Safety Tips Workplace : Occupational Safety And Health In Industry

When to Train

The answer to this seems simple. Obviously one trains when there is a defined need for training.  Thus we would train at these times:

1.      The new man —orientation to the company

2.      The new man —on-the-job training

3.      The experienced man —when needed

4.       Any employee —transferring to another job

5 .     The group —toolbox meetings

6.     Other —defined problems

What to Train

The answer to this also seems simple. The content of a training program is what management wants employees to know. Or, more specifically, “Teach them how to carry out the responsibilities management has assigned.” Actually, content, or what to train, is decided as objectives are identified. If objectives are stated in terms of what a participant should be able to do upon completion of the training, selection of content is simple. For instance, if one objective is that the participant should be able to make a job safety analysis of each job, one segment of the training will consist of an explanation of job safety analysis. Another segment will consist of actual training using the tool.

The training method used to be a single four-step process: tell him, show him, observe him, correct him. Industrial training today is too complex to boil down into a simple four-step process, but does start with one essential step: Define the objectives of your training. Objectives should always be spelled out before content and methods can be decided upon. Training objectives should be stated in terms of desirable terminal behavior. They should state how the participant should perform when he has completed his training.  For instance:
As a result of this course, the participant should be able to:
1.    Investigate any injury accident to determine five causes, and record the information properly on the accident investigation form.
2.    Transmit management’s policies on safety to his employees.
3.    Orient each new employee in safety.
4.    Make a job safety analysis of each job under him.
Action, not knowledge, is the purpose of training is a philosophy of training that is most important. Training in safety, particularly supervisory training, must be directed not at merely disseminating knowledge but rather at telling participants what management wants done and how to do it. After objectives are defined, content generally comes easy. The last step should be method, which is too often used as a first step.
Today there is tremendous choice in method of instruction. In past years a trainer could lecture or discuss; today he has audiovisual aids of every description —films, slides, filmstrips, TV programs. Furthermore, there exist large numbers of programmed instruction texts, management games, etc.

Each employee is an individual, but he is also an integral part or a member of a group, and every manager must take this into account.

In chemistry, elements combine to form substances that have entirely different properties from those of the individual elements. People combine to produce groups that have entirely different properties from those of the individuals. We have to recognize these group properties, just as we do the individual’s properties. Each group has a distinct personality of its own.

Each group makes its own decisions. It sets its own work goals, which may be identical with management’s goals or different. Each group sets its own moral standards. For instance, a group might decide that stealing things from the company is allowable and hence would not exert group pres­sure on the individual who takes small items (pencils, notebooks, hammers, material, etc.). If, however, a group member is caught stealing from an­other group member, he is usually in deep trouble. The group takes care of the punishment itself. Management does not have to because the group’s moral standards state that it is wrong to steal from another group member. The group has decided, and the group enforces its decision.

The group also sets its own safety standards, which it lives by, regardless of what management’s standards are. Take, for example, hard hats. If a group of construction workers makes the decision that hard hats should be worn, all members will wear hard hats. If, however, they decide against head protection (which they did 20 years ago), they will exert pressure on members not to wear the protectors.

How can we cope with the phenomenon of the group? First, we try to understand the groups that we have in our company; second, we try to identify the respective strength of those groups; and third, we try to build strong groups with goals that are the same as our goals in safety.

What Makes a Group?

There is only one real criterion for a group —that is, the members must share a common goal. If the goals are important to a group, the group will be strong; conversely, weak goals means a weak group. If an individual member of the group does not share the group goals, he becomes a weak member of the group. For each group the manager must determine: (1) Is it strong or weak? and (2) Are the group goals compatible with company goals?

We can determine the strength of our groups by observing some characteristic symptoms of strong and weak groups. In a strong group, the members voluntarily:

1. Try to deserve praise from the rest of the group
2. Seek recognition from the group leaders
3. Exert pressure on weak group members
4. Put special efforts into achievement of the group goals

In the weak group the members :

1. Form cliques or subgroups
2. Exhibit little cooperation
3. Are unfriendly
4. Use no initiative
5. Avoid responsibility
6. Have no respect for company policies

How do we motivate the worker to be safe? No one has the magic key to understanding all people —and hence to knowing how to manipulate them to want to do what needs to be done. All we can do is attempt to gain some insights. We will look at some influences that help to create employee attitudes —both those influences which we can consciously apply, and those over which we have little or no control. These influences help to mold and shape the employ­ee’s decision on how he will work. He himself makes this decision; we, in management cannot. Oftentimes, however, management’s definition of policy influences the employee in making the decision.

Let us imagine a factory worker named Elmer, who slaves over a hot ma­chine all day to produce 275 Super Speed Fishing Worm Untanglers, size  4. One day management hands out booklets telling Elmer and his fellow workers how they can produce 300 untanglers instead of 275.

Nobody in his right mind enjoys making fishing worm untanglers. So Elmer hastily skims through the booklet, throws it away, and keeps right on turning out 275 a day.

Management then sends down an order warning that any employee who

fails to produce 300 untanglers a day will be dismissed. Elmer is now powerfully motivated. He finds that the booklet is interesting reading after all, and he learns everything in it with remarkable ease.

This is more typical of the way management motivates its employees to do what it wants in production, cost control, and quality control than it is in accident prevention.

In these other areas, management does not seem to worry as much about motivation. It decides what it wants done, and then it makes sure it is done.

In safety, we seem to be more concerned with motivation. We decide what we want, and then we use contests, posters, meetings, and special campaigns to persuade the employees that they ought to do it.

How does management get other things that it wants —production, for instance?

When management officials decide they want a certain level of production, they:

- Tell what they want. They communicate.

- Say to someone: “You do it.” They assign responsibility.

- Say: “You have my permission to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.” They grant authority.

- Say: “I’ll measure you to see if you are doing it.” They fix accountability.

We can use some of these principles on safety also. This does not mean, however, that we can merely force employees to work safely. But we can set a stage where it is easier for them to decide to work safely.

Management, through its policy, makes the decision that safe perform­ance from employees is desirable. Management cannot, however, force a safe performance. Each employee decides for himself whether or not he will work, how hard he will work, and how safely he will work. His atti­tudes shape his decision — attitudes toward himself, his environment, his boss, his company, his entire situation. His decision is based on his knowl­edge, his skills, and his group’s attitude toward the problem.

All that we can do is to recognize those influences over which we have no control and extend our influence wherever possible. Some of these are:

1. The influence of the attitudes of the group toward safety
2. The influence of selection and placement
3. The influence of training
4. The influence of supervision
5. The influence of special emphasis programs
6. The influence of media

During the past 55 years, industrial safety men have tried to motivate employees with a deluge of slogans, posters, contests, displays, meetings, films, payroll inserts, letters to their homes, charts, literature, and assorted gimmicks. We, in other words, have relied primarily on publicity to spur employees toward safety.

Publicity is certainly nothing to be sneered at. The pen is powerful. The written word has altered the course of history and reshaped the world many times. But always, when this happened, the words were aimed at a receptive audience. They were written for people who were willing to listen to them and act on them.

Voltaire and his fellow writers, for example, smashed the tyranny of church and state in eighteenth century France and partly formed the world that we still live in today. But what would Voltaire’s deadly wit have accomplished if he had lived and written in the Middle Ages? Probably nothing but a stake and a fire in a public square —with his own body serving as the fuel.

Too many of us in the safety profession have been playing the part of a Voltaire trying to reform the Middle Ages. All our brilliant propaganda in behalf of safety has fallen on uninterested ears and bored minds. The men in the plant are not receptive. Too often, we motivate nothing but a “ho-hum. ”

Yet we who want to change the behavior of the employees of one company have a great advantage over those who are trying to influence the general public. Company management has the power to directly alter the attitude of its employees to make them receptive to our posters, literature, films, etc. Management does this every day to get what it wants from its employees—except in accident prevention.

Perhaps systems safety can be best used in industry in conjunction with the high-potential accident analysis approach. Using present-day systems of locating and defining high-potential accidents or high-potential accident exposures, we can periodically and regularly identify potential high losses.

After identification of the high-potential accident, the next step would be to make an estimate of the potential dollar loss that could reasonably be ex­pected should the accident occur. For a high-potential accident that has already happened, this estimation would be relatively simple. Additional cost estimates can be made of any indirect costs and property damage losses and a total estimated cost derived.

At some predetermined dollar loss level, a fault-tree analysis would be required. Since fault-tree anlyses can be complex in some cases and hence time-consuming, this level would necessarily be high, perhaps $10,000 or $25,000. The analyses might be made by safety, or the system could be taught to line supervision, who would then make the analysis.

Although, to my knowledge, the above system has not been tried in any organization, it seems to have merit. Both high-potential accident analysis and systems safety are proved techniques, but both are practically unused in industrial safety.

Fault-tree analysis is one system of making a detailed analysis of failure or potential failure. It was successfully applied initially in aerospace, and has more recently been used in other fields. Although it has been used al­most entirely to date in product safety (aircraft, missiles, automobiles, etc.), it seems likely that the technique will be used in industrial safety in the future.

The fault tree is actually a logic diagram that traces all the events that might have led to the undesired result being studied. A fault tree can be constructed for any event. First, an undesired event is selected. Then it is necessary to reason backward to visualize and identify all the ways in which it might have occurred. Each contributing factor or cause is then studied and analyzed to determine how it could possibly happen. Such tracing of causes and factors can point to many different system failures that might not otherwise be noticed.

Say that the undesired event selected is a severe injury to the operator of a power press in an industrial plant. The fault tree (see Figure 7-1) for this event is made by listing those events which might have occurred, or which must have occurred, for the undesired event to happen. These events are connected by either AND or OR gates. An AND gate means that both events noted must be present for the event to occur. An OR gate means that either event alone can be responsible for the major event to occur. Thus in Figure 7-1, events B, c, D, and E must all be present for the major, undesired, event A to occur.

However, either event F or G alone could cause subevent B, and either H or I alone could cause subevent C. Event N, O, or P alone could cause subevent G.

This fault tree shows that for a severe injury to occur to the operator of the power press, four things must happen:

1. The press must be operating.
2. The ram must be descending.
3. The operator must have his hand under the die.
4. There must be an inoperative guard or no guard on the die.

Hence, prevention lies in the elimination of one of these four events.

Each of the four is then analyzed. For the press ram to be descending, the clutch must have been tripped by the operator, or the clutch must have failed, and the press repeated without being tripped. Any of these could happen if a clutch part had broken, the clutch was worn out, or the clutch had been poorly designed, with no fail-safe built into it.

The operator’s hand might have been under the die if he had been work­ing under it to arrange his piece or if he had been distracted and was paying poor attention to his work. The die could be unguarded if the guard were removed, the guard were in some way defective, there was no guard, or be­cause on this particular die and setup a guard was impractical or impossible.

Each of these subevents could then be further analyzed, which might lead to such conclusions as (Q) maintenance priorities do not include press die-guard construction, (R) press department supervision are not finding defective guards (are not looking for them), (S) press operators are remov­ing guards, (T) supervision is not enforcing the use of guards, (U) super­vision is not stopping work on a press when guards are absent, and (V) management is not setting and enforcing a policy of press guarding. (Notice that in this particular fault-tree analysis, human failures have been included.)

The above analysis is very simple; it was chosen merely to illustrate the general idea of fault-tree analysis and to indicate how it might possibly be used in industrial safety as well as in systems safety. You can no doubt visualize a complex analysis, for example, one that might be used in the aerospace or missile fields.

There are many methods of analysis in use in systems safety:

1. Cross hazard analysis. This is done early in the design stage. It is the initial safety analysis, and it considers the overall system.
2. Classification of hazards. Types of hazards are identified and classi­fied with regard to potential severity.
3. Failure modes and effects. The kinds of failures that could happen are examined, and their effects are predicted.
4. Hazard criticality ranking. The probability of different hazards occur­ring is determined, and the hazards are ranked in order from most to least critical.
5. Fault-tree analysis. Fault-tree analysis traces the progression of hazards.

Other types of analysis made in systems safety consider (1) high-energy potentials, (2) catastrophe accidents only, (3) maintenance considerations of system skills required for operation of a system.

“An unsafe act, an unsafe condition, an accident: all these are symptoms of something wrong in the management system. ” We ought to look behind the acts we see in inspecting, and behind the conditions we find, and ask, “Why are these here?” The answer to this question may lead us back to the department supervisor—it may even lead us to some other system weakness within the company— but the question should be explored fully and answered.

For instance, if an unsafe ladder is discovered, the inspector should immediately ask such questions as: “Why is this ladder here?” Why did not our ladder inspection procedure find it?” “Why did the line supervisor al­low it to remain here?” Answers to questions such as these begin to get at true causes of accidents.

Inspection was and is one of the primary tools of the safety specialist. Be-fore 1931 it was virtually the only tool, and from 1931 to 1945 it was still the one most used. Until 1960 it was the primary tool of many outside service agencies, and even today it remains the primary (and sometimes the only) tool of some safety men.

Today, however, I believe that one key question should be asked by every safety man engaged in inspection: “Why am I inspecting?” The answers to that question dictate how, when, and where to inspect. For instance, if we are inspecting to unearth physical hazards only, we will look only at things. If, however, we are inspecting to find both physical hazards and unsafe acts, we will also look at people. Unfortunately, most inspections today are of the former kind, rather than the latter.

If our primary intent is to detect hazards that we have not seen before, we inspect differently than if our primary interest is to check on the inspections the department supervisor has made. If our intent is to detect hazards only, we can immediately have them corrected by going directly to the maintenance department and reporting any deficiencies. If our intent is to audit the supervisor’s inspection, we will use what we find to instruct him —to coach him to improve his future inspections.

Many articles have been written on safety inspections, and many have asked the question: “Why inspect?” Some typical answers have been:
1.    To check the results against the plan
2.    To reawaken interest in safety
3.    To reevaluate safety standards
4.    To teach safety by example
5.    To display the supervisor’s sincerity about safety
6.    To detect and reactivate unfinished business
7.    To collect data for meetings
8.    To note and act upon unsafe behavior trends
9.    To reach first-hand agreement with the responsible parties
10.    To improve safety standards
11.    To check new facilities
12.    To solicit the supervisor’s help
13.    To spot conditions
The single most important reason for making inspections is seldom mentioned. It is:
14.    To measure the supervisor’s performance in safety

Perhaps if the line manager felt that this were the primary purpose for management’s inspection, he might do a better job of making sure that nothing amiss could be found in his department.

If inspection is used as a measurement tool of accountability, the line manager will start inspecting more often himself, to ensure that conditions remain safe and that fewer unsafe acts are being performed. He will not wait until the safety specialist comes around to do the inspection job for him.

Who Is Responsible for Inspection?
It is generally agreed that the responsibility for conditions and for people is the line supervisor’s. Thus responsibility for the primary safety inspection must also be assigned to him. By “primary safety inspection” we mean the inspection intended to locate hazards. Any inspections performed by staff specialists then should be only for the purpose of auditing the supervisor’s effectiveness. Hence the results of our inspection become a direct measurement of his safety performance —his effectiveness