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.
Fear has driven the behavior changes we saw this week and it was 100% fear of this virus and the unknown that comes with a pandemic. So if fear drove all of those people to change their behavior and get prepared, then why can’t fear work in helping us change these same people’s behaviors at the workplace? Humans have a built-in filter that works overtime just so we do not worry about everything. This filter convinces us that certain behaviors are advantageous to us and our mission (whatever we are doing at the time) and thus even though we know that the behavior is wrong, unsafe, and even against our training and company policy we still do it. And this battle of right vs wrong happens many times across an 8-hour shift. So what is wrong with us showing a video of a worker being pulled into a machine that was not locked out and co-worker turns it on, or a graphic image of a crushed body part because the machine was not locked out? Sure the shock will fade, but its like any effort in safety, it has to be renewed for it to be effective and trust me when I tell you I have pictures that can’t be unseen!
This week I made all of my YouTube videos FREE and already I have received over 100 complaints and YouTube has deleted, modified, or restricted access to dozens because of their graphic content. And the feedback from the SAFTENG members has been 50/50 on their “shock value” to them as a safety professional; 50% want the files so they can use them in their training and the other 50% suggest I am hurting my reputation by providing such content. Heck, it is 50:1 on views of my images in the members’ area as to “graphic” vs. unsafe pictures. I do not necessarily think it is hurting my reputation as a safety professional and I certainly do not think it makes anyone less of a safety professional for using them; but these shocking images and videos can NOT define us! They are merely a tool of many we must use to change unsafe behaviors and in order to change the behavior, you have to convince the heart and mind there is good reason to change. And for some, the sight of a graphic image or video just may be the ticket to convince them it is time to change.