As I wrote last week, I am not a fan of the so-called “safety stand-downs” that seem to be all the rage these days. Our stand-downs in the 1990s and 2000s were entirely different approaches and were conducted following serious events. My post spurred a lot of great discussions about how they are conducted vs. how they should be conducted and whether we can measure their impact. This last item, measuring their impact, is what I want to offer in this post. For every “stand-down” that was conducted at a facility I managed, we had to devise a means to measure its impact, both short-term and long-term.
For these annually planned stand-downs, a mature safety management system will have devised a means to measure whether the stand-down was effective in whatever its intended goal was. Some friends told me they simply wanted to pause and discuss fall safety to win the “hearts and minds” of their workers. Others used the time to perform technical training on Personal Fall Arrest Systems (PFAS). And both can be measured over the next weeks/months…
