All these social media posts decrying the traditional Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) tools are so ridiculous! Most of the people posting such garbage are either academics or marketing people trying to sell the next “silver bullet” in OSH. Most importantly, very few have hands-on experience in developing, implementing, and managing safety and health on a day-to-day basis; yet they are experts on what’s wrong with the traditional approach. And even sadder is that we see so many companies distracted by all the shiny/flashy things that they have lost sight of what really matters. Look, the old tried-and-true OSH compliance model will ONLY get us so far, but it will move the ball in the right direction and lay a foundation from which we can build.
Take all this “SIF” (Serious Injuries and Fatalities) talk. Companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on all the flash simply because they have never gotten serious about the traditional approach and were therefore easily convinced that they needed a “new approach to managing risks”. Just recently, we visited a facility and were bombarded with all the SIF graphics, signs, banners, shirts, hats, stickers, etc. This was to be one of our “wall-to-wall” OSH audits. We were impressed with the effort, but we had already read the facility’s safety programs before our arrival on site, and we just looked at each other and rolled our eyes, as we knew exactly what we had walked into.
OSHA’s Control of Hazardous Energy (LOTO) standard has been around since 1989, 37 years!!!! Without a doubt, LOTO is a SIF program, and yet, this facility failed in LOTO in a massive way, as do so many facilities. The program was a cut-and-paste of 1910.147; the facility wrote a 4-sentence memo every year for their “periodic inspections”, training was a 15-minute video from an online source that had zero relationship to their actual program, etc. And yet their SIF program made no mention of LOTO, PRCS, or ESRWPS. These three (3) OSHA standards ALL require a written program that includes an assessment/inspection/training/audit, and yet ALL three typically fail miserably during a basic compliance audit.
These academics and marketers of their snake oil decry these traditional tools and approaches to building a credible safety and health process. So I say to them… Try building a house without a hammer or tape measure! It’s NOT the tool’s fault; it’s the improper use of the tool that causes the problem!