations, and the level … Read more...

Suspended Loads and Respecting the Fall Zone

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In almost every industry, a load of some kind is being lifted, manipulated, lowered or carried in a way that poses risk to workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are more than 50,000 “struck by falling object” recordable injuries every year in the United States. That’s one injury every 10 minutes caused by a dropped object in the workplace.

Graphic of a frontline worker falling in the workplace

 

Understanding the Fall Zone

The fall zone as defined by OSHA is “the area including, but not limited to, the area directly beneath the load in which it is reasonably foreseeable that partially or completely suspended materials could fall in the event of an accident.” OSHA goes on to state that standing under a suspended load is prohibited and that “while the operator is not moving a suspended load, no employee must be within the fall zone, except for employees (who are): engaged in hooking, unhooking or … Read more...

Good Systems Are Essential to Great Safety Cultures

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There’s no easy and quick fix when it comes to building a safety culture.

Every organization is unique and dynamic in nature, and each has its own personality. Added to this is the reality that success in Safety is, for the most part, determined by the Safety professional’s customer – the organization’s workers themselves – and for most of us as Safety pros, our list of customers is long and varied. And each has a different definition of success.

Graphic of manufacturing company using mobile inspection tools to create a good safety system

Parallel to this thought is that there is no “one right way” to build a safer culture. Rather, it is a number of elements that must be employed to build robustness within the safety process. Simply put, organizations that demonstrate world-class performance employ a strategy with elements that control loss-producing variation throughout the work system.

Controlling process variation is not a new concept. Many successful operational effectiveness programs have been … Read more...

Measuring Safety Part 2 – Serious Injury Fatality – Rethinking Measurement and Prevention

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In Measuring Safety Part 1, we reviewed the drawbacks of focusing solely on the measurement of safety outcomes absent understanding and tracking operational processes and events that are predictive of a safe workplace. In Part 2 of the series, we are going to dive deeper into the implications of this thinking by reviewing “Serious Injury Fatality” (SIF).

Serious Injury Fatality (SIF) – Breaking it down

The concept is not new. Workplace fatalities have been the object of preventive corporate policies and regulatory scrutiny for decades. Before my interview with Todd Conklin during Pre-accident podcast, however, I had only seen the abbreviation of “SIF” online.

Being an avid reader and learner, I began my Google search on the SIF-phenomenon which revealed many sources on the topic: White papers, several documents by Fred Manuele, and a YouTube video for learning on the subject. Though my search was not an … Read more...

Measuring Safety, part 1 – The Relevance of Outcomes

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The other day I received another self-praising message in my news-feed, one of Norway’s major construction contractors was celebrating their one year anniversary since their last lost time injury incident, making their LTIF now “Zero”.

While reading James Reason’s latest book, “Organisational Accidents Revisited” I noticed the quote: “The road to Hell is paved with falling LTI frequency rates”,  illustrated by major cases like DWH and Texas City.

I believe it is good when no one has been injured as a consequence of their work. At the same time, this has again turned my attention to something which has been keeping me busy for many years;

why are people so focused on outcomes, when they mean so little in terms of improvement, especially in safety?

 Obsessed About Outcomes

When an incident or accident happens, it’s generally the consequences that attract great attention. From a humanitarian and … Read more...

5 Reasons Why SaaS is Changing EHS Software

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What is SaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS) is transforming how organizations of all shapes and sizes are deploying and using software (including EHS software). The IT research firm, Gartner defines SaaS as “software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers software based on one set of common code and data definitions that is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.”

In effect, SaaS is similar to leased software maintained and hosted by the vendor that created it.

Why SaaS?

There are a number of attributes that make purchasing software in a SaaS model much more advantageous that traditional owned and on-premises enterprise software.  Here are 5 of the most important:

1. Lower cost of entry

One of the most important attributes of SaaS … Read more...