Safety Speaker Insight – Everyone Can Contribute to Better Safety Solutions

Everyone Can Contribute To Better Safety Solutions
As a safety speaker, while speaking at the National Safety Council’s Texas Safety Convention, I shared the following concept with the audience at my second session.

In my presentation, Ensure Your Safety, I share techniques to help ensure that experienced workers will embrace new safety policies, procedures, devices, etc. After all, for the skilled crafts person who has worked at your company for over 20 years, yesterday’s procedure is today’s shortcut.

Experienced Workers Improve Safety
As you know, many safety processes are the result of reviewing close calls or actual incidents and discovering solutions that will prevent a similar incident in the future. Quite often, new safety methods are the result of experienced workers and safety teams brainstorming and being creative in finding a better way of doing a task safely.

New Or Younger Workers Can Improve Safety
Most people think of looking to the experienced team members for safety suggestions or solutions. As a safety speaker I want to bring to your attention the value of asking new employees for safety improvement input. Your newest employee on the first day at work can help improve your safety process. This is because they have a new perspective and also because of their lack of experience they might be able to share insights of how techniques or instructions are unclear or confusing. Also, because they haven’t, “Always been doing it this way.” They might be able to think of new solutions.

In my own experience as a safety speaker, I have made safety improvement suggestions in areas I had no experience at the time. As an example, I was driving to a safety meeting being held at a resort. Now, I am not a traffic expert but I saw something which could easily lead to a collision. Because I was a new person to the site and an outsider I saw something no one else had noticed.

As I drove through the resort to the main hotel entrance, I noticed what I thought were many four-way stops. The reason was as I approached an intersection I saw the back of the familiar octagonal shape of a stop sign. Being an observant driver that told me the other car was supposed to stop. It was on that information I was making the choice to move forward. To my surprise, this was not the case. I soon noticed octagonal signs facing me, which had been painted the resort sign color of brown and had directions and arrows painted on them. Apparently, the resort had some spare stop signs around and decided to re-purpose them by painting over them and using them for other signage. This seemingly good attempt at recycling or making full use of the resources at hand was setting someone up for a collision.

As the “new guy” I was able to make this distinction and I shared it with the resort leadership. So here we have a traffic policy and safety novice making a useful safety suggestion.

If I can do it in this context your newest worker may have some useful insights. Be sure to make it a point to ask them for their safety input and explain they might have a fresh new look. When they do give you input be sure to praise them even if it isn’t something that would make a difference. Their attitude is the key. The more people we can involve in watching out for the safety of others the better it is for everyone.

Solutions For Your Safety Challenges
When you need solutions for your safety challenges give Diane Weiss a call at 209-745-9419 and bring John to your site to discover injury-preventing solutions. You can email her at diane@drebinger.com
Until next week,
I’ll be, “Watching Out For Everyone’s Safety™”
John
© 2016 John Drebinger Presentations
Permission to use granted when credited and contact information included. www.drebinger.com +1 209.745.9419