Condition your workforce for safety

by Bob White ROII Safety Services Director

As the safety director for ROII, I have the opportunity to research more injury cases than many people. Even though our job at ROII deals with injury claims, it is heartbreaking for us when a severe injury or fatality occurs. Seeing life-changing injuries and their effects on families leaves us asking, “Why did this happen?” or “How could this have been avoided?” Sadly, the answer is all too often, no one thought to consider the element of safety.

Safety rules, regulations, training and PPE all have their place in the picture of safety. However, unless employees think to use this training, knowledge and equipment, they do not serve their purpose.

Many employers tell me:

“Even after our weekly safety meetings and other training we provide for our employees, they still forget to put on their safety glasses, hook into fall protection when they’re supposed to, wear their hard hats, or secure their ladder.”

Any seasoned L&I safety inspector will tell you, “the biggest reason we write employers so many safety citations is employees seem to get tunnel vision when they do a task. They are concentrating on their task, and they simply forget about safety.”

So, after years of researching injury claims, the million-dollar question began to stir within me.

As an employer, how do you cause an employee to consider the element of safety as an automaticsecond-nature response every time they perform a task?

Can an employee be conditioned to widen their ‘tunnel vision’ enough so that the element of safety comes to mind automatically? Can you blame employees for forgetting about safety when they haven’t been trained in a way that builds good safety habits? Safety has to become part of who you are in a way that changes your mindset when you look at a task.

I built ROII’s Help Minimize Risk: Condition Your Workforce for Safety class around this concept and decided to address many aspects to get at the root causes of why most accidents occur that the safety industry seldom talks about. It is a safety class like no other.

Upcoming classes:

April 26 | 1-5 pm

Online

June 20 | 1-5 pm

Online

To join this class, visit www.biaw.com/classes.

We will be scheduling summer and fall classes soon.

If you are an ROII participant and would like to receive my regular safety updates, including ideas for safety topics, please contact me at (360) 352-7800 ext. 109 or bobw@biaw.com

Not an ROII member? Learn more about ROII at roii.com

ROII Safety Director Bob White has served the members of BIAW since 1999. In 2011, he was appointed as safety services director for BIAW’s ROII program, helping participants work safer, avoiding costly workers’ compensation claims and expensive safety violations.

Previously, he handled all of the association’s logistics and oversaw the restoration, repair and remodel of the historic McCleary Mansion that served as BIAW’s headquarters until 2020. Before that, he worked as a professional driver in the timber industry for 13 years, hauling logs and heavy equipment throughout the Pacific Northwest.