"Safety First,” “Goal Zero” and “Target Zero” are all great safety slogans we see on a daily basis. Wouldn’t it be great if those goals or targets were attainable? It’s no surprise, but people are not perfect. Even the best of us make mistakes.
Safety professionals can take consolation in the fact that, in most cases, those errors do not lead to safety disasters. On the flip-side, we know that sometimes they do. The average skilled worker who works with their hands makes five to seven errors per hour, including things as simple as posture, hand positioning or using the wrong tool. With this in mind, how do we achieve “Goal Zero”?
My safety career began 25 years ago, when I became a safety director for a school district. It seemed simple; all I had to do was follow the insurance company’s requirements. But every job has its defining moment. Mine came in the spring of 1997 at a high school baseball game. The stands were filled to capacity when, tragically, they collapsed and a little girl was killed as she played beneath the bleachers. It was a very sad and profound moment. It was also the beginning of my learning about safety and the safety process.
Immediately, lawyers and investigators were in my office. They wanted to know what inspection program we had for bleachers and why we did not have an exclusion zone preventing people from going under them. They wanted to know if we had a process in place that would have prevented the bleachers from failing and what process would minimize injuries in case of failure.
When I became the VPP coordinator for a Houston refinery in 2001, I was immersed into the VPP process, and my bible became the elements of VPP. I consider it a great safety process because it demonstrates management commitment, employee involvement and worksite analysis. It includes hazard prevention and control along with health and safety training. I have hung my hat on that safety process and have been relatively successful.
The VPP process also requires continuous improvement and companies using that process have to conduct an annual self-evaluation. Once, in an OSHA VPP recertification audit, the auditor asked who conducted our annual evaluation. I proudly answered, “I did.” That was the wrong answer. He explained the employees were to conduct the annual evaluation. He then showed us how to achieve that process — now that’s meaningful employee involvement.
Safety tends to focus on isolated machines or the actions of individuals without evaluating the process. With the bleacher collapse tragedy, if we had a safety management system with regular inspections and an engineering evaluation that identified the maximum capacity, the outcome might have been different. Knowing humans are required to conduct these evaluations and that humans do make mistakes, we must ask the question, “What are we doing to prevent a serious injury or death if the bleachers collapse?”
The norm for safety statistics is measured by the number of recordable incidents. So, are they good if only one employee is injured for every 200,000 man-hours? One fatality counts the same as one recordable. So the real question is, “If somebody dies, do you still have a great safety record?”
The VPP process requires management commitment, meaning that our employees are involved in identifying the task of the required work and will participate in the mitigation of any hazards. We will conduct an in-depth job safety analysis and ask the question, “When deviation happens from the process, what will keep us from dying?” We measure those controls by audits conducted by employees and management, and then make adjustments as needed. We track our safety performance by not only the number of audits conducted, but by the findings. Our training emphasis is based on our audit findings.
The VPP process will create a learning environment that focuses on continuous improvement and eliminating catastrophic injuries. It’s not just lip service or a saying — it’s all in the “doing.”
Bill Shaw, a Certified Safety and Health Official (CSHO) and Safety Management Specialist (SMS), is vice president of HSE for Evergreen North America Industrial Services.
For more information, visit www.hasc.com or call (281) 476-9900.
