SAFETITUDE TRAINING AND CONSULTANCY

It is true that GOAL gives direction to our efforts and keeps a team focused and streamlined for it. When a goal is achievement-oriented (SMART), people align themselves to it and work with greater commitment. When they achieve the goal, a sense of pride for achievement makes them work harder with multiplied conviction at next occasion. Contrary to this, a goal like ZERO Accident is failure-oriented-sorts of a bizarre wish, not a strategic plan to achieve. As a matter of fact, ZERO Accident is an imaginary goal of an overzealous organisation in order to show that it has high commitment to safety. Interestingly, it is a start point of manoeuvre. The culture of workers participation-a key to safety improvement, gets a heavy blow.  Workers who are expected to share even near miss, started hiding injury for no matter how it is serious in fear that they would be reprimanded.  Line function stops recording the case of accident lest it will cause slippage of the target. T...

                                                  I would like to narrate something that you may call right attitude of manager towards safety. I was first full time safety officer in erstwhile Cadbury India Limited in year 2000. I was reporting to factory manager (revered Jaiboy Phillips) who used to call me “Father of Safety”. I don’t know at that time how much I knew about safety but his understanding of value to safety made me a complete safety man of today. I remember his words saying that there are many in the Company who would tell him of all good things but he wanted me to inform if there was any bad thing needed attention. It was clear instruction that I must inform him anything that affected wellbeing of any person or any deviatio...

@safetitude: How LMRA benefits you? Even if a detailed Risk Assessment of an activity has been done, yet before you begin a work, you must ensure that all risks related to the work is under control. Using a checklist to identify the risk will help you avoid meeting an accident. This is called Last Minute Risk Assessment which is very effective tool to prevent accident.

@safetitude: Are children vulnerable in schools? Recent unfortunate couple of reported and many times more unreported incidents in India necessitate the need that school safety should not be undermined. The commercialization of education system increasingly has rendered these children on mercy of god. Poor infrastructure, unhygienic arrangement and unsafe facilities of school have become a concerned place for parents. It is more deplorable that in the run of getting good education, parents are leaving their wards in hands of school management and they in turn are not going beyond their profit mindset.  Should local govt. not force schools to ensure yearly audit  and certification process so that safety, hygiene and healthy atmosphere are not compromised. 

@safetitude: Safety - investment or Expense? At times, budget allocation to safety is seen from return on investment (ROI) point of view. But the fact money spared for safety do not yield  direct benefit, makes many wary.  Unfortunately, the visible cost to accident or loss appears like the tip of iceberg. The literature says that direct cost is 4 times of the indirect cost but since later is hidden,  seriousness in ensuring good safety against economics weakened. As everybody understands the language of  money, so should we practitioners not put rigor to estimate the total cost of losses resulted from an accident and present it to business manager. The ultimate aim is to make management aware that " Safety is an investment and is not an expense.

@safetitude: Should your Safety Procedure not be a decorative piece? More often, emphasis is laid on preparation of Safe Procedure for various activities in an organisation however  it is seldom referred or adhered to in real situation.   According to me, it may be because of mismatch of the contents with actual practice in vogue.  Sometimes, the contents copied from external source is so ideal and hi-fi that  organisation's safety maturity does not fit into it and therefore, procedure becomes  redundant. In other situation, a certain laid procedure is ignored in the name of ease, comfort and economy.   But it does not mean that an organisation should not have it. My opinion is, an organisation should prepare a procedure in consultation with all functions so that it suits to the current maturity, commitment and most importantly the resources available. Further more,it must be reviewed and upgraded regularly to make it relevant in changing circumstances. ...

@safetitude: It is common approach to find out root cause of accident in order to avoid repetition, and for this we do accident investigation (instead of accident analysis). One should agree accident is 2nd last link in accident causation chain and is result of unique combination of factors (many a time unknown otherwise). We also acknowledge an accident result of failure of all safety barriers.Therefore, is it possible that we can avoid  repetition addressing a single cause? According to me, never.  So what to do? As a matter of fact, we should analyse situations (factors in four groups which I developed as safety quadrants) and find the combination responsible for. This way we would be able to effectively reduce number of accidents for better safety performance!