By Jonathan Zimmerman, ASP, EHS Director of Sugar Creek Packing (SAFTENG member since 2002)
I am a safety radical, I live safety 24/7 and lately, I have come across some discussions on web pages, blogs, linked in forums, etc. that really are bothering me. I am not a consultant, CSP (yet at least), or PhD – I am a Corporate EHS Director working to make safety a value wherever I can (in my neighborhood, workplace, organizations, etc.).
Discussions that discredit Herbert Heinrich’s research and THEORY on safety from the 1930’s and say that his theory and research is no longer valid. First, Heinrich’s theory was that 85% of injuries are the result of unsafe acts of employees (among other things) and I consider him to be the father of safety. Some argue that his research is no longer valid and should not be used. I look at Heinrich’s work as a building block that we should work to refine and continuously improve. Why do we as safety professionals discount his work so much and why do we let consultants invoke that we can improve safety by just implementing a behavior based safety process based upon Heinrich’s work? Let’s face it, there is no silver bullet for preventing injuries, if there was safety would be easy and we wouldn’t have incidents and injuries. Further, what works at one company doesn’t always work at another company. It takes a holistic approach to change the culture and make safety a value.
We shouldn’t let his work be discounted and we shouldn’t let consultants sell our workplaces on behavior based safety alone. Look at it this way – how many current basketball players, coaches, fans, etc. discount the work of the founder of basketball James Naismith? None. Has the game changed and been improved? Yes – just watch March Madness. Are there different strategies to winning a championship, not just one? And is it different for each team? Yes to both.
I feel we stand to gain a lot by encouraging and tracking near misses or near hits as a leading indicator. I even consider an unsafe behavior (i.e. not holding on to a handrail when using stairs) as a near miss or near hit. If we investigate these near hits thoroughly and address the root cause we should be well on our way to preventing incidents and injuries. It takes the engagement of the entire workforce from CEO to new hire to get this done.
Safety should be entwined (like a rope) with everything else we do within our organizations. We should expect all employees to be on the lookout for safety issues and concerns and address them immediately. Just like we as safety professionals need to insert ourselves into the organization to learn about things like six sigma, lean, Quality Assurance, production, engineering, etc.
We should be like teachers, taking every possible safety nugget and sharing it with as many people as we can touch.
We should give feedback in a tactful way and we should accept feedback from others with a smile and a thank you.
We should be relentless in our pursuit of an injury and incident free workplace we owe to our employees and their families.
Our ultimate goal should be to work our way out of a job by turning all employees into safety professionals.
We need to celebrate success, give credit where credit is due, and continuously improve our approaches.
Thanks to all the safety professionals around the world, let’s make safety a way of life.