SAFTENG is 25 years old this year and from day 1, the most popular materials have been the graphic injury/accident photos. In my early years, I used them myself, but as I gained more experience and became a follower of Dr. Scott Geller I began to reshape my views on “shock safety”. He convinced me that we would never succeed in scaring workers to behave safely by showing them graphic pictures and videos and still to this day I am a believer that scare tactics do not change behaviors.
That was until this week! This week we have seen a massive shift in reporting and actions taken by governments regarding Covid19. The information is still coming in and there is still a lot of misinformation regarding the actions we need to take as a society and this has caused a panic among humans. They have changed their behaviors because of nothing more than a fear of a virus. 99% of the population do not even know who is infected yet and still the run on grocery stores and big box stores has been something I never thought I would see. In the south, when we get a forecast of 0.5″ of snow or freezing rain you will see people go and buy milk and bread. That behavior is a “learned behavior” from our parents because back in the day when that kind of weather hit you were stuck at home. In today’s society, very few people stay home, but yet the night before the milk cooler and the bread aisle will be empty – it’s just a southern thing.
So can we use fear to change behaviors in the workplace? As safety professionals we share accident stories to raise awareness of what can happen as a result of not following safe work practices and even that practice will cause heated debate in some safety circles. I did my “Incident Alerts” for over 15 years and I have accumulated over 400,000 news articles related to workplace industrial/construction accidents and over those years I got my fair share of hate mail regarding my alerts. I even had a few people who made special efforts to shut them down by registering for the emails and then reporting them as spam – REPEATEDLY doing this over months because they felt so strongly that they were doing more harm than good.