Many know safety-very few understand it


Safety Mathematics - Accidents add sufferings, subtract happiness, multiply worries and divide income.  

I would say with my experience, most persons know that adopting unsafe behaviour would bring pain to them, yet they do not care to correct it. I know you may list out many reasons why people behave unsafely but I would add to this list with one more reason. That one reason is "seeing immediate perceived positive consequences in adopting unsafe behaviour. The perceived positive consequences are comfort, quick completion of work, appreciation from supervisors (very often), peer praise etc. A person fails to understand that the behaviour of being at construction site will injure his head on the day when he will not wear helmet. When he comes out without injury, the consequence in form of comfort in not having anything on his head (here helmet), went straight at work so supervisor appreciated in silence (saved a little time otherwise would spent on getting helmet) and sense of risk taker, reinforced unsafe behaviour of his for repeating same (unsafe intermittently in future too.  Similar behaviour of other people in the organisation is hindrance in reducing probability of injury because injury can take place at random.
The real challenge in safety is to break this barrier by applying systematic behaviour based approach.
SAFETITUDE at www.safetitude.com is one of such efforts in this direction.

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