This week we talk about summer safety and how we can prepare ahead of time for hazards we know we keep coming back.
This week we talk about summer safety and how we can prepare ahead of time for hazards we know we keep coming back.
Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast where we discuss the technical and people side of safety. Safety should be your primary leadership tool for discovering more about your people and culture. Your host is Dr. Mark French, also known as the safety dude. Mark is a credentialed, experienced and passionate professional with experience in automotive, food, chemical, nuclear, e commerce and energy sectors. He is going to share information and anecdotes from years of experience in the people side of safety based on industrial and organizational psychological theories. Safety is so much more than a technical skill. It is a motivational need that defines the culture of your organization. employee safety is a meaningful business practice that makes a direct impact on everyone through direct behavioral engagement. That is why your organization should be using safety as a key method to learn about your culture and lead your teams. Thanks for joining this episode as we talk through current issues and people management and how they impact our everyday workplace.
Mark French:And welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hey, I am your host, Dr. Mark French and so happy that you have joined me again for this episode. So this week, moving into a topic that I think I cover, actually, probably more frequently than I probably think I do. Because sometimes I lose track of like what have talked about, but I feel like it's familiar. But I'm gonna go back to it anyway. And it's circulates around, I think it will begin with a talk on heat stress, and hot weather safety and hot temperature, safety because that can happen indoors or outdoors. A lot of the focus on the outdoors because of direct sun, lack of controls, but there's also a lot of indoor work that can lead to heat stress that can be bothersome for sure, and troublesome and dangerous most especially. But what I want to really talk about is reoccurring hazards that happened in the workplace, and how, in my past, it always feels like we're never prepared for something that is very routine, I'm sure in your life, either as a leader or as a safety person. There's something that always happens that you go, Okay, we know this happens, it happens frequently, or it happens on a regular basis. Maybe it's a turn around or a shutdown, or a specific type of meeting or leadership conference that you do with your company. And it always somehow feels like that it is complete chaos. And like no one was prepared. And everybody was shocked that it needed something done. How many? There's so many times that in the safety role, especially that this has happened, but also as a leader. Like when you talk about leadership, and we're talking about going to predict things it's like, okay, did we forget again that your budget analysis is due every quarter like this shouldn't be a fire drill every time we do this, but let's start with heat stress. So OSHA is still talking about producing a heat stress dress a standard. Now we need that there is no doubt in my mind, we need something on the books that guides us because now we're going off of a lot of a lot of information that is not trusted as well as it should be and even litigated to be found that it may not be as accurate as we thought some of it was based around like the heat index, and how dangerous is each of these temperatures are each of these temperatures? And what does that mean for human beings and basically will say, you know, there's no basis for it. Therefore, how can you be cited based on something that really has, it hasn't been proven to do what it says it will do. So the hot temperatures in those ranges are estimates of what it could do to the human body. And so that was litigated and found to be in this was in an journal article for a few months ago. But we know that he does dangerous, just go outside during a super hot day. Do any type of workout side and you can't tell me that you feel Good afterward because you don't I there's parts of my yard and here's all sad times for me. There's tons rafted, there's parts of my yard that has Bush mode, and I have a lot of yard. And it never fails that the only time I can get out there and do it, whether it's not raining this year, because it's in my area of interest raining nonstop. It's It's blazing hot. It is heat index of 100. And it's crazy. And I'm out there trying to push mow and there's no doubt that stinks. I hate it. So you can only think of where we're trying to pretend primarily agriculture is where this is focused, which is also the flip side of it is that there is an economic impact to having a history standard on the books. But for me, I see the benefit of assuring someone doesn't die on the job because of heat stress to be more important than some economics that can be meaning there can be a common sense approach. And I know when we sometimes talk about legal, and we talk about attorneys, and we talk about the government, and we talk about common sense, those two things sometimes don't come together very well at all. And so there is skepticism on whether or not that can be done effectively. But let me take another step back. We know, there's this thing called Summer, and I'm being sarcastic, and I can't help it, there's this thing called Summer, that happens every year. And every year it is hot in in areas and depending on your climate, it is warmer during that period than it is other periods. And we act surprised that we have heat stress issues with our workers during that time. And that blows my mind. It absolutely just befuddled me that we forget that there's this thing called summer and I, I distinctly remember looking at a capital plan at a plant one time and they were looking at improving the H vac system, certain areas to try to do something ventilation or something to reduce the heat there. By the time we get around to ready to spend the money and do it we would be like in the late fall. And well, the temperatures are great. Now let's postpone that project. And then the next summer would come, we would have significant issues again, we would start to ramp back up, we'd pull all these files back out, we'd go after the capital money, it would cool off and then we would table it. And I say we because I was there too even though I was not advocating to stop. But again, I was not one that could control it. And so as much as I advocated, it finally became where it was a running joke with me that around like early spring, I would start going you know, there's this crazy thing called Summer. This is going to be coming at us really soon. And what do you mean like to predict whether it'll be hotter or colder during this phenomenon that's going to shock us called Summer. And the sarcasm was not lost. But still, I never really saw any fruition to what we were doing, unfortunately. But yet they're still every hear you I read the articles of where someone has unfortunately died, or an article of where they're talking about heat illnesses are, what can we do and how can we prevent it? And it I'm, I don't understand how it how it seems like it's a surprise that all of a sudden, you didn't know it was going to be hot, because I am for certain that every year it gets hot. I grew up helping an uncle and tobacco field that was hot. And luckily he was I mean, he didn't work us to mean it was it was very as well as it could be managed. It was managed. We frequent breaks family treated well. But still, it was hot. And it was it would wear you down quickly, especially day after day of it. He would just it would just be tough, with no other way to describe that. And I don't understand the idea behind Hey, what do you mean it's here again, this hot weather. Unbelievable. I am not sure where it came. He came out of nowhere that he this summer. And now we're hearing about and we still have like we're still in early August this This isn't over for a lot of parts of the United States especially. It's only going to get a little bit it may get hotter before it gets starts to get cooler. And this is something I want to talk a little bit more about is why are we Not working on the things we know are going to happen. Let's talk more about that on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast.
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Mark French:Welcome back to the second half of the leading in learning through safety podcast. So we're talking this week about reoccurring hazards. And this is probably one of the things I love most about safety is that it gives you the greatest opportunity to think about where the hazards are, and fix them ahead of time now as this to say that there are not interesting and new things that come my way frequently. In my job. Oh, absolutely. It keeps me on my toes. But I'm the majority of it. To be perfectly honest, the majority of it are things that if I truly sat down and looked at the work process and looked at the temperature and looked at the cycles and looked at the the work that an organization does, I would say 90% of it can be predicted and understood what the hazards could be. Now the sticky part is like how much where'd you get your diminishing returns? Where is it that you protect enough that you say, hey, that right now let's move to the next one. Not to say we don't come back and continuously improve. If we don't continually come back and reevaluate at some point to make sure it's still the best available, we miss out. So it's always that cycle of let's fix it to the best of our ability. Let's get it. Let's get it good. And let's move on. And then we'll come back again. And we'll make it better later. And then we'll make the whole cycle better. But that's what's great about safety. And I think that's what attracted me when I first got into safety is that I could sit down and logically apply basic principles that I had learned and apply them to the world. And you look at like your most dangerous situations fall from heights, lockout, tagout, confined spaces, things like that. You sit down and you look at every job we're doing, where are our people going, and you're able to say okay, I know that they're going to be doing this, this one, two, and three. Therefore, we need a policy, we need a plan, we need training, and we needed the right equipment. And we need the right attitude and the organization to support it, then we can do it. And that's that's so important that we can predict this just like heat stress. Every summer, we know that we are going to have problems with heat in the outdoors, it's going to happen. Just like in the wintertime, we're going to have trouble in locations with potential snow and ice, there's gonna be more slip hazards because of snow, ice. And such in our outdoor workplace, even leaving the workplace in the parking lot. That can be an issue and we have to prepare for it. We can't act like that. We didn't know that was coming because winter comes every year, just like summer. And with indoor heat stress, we usually can get that information of knowing like this building. This department this work is very hot. And this is an area that when we do work here, we know we need extra fans, we need extra restaurants, we better bring some coolers of water up there. Or maybe we should look at an engineering change like some ventilation or anything we can do to circulate more air or create a cooling space for the team at even thinking about where are they going to go to do a rest period where they can get rest from that heat? Do we set up a tent? Do we have enough tents available to give some shade? Are we making sure that the coolers are clean and full of water one of my I know it's I'm it's great that we have coolers out there but I also worry about the sanitation, random topic, the sanitation of those coolers to make sure that we're not that we keep them clean for that water because no one wants to drink dirty water out of a cooler. They just don't. So how do we clean? How do we get it ready? How do we provide these most important things to our team and be prepared for every year to deploy it? Like Do we have a storage area? Okay, summertime gear, we're going to work to clean it up at the end of the year, we're going to put it away. And we know on this date, as temperatures start to get up again, we're going to deploy it, we're going to start training, we're going to start educating, we're going to start doing everything we need to do to get them ready for that hazard. It's much like going into a confined space, in my opinion, you evaluate the confined space, and then you follow the permit and you debrief everyone on the permit. It's a very, as you can tell, I love logic. Where I'm wired. I like the logic of okay, we know we're going to go do this. Have we followed all these steps? And does anyone remember that last time we did this? Do we have any issues? Were there any concerns? What else should we be thinking about? How can we do better this time? And when we say better, it doesn't mean faster? It means how do we do it safer? And maybe then that also increases productivity? But how do we do it safer? How do we make sure we have done everything we should do? Has anything changed since last time? And how should we adapt to those changes. Now I love that I love doing that logical process. Now, the real work, this is so easy on paper. I mean, as anyone would know, as a safety professional, if you've had to do this, the paper part's easy. It's when you get out there and have to make it happen and you rely on others, to feel the same passion that you do to understand the same logic to understand that it's important that we do these things to protect our people. And that even that our team looks at it as that they want to be protected. And that they don't get that mentality of well, I'm tough. I can do this, I can handle it. I I am the ultimate summertime worker, I am going to just show you what I can do during the summertime heat Blitz. We have to overcome that attitude also to convince them that hey, that's great, you are you, you were superhero material. But go ahead and get in the shade and have some water too. Because, you know, that would be great. Thank you and making sure that we protect even those that may resist what we're trying to do and I think that's we're having an OSHA rule coming back to the woods a very big answer with I'll tie it together here maybe making sure that we have a an actual rule of law on the books in black and wine that says here is how you should do it. That way we can point to it and when you go we know this is the law isn't a best practice. It isn't it isn't theoretical anymore. It's the real deal. It's a law. And here's what we have to do to follow it to make sure that you and and all your team members are okay I want to thank you for joining me on this episode of the leading and alerting through safety podcast one quick announcement just short timing, if this is a dated podcast for sure, but coming up in just a few days is the Tennessee safety conference. In my opinion, it's one of the best state conferences in the nation. I absolutely love it. I'm honored to be there to be a speaker this year, along with so many other good speakers if you're going to be in the Nashville area really encouraged as you're going to do some learning that's a great place to do it. And until next time we chat stay safe.
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