There is a preoccupation generally in most market sectors for testing workplace safety making use of the regularity or harshness of lost time mishaps and happenings. Sadly, there is a very tenuous connection between safety in businesses and the amount of lost time accidents. The reasons for this are numerous but it’s turning out to be pretty obvious that hidden incidents like back strains, muscle tissue strains and repeated strain damage are a difficulty in injury figures. There is a developing body of thoughts and opinions that many people will use these non-visible injuries as a way of having time from work. We’ve discovered that when non-visible injuries reached 20per cent of all injuries a problem of false claims surfaced.
We also identified that locations and sites that had typical or less than typical management abilities in the workforce received the most accidents. Quite simply, the reported accident rate was a reflection of the authority expertise in that area. One of the biggest difficulties of looking at incident rates as a way of measuring safety is that it is quite achievable to work unsafely for many years and never incur an incident. This is probably one of the most important factors in incident prevention or improving workplace basic safety. Conduct speaks louder than words or statistics.
There’s also a problem in the way that we train individuals for management positions. We use academic methods to teach practical abilities and no longer is that good enough. We wouldn’t use academic methods to teach men and women to swim because we know it wouldn’t work. Yet in all our wisdom we use classroom ways to teach individuals what is essentially a simple skill. There is plenty of evidence around the world from research that this method doesn’t work but we persist in it. You can go to any website promoted by training firms and they will exhort you to join their leadership program which is totally classroom-based. Furthermore, they will charge a lot of money for it. So the return on the management training investment is pitifully low.
To create less dangerous workplaces we need to be able to teach our supervisors, team management and managers in simple abilities that aren’t typically on the schedule of most on-the-job training programs. We need to coach them how to influence, how to steer change, how to run a safety observation program, how to involve their staff in creating a less dangerous workplace, utilizing positive encouragement as a means of managing performance, and we need to do this in a practical environment where they work rather than a classroom.
The inability to do this can lead to a continuing cycle of workplace mishaps and dangerous actions. We certainly have used the wrong methods and measured the wrong outcomes. For this reason we are still having so many mishaps and incidents in the workplace.