A common lament among safety professionals—if I heard it once, I heard it a few dozen times over the course of EHS Today’s 2019 Safety Leadership Conference in Dallas—is that senior management constantly has to be convinced that investing in safety is a smart decision.
It shouldn’t take much convincing for the top brass to agree that having a safe workplace is a good thing, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. Even somebody as highly placed in the management tiers as Jana Gessner, vice president of EHS with food, snack and beverage giant PepsiCo (a Fortune 50 company), knows the frustrations of selling safety to the C-suite.
As Gessner, one of the keynote speakers at SLC 2019, explained, part of her job requires putting a “brand” on safety to promote it internally. “You have to simplify the agenda to senior management,” Gessner told the packed audience of fellow safety professionals, “and that means tying the agenda into the costs of managing safety. We need to be able to show the link between what we’re doing and overall costs to the company.”
Part of that branding process at PepsiCo includes “Courage to Care,” an EHS initiative focused on the Zero Zone—achieving zero injuries in the workplace, zero collisions on the highways, and zero regulatory impact. “We have the courage to care and put the protection of our people over the needs of production,” Gessner said. “Our employees are empowered and encouraged to speak up for safety. “
It’s easy, she noted, for people to see the failures of a flawed safety program, but it’s not always easy to see the victories, which are often hidden since how do you see an injury that was prevented or an accident that didn’t happen? That’s why safety professionals need to be able to speak the language of senior management by pointing to the financial impact EHS programs have on a company.
Helpfully, AmTrust Financial Services, a provider of workers’ compensation insurance, has compiled a report that quantifies “the ROI of safety.” Some of the compelling statistics culled from various sources in the report include:
• Companies that have safety programs can reduce expenses related to injuries and illness by 40%.• Every $1 spent on safety can save at least $3 on expenses related to worker injuries.• New and inexperienced employees are more likely to be hurt; 40% of those injured have been on the job less than a year.• Injuries at work cost businesses more than $161 billion per year.
Calculating total costs of work-related injuries goes well beyond medical expenses, workers’ compensation, property losses and legal fees. Just as serious to a company’s financial health are indirect costs such as loss of productivity, worker replacement, training, increased insurance premiums, OSHA fines and damage to the company’s reputation.
Jeff Corder, VP of AmTrust’s Loss Control Division, suggests that companies should look at the money put into a safety program “not as short-term expenses, but as long-term investments in the health of their employees and their business,” a point that Gessner also emphatically stressed.
Another SLC 2019 speaker, Steve Wiltshire, director of safety at Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), buttressed Gessner’s observations by succinctly defining what a safety leader is: “A person who has the courage to demonstrate that he/she values safety by working and communicating with team members to identify and limit hazardous situations, even in the presence of other job pressures such as scheduling and costs.”
“Our job is a lot bigger than just sending our employees home safe every night,” Gessner emphasized. “You can’t boil the needs of the EHS department down to just one main thing—safety is much bigger than that. As safety leaders, we have to be the change agents for our companies.”
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We often hear the superlative “world-class” used to describe things like educational programs, manufacturing operations, healthcare facilities and athletic competitions. Even styles of pizza have been described as world-class (and I’ve certainly done my part in sampling pizzas around the globe). Usually, the description of “world-class” simply means that something is “the best of its kind in the world.” But as an editor, I focus on the literal meaning of words, which gets me to wondering: If something is best in the world, what’s the overall quality of that world?
We’ve all seen movies and TV shows where the main character—in a moment of abject desperation—contemplates, “What would my life be like if I could start it all over again as another person?” This being a magazine focused on EHS, let’s take that premise and apply it to safety: Let’s say you’re offered a totally random shot at being any one of the world’s 7.7 billion people—with no guarantees of what country you’d live in, who your parents would be, your gender, your race, your genetic makeup. Would you take that chance of coming back as somebody else?
While you mull over that decision, here are a few statistics to consider:
• The United States represents just over 4% of the world’s population, so chances are extremely good that your new self would be living nowhere near the U.S. You wouldn’t have to endure any more non-stop “Democrats vs. Republicans” demagoguery, so that’s a plus; then again, chances are pretty high you wouldn’t even be allowed to vote at all.• More than 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 per day, and 80% of the total world population (more than 6 billion) live on less than $10 per day. To put a positive spin on it, though, all your angst about your 401(k) and your IRA and any other investments would immediately vanish.• Roughly 40 million people (or to look at it another way, one in every 200 people) are victims of some form of slavery, usually forced labor. Sorry, there’s no silver lining here.• At least 300 million people (roughly 4% of the world) live in a war zone. That’s just a little less than the population of the United States. No bright side here, either.• A few other points to consider: One out of every nine people in the world is chronically undernourished. One out of every eight people has no access to clean water. And one out of every five lacks adequate housing.
So what do you think about your chances of being reborn into a safer and healthier environment than the one you’re living in now? I certainly would decline the offer to play “reincarnation roulette,” and if I had to venture a guess, I’d assume most of you would, too. Looking at it from the opposite viewpoint, though, there are a lot of people in this world who would gladly and instantly trade places with you if they were given the chance.
Safety, after all, means different things to different people, depending on the context. EHS professionals in the U.S. do an exemplary job of ensuring their workforces go home at the end of the day in the same condition they arrived. And their workers go to sleep every night behind locked doors in a warm home under clean sheets, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration at their disposal.
But if we look at the entire world, especially at developing countries where the majority of the world’s population lives, many of the people who produce the goods and services you use everyday don’t always make it home safely at night, if they even have a home at all.
Certainly the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly on best-in-class safety programs, but clearly there are many areas throughout the world where “safety” itself is a rarely-uttered concept. It’s our hope that the best practices that we report on here illustrate how lives can be and are being transformed through the dedication and perseverance of safety professionals, and that those lessons learned are shared not only throughout the country, but throughout the world.
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I was running a bit behind as I hiked through the sprawling halls of the San Diego Convention Center to get to a session at last month’s National Safety Congress. By the time I got to the room, even though I was about 10 minutes early, the place was packed, and shortly after I sat down, they announced that the room was at capacity and nobody else would be allowed in the room (they take fire marshal rules very seriously at safety shows).
What topic could account for so many attendees crowded into a regular afternoon breakout session? It was a panel discussion on “Getting Frontline Leaders to Become Safety Leaders.” Panelist Roger Green, former director of EHS with industrial manufacturer ThyssenKrupp NA, neatly summarized the situation from the get-go: “Good, hard workers may not always be good leaders. Leadership is a skill that needs to be developed and encouraged.”
Echoing Green, Steve Curry, corporate EHS manager with flooring products manufacturer Armstrong Flooring, added, “You can’t expect a line supervisor to instinctively know how to be a leader. It’s a skill that has to be learned and supported.”
At some companies—too many companies, agreed the panelists—safety is often one of those “it’s somebody else’s problem” areas, but as Green emphasized, “Safety is not just the responsibility of the person with ‘safety’ in their job title. The more people who are invested in safety at a company, the more advanced that company will be in safety practices. Well-trained frontline leaders are an invaluable asset to a company. Safety is not an added responsibility—everybody needs to be involved in safety.”
“You need organizational buy-in that you’re not only going to invest in safety, but also in developing safety leaders,” explained Kevin Backus, ThyssenKrupp’s senior VP and general counsel. “You don’t have to leave safety just in the hands of EHS professionals. It’s one thing to tell somebody to do something, but quite another to give them the tools to get that accomplished. The perfect place to start with a corporate cultural transformation is safety.”
To that end, ThyssenKrupp launched a company-wide Safety and Leadership Development Program, which to date has trained more than 3,000 employees. “The course is about safety,” Backus noted, “but it’s more about leadership.”
Of course, ThyssenKrupp is a $38 billion multinational with well over 100,000 employees worldwide, but most companies don’t have that kind of financial heft or staff resources to invest in company-wide programs. “Smaller companies are often so focused on their numbers that they find it hard to justify the costs to develop leadership skills in safety people,” observed Chevon Cook, safety manager with Wisconsin Safety Council. His organization works with these types of companies to provide them with the appropriate data to justify an investment in safety culture, such as reductions in lost time, incidents and workers compensation, and other tangible benefits of operating a safer workplace.
Another frequently-heard safety challenge for companies is the attitude of employees who say, “We’ve taken every safety course you asked us to take, so now we know it all.” As Backus acknowledged, “Complacency is dangerous because it’s hard for safety managers to see it coming. You don’t want your workers to get so comfortable that they assume bad things won’t happen. You need to challenge people, get them out of their comfort levels.”
Lee Shelby could tell you something about the attitude of complacency. As a power lineman at a utility company, he was constantly exposed to 13,000 volts of electricity, but he admits he was “a little cocky” and didn’t always follow the safety protocol the job required. While wearing the wrong type of gloves, those 13,000 volts went right through his inadequately protected hands, and he ended up losing both hands. As he states in this month’s cover story, “Being complacent and getting distracted in the workplace can change your life in an instant.” Lee Shelby will be sharing his story as one of the keynote speakers at EHS Today’s 2019 Safety Leadership Conference in November in Dallas, Tex., as he’s now become a leading advocate for workplace safety.
In short, you can have the best PPE, the most advanced technology, the most intensive training programs and the most rigorous EHS protocols and still come up short if one employee—and it just takes one—decides to take a shortcut. “Safety Leader” isn’t just a bold-faced tagline on a business card—it’s a way of life that every employee needs to embrace, every single day.
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You might think that if you asked 1,500 EHS professionals a question, you’d get 1,500 different answers, but as it turns out that’s not quite accurate. For instance, when EHS Today conducted the 2019 National Safety Survey, one of the questions we asked was, “What is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?”
Far and away, the most common answer to that question was…… well, let me offer a few examples, and see if you can guess:• “New employees entering the workforce without a sound understanding of risks related to job and work processes.”• “Older workers set in their ways on how to do their jobs.”• “Employees who think safety is the responsibility of one person and not everyone.”• “Developing and delivering effective and engaging training for a generation of employees with very short attention spans. Micro-burst training seems to be the new norm and I’m not convinced it’s adequate.”• “Young people are not studying industrial hygiene any more. It’s a dying field.”• “Getting everybody to buy into the safety culture and put it foremost in their everyday activities.”• “Everyone is so wrapped up in the next hot topic that the basics are forgotten about, or at least not getting the attention they deserve.”• “Finding quality employees who are willing and able to work.”• “Hiring like crazy. Need to train everyone properly.”• “Getting buy-in to the safety program from senior leaders.”
Certainly, there was a lot of variety in how that “biggest challenge” question was answered, but basically everybody is pointing to the same thing: “employee engagement.” Whether it’s due to young people coming into the industry, older workers who think they know it all, or senior management who consider “safety” as just a cost rather than an avenue to increased profitability, EHS professionals seem uncannily consistent in the way most of them believe that establishing and maintaining a culture of safety at their organizations is their top challenge.
Safety leaders, who make up the majority of our audience, tend to be seasoned professionals. In our survey, we found that nearly two-thirds have more than 10 years of experience, and more than one-third of all respondents have at least 20 years of experience. So while safety leaders may not have seen everything, they have seen a lot.
And one thing they’ve seen a lot of—perhaps too much of—is the transition of the economy away from manufacturing and construction jobs towards service sector jobs, making it harder to attract young people to replace an aging workforce, putting more of a burden on safety leaders to train workers who may be here today, gone tomorrow, but who nevertheless have to be kept safe on the job while not threatening the safety of their co-workers.
As one survey respondent put it, “Engagement and involvement from the younger safety professionals seem to be lacking. In the next 10 years there will be a lot of safety professionals retiring. Will the next generation of safety professionals be ready?”
Another respondent remarked, “As economics force more people to seek part-time employment, the challenge is to help employees shift their focus from their paycheck to their work satisfaction, personal worksite health and safety, and a commitment to learn new skills.”
That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it?—finding the best ways to engage with workers so that they themselves feel engaged enough in their roles (and in some cases, in their own lives) so that safety becomes a second nature to them.
And that’s why, while you’ll find that EHS Today covers a wide range of topics—PPE, drug testing, OSHA compliance, workplace violence, the latest safety technology, emergency management, training techniques, ergonomics—the dominant theme of everything we do is to help safety professionals develop and sustain a safety culture at their organizations. It’s a challenging job you all have, but no job is more important.
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The 2019 National Safety Survey reveals the challenges EHS leaders face keeping their workers and workplaces safe.
Safety leaders have had to wear a lot of hats (and not just of the hard-hat variety) for many years, and there’s not even a common description that encompasses all they do. We know this for a fact, because when we asked respondents to EHS Today’s 2019 National Safety Survey for their job titles, we got almost as many different answers as we had participants in the survey. While “safety manager,” “EHS manager” and “safety director” (or variations thereof) were the most frequently mentioned, there were literally hundreds of unique job titles out of the 1,507 responses we received, running the gamut from “regional fire & life safety officer” to “senior risk control consultant” to “principal regulatory compliance specialist” to “ergonomist” to “president.”
And what do these safety leaders actually do? We asked them what areas they are personally responsible for managing, and while just about everybody (93%) said “safety,” there were a lot of other areas they’re involved in as well. Occupational health and risk management are both areas where at least two-thirds of the respondents are responsible. And at least half are involved in things like emergency management, ergonomics, environmental compliance and industrial hygiene. And many wear a human resources hat as well as a safety hat, as they’re responsible for workers compensation, and the rise in popularity in wellness programs often ends up on the safety manager’s to-do list.
We also found a lot of “analyst” and “technician” titles among the respondents, and that comes as no surprise, considering the safety profession’s transition into a more tech-focused profession. It’s inevitable that as the manufacturing and distribution industries increasingly are turning to automation and robotics to produce and transport goods and services, safety professionals are being tasked with not only keeping their workforces safe in these faster-paced, high-tech environments, but to become more knowledgeable themselves about these new technologies, and how they can be used to enhance and promote safety.
And when it comes to tech trends in EHS, one of the most prominent these days is the use of software to track, manage, analyze and report safety data. Forty-four percent of respondents say they’re using analytics to report data about facility safety performance, and another 14% are planning to use these types of solutions in the near future. Some typical comments from respondents include the following:
“We use data to support ongoing safety improvements and focus on prioritizing our capital requests for expenditures.”
“Running comparisons and data tracking allows employees in the field to identify and report unsafe actions and injuries.”
“We have created a safety heat map to track safety indicators on an overlay of our facility drawings. The data includes incidents, hazards, PPE and certification areas. We’d like to provide this through augmented reality so anyone entering an area can quickly use the data to reduce the risk of injury.”
“Life gets more complicated each year. The demands to analyze data, identify risk and develop plans for improvement continue to steadily increase. The speed at which things change now is astonishing. You ride the crest of the wave or you are consumed by it.”
Getting Paid, Getting Satisfaction
With input from more than 1,500 EHS professionals, we’re able to put together a composite picture of what a “typical safety leader” looks like. For instance, this person is a white male in his 50s, living in the Midwest with more than 20 years of experience, working in a light manufacturing plant or facility, and earning $84,500 (median annual base salary). He received a salary increase in 2019 between 1-3%, and expects the same pay increase in 2020.
What’s more, safety leaders as a whole are satisfied with their jobs and their career paths: 79% say they are either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their current positions, and 82% say they are either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with the EHS profession as a career path. That doesn’t mean, of course, that things couldn’t get any better, as witness some typical comments:
“There is not enough funding given to our department, no opportunities for advancement or raises, and EHS is only important when something happens.”
“The current regulatory environment makes it harder to justify addressing some issues since management knows that regulations are being pulled back.”
“Engagement and involvement from the younger safety professionals seem to be lacking. In the next 10 years there will be a lot of safety professionals retiring. Will the next generation of safety professionals be ready? Why do so many companies still fail to truly develop a strong safety culture?”
Helping companies develop a strong safety culture is, of course, what EHS Today is all about, and our thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in the 2019 National Safety Survey, and for giving us an up-close look into the challenges, opportunities and best practices that drive you on to keeping your workers and workplace safe.
The charts on the following pages will take you on a deeper dive into the results from the survey.
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Do you ever pass by a mirror at work and not recognize yourself? Are too many people making demands on your time that aren’t even safety issues—just because you’ve got the reputation as a problem-solver? Do you sometimes feel like your brain is full, with no room for anything else? In short, do you have too much to do and too little time to do it?
If so, then chances are you’re feeling overwhelmed. But the good news, according to Joe Korpi, manager, safety and health at Renewable Energy Group, a producer and supplier of renewable fuels and chemicals, is there’s help for you.
The first step to getting that help is to recognize that sometimes that chaos in your brain is self-inflicted. Korpi spoke in June at the ASSP’s Safety 2019 conference in New Orleans.One quick way to get a better handle on your daily work responsibilities, he suggests, is to “unchain your brain.” Sit yourself down for a couple minutes, and write down—yes, use pen and paper, not a computer or other electronic device—everything you need to get done that day. That process will help your brain remember and clarify all the tasks you have to undertake, both the important and the trivial, and it’ll help you identify what you most need to get accomplished.
You need to be clear about two things, Korpi says: • What do you stand for, i.e., what is your purpose—not just as a safety leader but as a person? • What do you want, i.e., what’s the desired outcome of any given situation? And what will it take to get you there?“Begin with the end in mind,” Korpi suggests. Don’t focus on what you don’t want to happen. Instead, he recommends that you be present in the moment. Having identified what your purpose is (and you may need to remind yourself of that purpose throughout the day), use that purpose to respond to what is most important in the here and now.
Korpi offers these 10 practical steps to taking control of your day:1. Morning action energy. “Spend the first 30-60 minutes of the day improving your mind and body,” he recommends, whether that be in exercise, prayer, meditation, or some other activity that does NOT involve checking your e-mail or social media accounts.2. Before you leave your home for work, identify the Most Important Tasks (MITs) for the day, and have a plan for how you’ll accomplish them.3. Book your mornings. Korpi cites a study that says the natural “peak performance” times for most people is between 8:00-11:00 am. So don’t waste those hours on unimportant activities, even if that means finding a conference room where you can work uninterrupted during those early morning hours.4. Book meetings after lunch. During those early afternoon hours, when your brain activity is lower, you can “coast” by using other people’s energy in meetings.5. Schedule e-mail time. The modern work culture would seem to suggest otherwise, but checking e-mail throughout the day is a huge waste of time, particularly as it serves as a constant distraction. Don’t let e-mail derail your momentum.6. Shut off notifications. Don’t get interrupted by social media alerts, either. You don’t need to know every time somebody “likes” you on Facebook or any other social media. 7. Daily After Action Review. Borrowing a concept used by the military, Korpi suggests you set aside the last 15 minutes of each day to review:• What was supposed to happen?• What actually happened?• Why was there a difference?
Also, identify what went right during the day, what can be improved, and other lessons learned.8. Set a hard stop. Determine what time you will leave the office… and then stick to it. 9. Have a relaxing evening, and get a good night’s rest (7-8 hours of sleep).10. Study intentionally. Invest your time in learning how others have successfully overcome that feeling of being overwhelmed.
“You can’t change the complexity of daily life,” Korpi acknowledges, “but you do have the power to choose how you will handle it.”
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A look at the "Dirty Dozen" companies who do a better job at PR than at protecting their workers and their communities.
Time again to look at the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s (National COSH) annual list of the 12 companies—a so-called “Dirty Dozen”—they deem to be the absolute worst when it comes to putting their employees in harm's way, due to unsafe practices.
First, the disclaimer: National COSH is an advocacy group whose aims include establishing and strengthening unions. And many of the companies on this list have resisted efforts by organized labor to unionize their workforces (see "Do Unions Make the Workplace Safer?").
Even so, these companies made the list for activities that are truly egregious, though there doesn’t seem to be a consistent set of metrics used to weigh the infractions of, say, a small construction company where a fatality occurred versus a social media platform that requires its workers to look at grisly videos throughout the day. EHS Today invited National COSH to explain exactly how the Dirty Dozen are chosen, which you can read in their commentary: How National COSH Picks the Dirty Dozen: "We Listen to Workers.”
The good news, according to National COSH data, is that workplace fatalities in the U.S. are on the decline. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that there were 5,147 deaths from workplace trauma in 2017, a drop of 0.8% from 2016, so not exactly a huge improvement. The bad news is that the overall trend shows that workplace deaths are up by 11% since 2012.
“We can make our workplace safer, if we listen to workers and take action to reduce hazards on the job,” says Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of National COSH. “There is no reason to tolerate irresponsible behavior by employers who fail to provide a safe workplace—and force workers and families to pay the price.”
The following slides examine why these 12 companies appear on the 2019 “Dirty Dozen” list. And if you'd like to see the previous year's list, click on the following link:
The 12 Most Dangeours Companies of 2018
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Do you ever pass by a mirror at work and not recognize yourself? Are too many people making demands on your time that aren’t even safety issues—just because you’ve got the reputation as a problem-solver? Do you sometimes feel like your brain is full, with no room for anything else? In short, do you have too much to do and too little time to do it?
If so, then chances are you’re feeling overwhelmed. But the good news, according to Joe Korpi, manager, safety and health at Renewable Energy Group, a producer and supplier of renewable fuels and chemicals, is there’s help for you. But the first step to getting that help is to recognize that sometimes that chaos in your brain is self-inflicted. Korpi spoke at the ASSP’s Safety 2019 conference in New Orleans.
One quick way to get a better handle on your daily work responsibilities, he suggests, is to “unchain your brain.” Sit yourself down for a couple minutes, and write down—yes, use pen and paper, not a computer or other electronic device—everything you need to get done that day. That process will help your brain remember and clarify all the tasks you have to undertake, both the important and the trivial, and it’ll help you identify what you most need to get accomplished.
You need to be clear about two things, Korpi says:
What do I stand for, i.e., what is your purpose—not just as a safety leader but as a person?
What do I want, i.e., what’s the desired outcome of any given situation? And what will it take to get you there?
“Begin with the end in mind,” Korpi suggests. Don’t focus on what you don’t want to happen. Instead, he recommends that you be present in the moment. Having identified what your purpose is (and you may need to remind yourself of that purpose throughout the day), use that purpose to respond to what is most important in the here and now.
Korpi offers these 10 practical steps to taking control of your day:
1. Morning action energy. “Spend the first 30-60 minutes of the day improving your mind and body,” he recommends, whether that be in exercise, prayer, meditation or some other activity that does NOT involve checking your e-mail or social media accounts.
2. Before you leave your home for work, identify the Most Important Tasks (MITs) for the day, and have a plan for how you’ll accomplish them.
3. Book your mornings. Korpi cites a study that says the natural “peak performance” times for most people is between 8:00-11:00 am. So don’t waste those hours on unimportant activities, even if that means finding a conference room where you can work uninterrupted during those early morning hours.
4. Book meetings after lunch. During those early afternoon hours, when your brain activity is lower, you can “coast” by using other people’s energy in meetings.
5. Schedule e-mail time. The modern work culture would seem to suggest otherwise, but checking e-mail throughout the day is a huge waste of time, particularly as it serves as a constant distraction. Don’t let e-mail derail your momentum.
6. Shut off notifications. Don’t get interrupted by social media alerts, either. You don’t need to know every time somebody “likes” you on Facebook or any other social media.
7. Daily After Action Review. Borrowing a concept used by the military, Korpi suggests you set aside the last 15 minutes of each day to review:
● What was supposed to happen?
● What actually happened?
● Why was there a difference?
Also, identify what went right during the day, what can be improved, and other lessons learned.
8. Set a hard stop. Determine what time you will leave the office… and then stick to it.
9. Have a relaxing evening, and get a good night’s rest (7-8 hours of sleep).
10. Study intentionally. Invest your time in learning how others have successfully overcome that feeling of being overwhelmed.
“You can’t change the complexity of daily life,” Korpi acknowledges, “but you do have the power to choose how you will handle it.”
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For a company the size of retail giant Walmart, ensuring the safety of more than 90,000 workers employed in more than 150 distribution centers is no small undertaking. Warehouses and loading docks are notorious for workplace incidents (which of course are notoriously expensive); so, Walmart set itself the goal of reducing OSHA recordable incidents. That meant the retailer would need to improve its workers’ awareness of safety practices. Walmart needed to create a safety culture, but with a workforce that encompasses all age groups and generations, that would take some doing. In fact, it would take a new breed of safety technology.
Walmart opted for a microlearning solution, one that lets each employee access the company’s safety training on their own terms. Gamification doesn’t really adequately describe the microlearning process; certainly, workplace safety isn’t meant to be a game. Yet, the attraction to microlearning technology is that it engages a worker in a way that immediately gets their attention and keeps it—in Walmart’s case, for roughly five minutes at a time, through a series of entertainingly produced safety scenarios and questions.
The results have been impressive: a 91% participation rate; an increase in knowledge levels on safety by as much as 15%; and a reduction in recordable incident rates at eight Walmart distribution centers of 54%.
Walmart’s experience with microlearning is a scenario that’s becoming increasingly common throughout numerous industries. Thanks to the widespread popularity of laptops, tablets and smartphones, microlearning has emerged as one of the fastest-growing technologies used by companies to enhance the safety of their workforce and workplace. EHS Today recently conducted a study on behalf of safety technology provider Cority called “EHS Embraces the Technology Revolution,” which found that more than half (54%) of safety leaders surveyed already are using microlearning to train their employees.
SAFETY AT HAND
Microlearning is just one of many technologies being pilot tested and in some cases fully adopted by companies looking for a way to improve their safety operations, and perhaps other areas of the company as well. Take, for instance, mobile and smartphone apps, which have become almost ubiquitous in the workplace and are now capable of improving worker health and safety. Thanks to technology that’s small enough, comfortable enough and indeed fashionable enough to be worn by employees at all times (even off-the-job), wearable safety devices are now as close as a worker’s fingertips.
Tech giant IBM announced earlier this year a collaborative initiative with several device manufacturers to develop wearables, smart devices and environmental sensors to monitor worker safety in hazardous situations. This includes such things as a shirt equipped with environmental and biometric devices; “smart” hard hats that provide situational awareness capabilities to workers; and activity trackers that can monitor worker heart rates and “man-down” events.
“Mobile devices and applications that enable users to report incidents and safety observations and complete inspections and tasks in the field or on the shop floor are finally gaining traction,” explains Pam Bobbitt, vice president, product marketing at Cority. “Many organizations are also leveraging mobile devices in new ways – using iPads as sensor devices to conduct noise sampling. This is amazing because not only are you saving money on specialized equipment and don’t have to bring in third parties, you now have easy and direct access—enabling you to take more samples, get better data and make better decisions. Newer technologies like wearables, fatigue monitors and smart PPE are also poised to have a big impact on workplace safety.”Other than safety management systems, mobile devices are considered relevant to safety operations by 64% of safety professionals, according to the safety tech study. Only safety management systems (at 85%) scored higher on a list of 18 safety technologies (Figure 1). Also, 56% of respondents already are using mobile safety devices in their workplace, and another 25% intend to do so within two years, which again puts it just behind safety management systems for current or near-term use (Figure 2).
In other words, rather than calling it a “killer app,” it might be more accurate to call mobile safety devices a “savior app.”
FIGURE 1
Figure 1
FIGURE 2
CONTROLLING RISK AND PREVENTING INCIDENTS
The real potential of safety technology is in its transformative impact, in how it can provide information to workers to help them control risk and prevent incidents. It offers immediate access to key information that helps a worker view the risk assessment for the job, safety data sheet, work instructions and other key information to ensure they are working safely, according to Bobbitt.
Predictive analytics, another safety technology, offers a way to use data to provide insights to workplace situations. “Let’s take completing a safety inspection as an example,” Bobbitt explains. “The employee completes the inspection; they can be notified with a message like ‘10 of your fellow employees in other facilities reported an observation noting signs of leaking on this piece of equipment. Click here to access that information.’ The employee doing the inspection now knows to look closer in certain areas and can potentially identify an issue that will prevent an incident such as equipment failure or spill and release. Operations benefits as well because this prevents a potential shutdown of production.”
Looking again at the EHS Today/Cority survey, another safety trend on the horizon are the technologies designed to make a workplace safer by removing human workers entirely: robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence. Similarly, technologies such as virtual reality, exoskeletons, sensors embedded in PPE and the Internet of Things offer ways to protect the worker while distancing them somewhat—or in some cases, entirely—from hazardous or physically demanding situations.
The biggest barrier to technology adoption for these types of technologies is, not surprisingly, budgetary restrictions. Indeed, as the survey indicates, safety leaders need to be able to articulate how any of these new technologies can enhance and improve workplace safety if they hope to get budgetary approval for new initiatives.
“What often happens is that companies forget the value and ROI of these new devices and technologies will provide as it takes time and investment,” Bobbitt explains.
A strategy she recommends is to conduct short pilot tests with a small set of employees for a defined, short period of time. Then look at the data from the pilot and evaluate if it provided the value you thought it would.
“There may be a clear business case or you may find no business case,” she observes.
However, she adds, the investment is relatively small and it’s far preferable to just sitting on the sidelines while your competitors are gaining a technological edge on safety.
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As some of you know, in addition to my role as the editor-in-chief of EHS Today, I’m also Infoma’s resident supply chain and logistics industry expert. As such, I’m quite familiar with XPO Logistics, one of the biggest logistics and trucking companies in the world. If you pay attention to “best of” lists, you might have noticed that XPO was recently named to Fortune Magazine’s list of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” in the trucking, transportation and logistics sector. The company has also been named to various “best employers” and “best places to work” lists
One list that XPO has never appeared on, though, is “Best Union Shops” because relatively few of the company’s more than 100,000 employees belong to a labor union.
Recently, though, XPO made another list, one which it certainly didn’t appreciate being named to: The company was named by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) to its annual “Dirty Dozen” list of the country’s most dangerous employers, primarily because of conditions in one of its Memphis warehouses.
To be fair, the National COSH list could more accurately be described as “Big-Name Organizations that Have Resisted Union-Organizing Efforts and Have Some Workplace Safety Issues.” The organization apparently doesn’t compile its list using any type of statistical metrics to determine which companies are the worst offenders; instead, it relies on “our network of health and safety activists about companies that put workers and communities at risk.” Tellingly, companies that are unionized don’t ever seem to make the “Dirty Dozen” list. So one has to wonder how much the fact that XPO employees in Indiana, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania all rejected union representation in the past year played into XPO making the list.
The lack of any true yardstick to measure a company’s “dangerousness”—other than, you know, the danger of not having a union steward on the premises—resulted in a few other head-scratchers. For instance, Facebook made the list. Now, we can debate all day whether social media is doing irreparable harm to our kids’ sense of well-being, but that’s not why Facebook made the list. The reason for the inclusion is that moderators are expected to spend their workdays looking at content flagged for being offensive. These posts and videos, as you can imagine, are rife with pornography, hate speech and murders. And apparently the exposure to this extreme content has led to acute stress and PTSD among some moderators.
Now, failure to provide mental health counseling to employees is indeed an unsafe practice, but it doesn’t seem like Facebook ’s offenses meet the threshold of OSHA violations or fatalities that would warrant naming it one of the country’s most dangerous companies. Which leads me again to wonder: Was Facebook chosen for its “name recognition” more so than for its actual unsafe working conditions?
Now, rest assured, every company on the Dirty Dozen list has some explaining to do. Every instance cited by National COSH happened on some safety director’s watch, after all, and some of the companies on the list do indeed sound like horrific places to work, if indeed the sexual harassment, workplace violence and opioid abuse mentioned are endemic rather than outlier incidents. And let’s be clear here: One workplace death anywhere, at any company, is one too many.
But it does seem like there’s a bit of grandstanding going on with this Dirty Dozen list. If National COSH’s point is that unionized workplaces are, by their very nature, safer places to work than right-to-work type shops, then just come right out and say that and offer some data—not just position statements—to prove their point. But let’s not pretend that abuses, violence and fatalities don’t happen at union shops, either.
EHS Today reached out to National COSH for clarification on how much a company’s resistance to union organizing efforts plays into their ending up on the Dirty Dozen list, but they declined the opportunity to comment. In any event, let’s hope that the companies on this list—and all others, unionized or not, household name or not—put forth the effort to clean up their acts. Every worker has the right to a safe workplace environment, period.
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