Celebridade

Few workers consider it their responsibility to help identify dangerous conditions or procedures, that is assumed to be the job of the safety staff. The problem with that logic is that the staff is not expert at every process in the company, they are risk managers who find problems and recommend mitigation strategies. By far the most successful example is the introduction of hard hats for construction workers.

Although people can readily identify hazards in a new place as they enter for the first time, they seldom bring it up as they are trying to get the job. After they are hired, they walk past the hazard again and again, and soon it no longer registers as a problem. This is how blatant deficiencies and dangerous conditions persist for long periods of time, until someone gets hurt.

No matter how vigilant, inspections can not find all the conditions in a work environment that can be dangerous to workers. The people who work in the area of a hazard have usually already assimilated the condition into their environment and no longer perceive it as a hazard. For this reason, real answers to not get put in place until after an accident has occurred.

Blood priority is how safety professionals describe the process of incremental introduction of safeguards piece by piece as the situations cause damage, injury or death. The problem is that in the absence of an accident, efforts to increase safety fall on deaf ears. For those things already in place, safety staff have to remind workers why the protective policy or equipment was introduced to gain compliance.

People simply do not believe that accidents and injuries will happen to them, that they are somehow immune for the possibility. In part, they think that the people who get hurt were doing something they should not have done, and should have known better. Further, people naturally consider themselves too smart to fall victim to a workplace injury of any kind with or without protective measures.

History has shown that that is not a safe bet, as very few people who suffer injury at work were doing something blatantly incorrect as a result of inexperience. The usual victim of an injury is an average worker, one with adequate experience and knowledge and not engaging in horseplay or other activity outside the norm. Accidents usually result from an individual losing focus on the job.

At one time or another, everyone gets distracted, whether it is something in their home life, a bad experience or even illness. Because of this the airline industry takes special precautions, since a single mistake can be catastrophic. They use multiple pilots to crew an aircraft, and every phase of flight is run by checklist.

Over time most occupations have been analyzed and appropriate procedures put in place, and in addition personal protective gear has been developed for extra protection. But many employees find this equipment tedious and unnecessary and do not use it. The gold standard for such personal protective equipment overcame all forms of resistance and became a symbol of respected work on construction sites; hard hats.