Quick,
Easy, Cheap — & Safe
Have you ever washed your car, then
plugged in the vacuum cleaner and dragged the electrical cord through the puddle of water
surrounding the vehicle?
Chances are you realized right
away that you were risking electrocution. So how did you respond? Did you build a special
platform for vacuuming or did you simply change the way you clean your car?
While this is an example of
safety at home, it perfectly illustrates a new approach to workplace safety. Sometimes the
quickest, easiest, and cheapest path to safer operations is a change of habits, or
behavior modification as the experts like to call it.
To a certain degree, the entire
workers’ compensation system is an exercise in behavioral modification: What changes
are made as a result of an incident causing injury or property damage? Why weren’t
the changes made prior to the incident? An injury is often at the root of a change in the
workplace.
Bringing new insight into this
relationship are recent studies by two workers’ compensation providers, one in Rhode
Island and one in British Columbia, that involved a sampling of soft-tissue/lost-time
injuries. The study comprised more than 800 post-injury assessments that resulted in over
4,400 recommendations, or an average of just over five per incident.
The study divided the
recommendations into three categories:
* workplace design, such as modifying workstations or
tools
* operating procedures, such as job rotation or stretching
or work breaks
* work style, such as posture or methods of lifting or
gripping
The findings might surprise you.
Fewer than one out of four recommendations were directed at the more expensive option of
workstation redesign. Most of the recommendations were directed toward modifications in
worker behavior.
Take the example of an employee
who operates a saw. Waiting until the last minute to change the saw blade might seem to
save time and money, but it doesn’t. A new blade not only gives you a cleaner,
quicker cut; it saves your fingers. The cost of changing the blade is minimal in terms of
body parts and operating costs.
For some safety professionals,
loss prevention is a matter of ergonomics and physical hazards, which result in costlier
solutions. As the Rhode Island and British Columbia studies reveal, however, most of
solutions are personal. The studies found that with back injuries, 75 percent of the
solutions involved work-style changes. Making sure that employees keep their backs
straight while lifting objects might take a little more attention on the part of your
supervisors, but it is probably more effective — and certainly cheaper — than
reducing the weight of objects employees may lift or buying equipment to lift the objects
for them.
Workplace modifications and
changes in procedures can be valuable and necessary tools in the prevention of accidents,
but they aren’t always the only, or even the best, options. Giving a worker
one-on-one coaching in safer work habits can net higher results at a lower cost.
And after all, the measure of
success in a safety program isn’t how much you spend but how well you protect your
employees.
Frank T. White is executive vice president and COO for Associated Industries Insurance
Service, Inc., (e-mail: fwhite@aif.com).
July/August 1999 -- Florida Business Insight, PO Box 784, Tallahassee, Fla.
32302, (850)224-7173, insight@aif.com
