Preventing Injuries

Recently I was asked to create a newsletter on preventing injuries for National Safety Month. And though I tried as hard as I could, I could not bring myself to write something that was in line with what the OSHA Quick Cards and a plethora of articles on the topic highlight. Which, generally, revolves around meaningless advice for our workers how to pay attention. Cause, you know, if they only would pay more attention, workplace injury would be a thing of the past.

Eventually, I wrote the article below, but that is not an article for workers.

June is celebrated by OSHA as National Safety Month and is focused on highlighting the leading causes of preventable workplace injury and death.

The saying among safety professionals is that all accidents are preventable, and OSHA suggests that all accidents are avoidable if both supervisors and workers complete appropriate safety courses.

However, the fact that for a long time, OSHA maintained a list that came to be known in the industry lingo as the “Fatal Four” seems to indicate that some serious accident causes are lingering year over year.

Furthermore, a 2022 report out of the University of Regina also suggests that most lagging indicators (fatality rates, lost time rates, injury frequency rates) for Canadian provinces are trending up.

The reality is, there is no quick advice or recommendation which will produce immediate results. We can’t write a 1-page document or provide our employees with a Quick Card to fix issues that have not been fixed since the Industrial Revolution. To prevent injuries and fatalities we must go beyond compliance, act proactively and tune our workplace culture to be conducive to safety. This a time-intensive process, management driven and requiring employee engagement. We can leave the prevention of injuries exclusively to our front-line workers, as the OSHA Quick Card implies.

Here are a few recommendations to get this process started:

Accept and embrace error

When accidents happen, we are quick to blame it on operator error and act surprised that said error could even happen in our organization. But, according to Todd Conklin, former Senior Advisor for Organizational and Safety Culture at Los Alamos National Laboratory (that, among others, deals with atomic bombs), humans are error-making machines. Lifetime Reliability suggests that we make 10-30 errors per 100 opportunities (or repetitions of the task). In our terms, of 100 nails fired, 10 will be misplaced; or from 100 roofs completed, on 10 we might lose our balance.

The reality is that only seldom error results in injury, but learning about and from error will help us reduce the chances of injury. We should create a system that makes it easy for our employes to report errors and near misses and suggest ways to improve the way we do work. We should communicate that the purpose of the program is to learn and improve and we should not punish employees and contractors for voluntarily sharing their errors. Because you can punish, or you can learn, but you can’t do both!

Embrace known approaches

Before the advent of the Quality movement, people were waiting until the production was finished, then discarded the products that were not meting the standard. The guy selecting and throwing away substandard products was the Quality Control (QC). In the world of safety, this would be waiting for an accident to happen, for us to create corrective actions and, hopefully, improve.

Then came the quality assurance (QA) revolution, with 6 sigma, Total Quality Management and other systems that focused on finding minor deviations as the production was ongoing and correct them on the fly. Before this, they were discarding 30 out of 100 products, and now they discard about 3.4 in 1,000,000 products.  

In safety we are at the QC stage. To move to QA we must find errors on the fly, before they lead to an accident. We need to take the quality approach called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control). Right now, most of us, have only the C. We have to (re) define what safety is, how do we measure it, how do we analyze our results and how improvement looks like. We need good inspections, good hazard assessments, good training and communication. We need to learn from our operations and improve. We need to find and reduce variations as much as possible. And speaking of reducing variations we should…

Minimize the gap between Work as Done and Work as Imagined

Most times, after an accident, we come to the conclusion that the work we performed is not reflecting the work we intended to complete. And, generally, we’ll blame somebody for not doing the job as intended, for “not following the procedure”. The reality is that every day our workers deviate from our written procedures because, honestly, our procedures are not that good – were written in the comfort of the office by a person or team that does not do the work. There is a huge gap between the ideal conditions we see from the ivory tower and the many variations of the field work in constructions. The ground is not flat enough for a ladder to be stable, the trades we hire don’t have the tools to execute our new design, there are cars on the street in the area where we planned to have our crane – the variations are endless.

When starting a new project, creating new designs, writing practices, procedures, policies and other documents, we need the feedback of the people that will do the work, so our document reflects closely their experience, abilities, tools and circumstances.

Integrate contractors into our processes

 When it comes to variability, there is nothing that is more variable than our contractors. Their knowledge, experience, size, resources, training are so different that, if left unchecked, it is impossible not to lead to different results and occasionally accidents. And, despite this variability, we award them contracts the same way, assuming all of them have the same knowledge or resources.

To mitigate these differences, we need to consider our power position and create systems that place our contractors on an equal footing. We need solid verification processes (pre-qualifications) to assess their knowledge and abilities. We need to have resources in place, such as orientation and training to “upgrade” the ones that do not have the required knowledge. We need systems in place to compensate for what they might not have – forms, training, and access to legislation. We need to communicate our culture and expectations, reinforce good behaviours and discourage at-risk behaviour.

Focus on higher-level controls

Finally, relying on PPE and administrative controls that are hard to verify and enforce introduces unnecessary variability. Where possible, as an organization, we should introduce and require the elimination of hazards or engineering controls, which are eliminating variability.