It's all about the 'WHY'- not the 'Y'- in safety!

​       If you’ve been in the safety profession or in supervision, for any length of time, you’re familiar with the difficulties associated with getting employees on board when it comes to following safety policies or procedures. Many of you have probably even had trouble in simply getting workers to follow a simple order of operation when performing routine tasks. In this post, I will share one of my experiences that really helped me understand why this is and share some tips on ways to effectively get the results you seek.

     First, we must understand that our workforce is comprised of people, each of whom are a creature of habit, a culmination of life experiences. Having spent the first decade of my career as a field-level employee, I sometimes wonder why it took me as long as it did to figure this out.

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     First, we must understand that our workforce is comprised of people, each of whom are a creature of habit, a culmination of life experiences. Having spent the first decade of my career as a field-level employee, I sometimes wonder why it took me as long as it did to figure this out.
     Second, safety professionals today are not the safety police we were accustomed to back in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  Amid the oil boom in the Bakken Oilfield, I worked for a well-established oilfield services provider. On my first day and during a site audit I witnessed none of the welders or pipefitters utilizing the guards on their handheld angle grinders. I made a note on the site audit form and approached each of the welders and pipefitters to share my personal experience about the importance of grinder guards. In 1996, while employed at a papermill in Courtland, Alabama a young woman was fatally injured when a metabo disk violently exploded. 

     ​The initial site audit was the first of many where I identified our employees were not using guards on their handheld grinders. In fact, I found this at every site audit and each time I tried coaching the employees into using the guards for their own safety, as well as the safety of those working around them. Months went by and the problem didn’t go away. 
     I addressed the issue in mass safety meetings time and time again. I purchased a copy of ANSI B7 emphasizing the significance of grinder guards for safety sake.  Yet there was no change in behavior. I then began asking supervisors to enforce the policy and police their employees to ensure that the guards were being used. Becoming increasingly frustrated I promised to begin reprimanding supervisors for failing to enforce the company’s policy regarding grinder guards.
     After many months of exhaustive frustration, I sat down and asked myself, “What is it going to take…a grinder disk exploding and someone being seriously injured?”  Not wanting this to happen, I decided to find a way to demonstrate the importance of the safety guards.  Grabbing a  metabo angle grinder from our fabrication shop, with no guard on it, I calculated the speeds generated by that particular grinder. This particular metabo had a 9” diameter disk and a free load operating speed of 9,700rpm.  During our next weekly mass safety meeting, I then demonstrated the importance. 
     Asking everyone present to take out their cell phones and open their calculator app, I explained that we were going to calculate the speeds generated by handheld angle grinders. We discussed the disk diameter and how to calculate the circumference around that particular disk. Once the circumference was determined [28.27 inches], they were to multiply the circumference by 9,700 [free load RPM’s of the angle grinder], resulting in a total of 274,219 inches per minute; then converting into feet per minute [dividing by 12], equaling 22,851 feet per minute; converting into miles per minute [dividing by 5,280], resulting in 4.32 miles per minute. 
​     Having reached our equation of 4.32 miles per minute, I then asked each employee when the last time was that they drove down the interstate at 4.32 miles per minute?  Continuing on we calculated the miles per hour [multiplying by 60], resulting in a staggering 259 miles per hour.
     I continued with, “If you think that 259 miles per hour won’t hurt, I challenge each of you to wait until you clock out this evening and find a rural dirt road where you can travel at a speed of only 10 miles per hour. Then roll down your window and hold your arm out steady (but don’t swing) and allow a stationary mailbox to strike your arm. Come back tomorrow and let me know how your arm feels.” Of course, I explained that was just a joke.

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     ​ I instantly  noticed the change in behavior that I, as a safety professional,was struggling to achieve. Each site audit afterward, revealed that the guys had grasped the understanding of ‘WHY’ I asked them to use the grinder guards. During several conversations with employees afterward, they expressed their previous opinion that I was just trying to make their jobs harder and more difficult.
​     The point is, if we can get employees to understand the ‘WHY’ we’re asking them to use certain protective devices, or ‘WHY’ we have established safety procedures to follow, or even ‘WHY’ we perform a task in an established order of operation, then we’re so much more likely to achieve our desired outcome. It’s not always easy, in fact, rarely is it a simple task. But with a little bit of creativity, and with a focus on effectively communicating the ‘WHY’ the potential of achieving that desired outcome can be greatly enhanced. 

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