Dysfunctional Practices That Kill Your Safety Culture

A man finds himself on the top step of a step ladder; a woman removes the guard to her machine; a worker is not wearing her safety glasses in the plant; a roustabout uses the wrong sized clamp instead of retrieving the right tool from the supply truck; a supervisor teaches a new worker to take short cuts; a mechanic climbs on top of the active machine to find the oil leak. Why do these folks do these things? Is it because they are stupid? Our tendency is to blame workers and label their personal failings as the cause of safety errors. Labeling does not solve problems that cause error. It is an illusion of human perception leading us to false conclusions resulting in dysfunctional practices that hurt the safety of our workers and the effectiveness of the systems we put in place to protect them. Learn a better way to analyze the behaviors of your employees to understand how they were put in a position to take the risk in the first place.