Episode 137 - Progress through Awareness

A study found that the number of injuries reported in January is higher than in December. We talk about this in this week's podcast

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Announcer: 0:15

Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:08

Hello, and welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, Dr. Mark French, and I am so happy, you have chosen to join me for the podcast this week. And hey, we're getting near the end of the year. And I'm really excited what I'm trying to bring next year to the podcast. I think this year has been I've done a better cadence, trying to bring better consistent information next year, I really am hoping that I've got the technology right. To do some interviews and stuff, I think we're going to do more of that and more engagement. And I'm looking forward to that I'm looking forward to what the new year may bring for the podcast and certainly happy to have you along for the journey. And appreciate you to be along for the journey. So let's jump in I've got some interesting topics. And I know last few couple of episodes, actually, I had been focusing on the ideas of biases and how they have affected me, especially in my work. And I'm gonna go back to kind of the original format now, because I got that out of my system, I guess. I'm gonna go back to looking at some of the news stories. I've missed a lot, or the discussion around some of the news stories that usually we talk about as part of the podcast. So I'm going to go back and look at some of these. And you know, talk about those items in the news that are going to really have an effect on how we do things in the safety world, time after time, day after day. And the first one that really caught my attention is this one article from insurance business mag. And it talks about why January is the worst time for retail workers compensation claims. This is a trend that I have seen more than in retail because I don't have a ton of retail experience. But I have a lot of warehousing and experience that came through my career in what happens. If here's my my two cent tour, I guess of that issue. That you look at it as kind of paying for what happened earlier. So after Thanksgiving, when everybody starts buying and Cyber Monday and Black Friday, these warehouses retail are very, very busy. And it's there's an energy to it, there is a very strong powerful energy that comes around it we're we're just moving and going and doing and you ramp up with a lot more people. And more people statistically would say, more injuries, if you're prone to it. If you have if there is a chance for injury and you have more people that chance then of someone encountering that injury goes up. That's just natural and normal unless you're doing more during that period to reduce injuries. Now some organizations believe more observations or more training Well, usually the training is talked about, but usually it's just more observations get out on there and see more. That's really not fixing the problem. I mean, it it can help. Sure. Observations are helpful with data. But really, we're not really fixing the issue. So I don't see that. So there's that great energy that comes around when we're talking about that Christmas the hall holiday shopping season that is upon us right now, in you're really working hard, lots of overtime, lots of extra people a lot of moving things. And when I found in this was, again, my two cent experience and observations of being there is that we have that great energy and we're working and working and working. And then when it's all said and done in January, we take the holiday off, January, we come back in. And then we take that big deep breath of like, wow. And then we go, Oh, my goodness, I am so sore. And I think of it is like an exercise program. In a way it's that much longer term. So stretched out, we're, maybe an exercise routine is a very micro session, think of this as a macro of that a longer, much longer session, you're going out and you've been doing your workouts, and there's one day that you're like, you know what I am feeling, there's a lot of energy, I feel it, I'm going to go for it, I'm really going to push myself to the limit, I'm going to work, work, work and push myself, what happens what you break down those muscles, you get sore and you get stronger from it. That's part of it. But if you did it over and over time, after time, for a whole month, you can have an injury. And it may come on slowly to where you lean on my shoulders, don't bother me keep going, they'll push through it. Because, you know, I feel like I'm getting the gains I need or I've got that motivation. Or it's just that I feel it. Same thing in that retail world. Same thing, because what they talk about and some good statistics here, of course, I will share this. It'll be part of the podcast link and also LinkedIn and Facebook, if you follow me there, it showed that the claims go up. And it's mostly strains and falls. And that doesn't really surprise me. And again, this isn't the date of injury, this is the date of claim. There's a difference there distinction of when the claim gets filed. So people come back in, they take that deep breath and they go oh my gosh, I have to say that it happened right last year, while we were working so hard and so fast. But like this shoulder, like all during the holiday, I still put heat on it, I tried to stretch it, or my elbow or my wrist or my hips or my lower back, pick your body part. It just never got better over the height. And I really thought the rest over it. Maybe the few days off we got or the two holidays, the New Years and the the round Christmas where we take some time off, I thought I could rested, get to feeling better. And I've come back to work now. And it's not better, like I'm really hurting here and it's not getting better. Well, here's that claim. Here's that hurt. And I come back to that to say that is because one, it's busier, it is definitely productivity in those sectors are so much higher moving things, shifting things, encountering people, more people in the store that can spill things on the floor, more boxes being moved in your warehouses, more. Much more things happening having to move material and warehousing having to ship material from warehousing, lifting, pushing, pulling, all that stuff is amplified during that time period, that December time period, as we're ramping up for those holidays and those big gift giving times. And so that when we come back in, we're feeling it, we get those I've seen this, many enough tread prepare a lot of times to come back into work in January and go, you know, our first aid rates are gonna go up, it's going to attribute to last year, our recordable rate is probably gonna have an early spike kind of a bathtub shape to it. Or even maybe even at a decline, like you go straight kind of come off the years with some higher recorded ability rates and then drop. Well how do you prevent that it's not more observations. It's early in the year when you've been hearing those complaints. Anyway, if we need a lifting help here, this is too heavy, this is going to be too fast. This product shouldn't be stored here because it's out of the zone, you're having to really lift forward or reach for it to pull it down. Or our housekeeping techniques or housekeeping processes aren't working because we know they don't work in this area because it just gets dirty or it's high traffic. Those are the things we have to fix earlier in the year. There has to be actually a system in place. It doesn't help to get near the end of the year, and put this plan together to do 14 times the number of observations of all the workers. That's not fixing an issue that's kind of blaming the person for the injury in the first place. And that's not what we do. We have to actually get in there and fix it. So this is a really interesting article that highlights that problem that as we go into the year that high energy high output are the systems in place to protect hire for people from the higher volumes, the stronger workload, the bigger expectation, the longer hours, and an influx of new were people coming into that system. Let's change topics talk about something else. When we come back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast.

Stinger: 10:34

humanizing the workplace, it is the leading a learning through safety podcast,

Mark French: 10:41

do USDA consulting, learn you lead others, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. The problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr. Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more. Individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at T SDA consulting.com. And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. The next item I came across was from the US Department of Labor and Statistics, a publication called the economics daily. And they released yesterday. So this is pretty recent. They released yesterday that in 2022. So this is last year, but they finally had the data analyzed and looked at the private industry employers reported 2.8 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses. That's up seven and a half percent from 2021. The increase was driven by injuries and illnesses and illnesses were up 26.1 injuries, only 4.5%. Still higher, not the direction that we would want to see for non fatal injuries. And of course, what drove the illness part was respiratory illness, we are still trying to understand the long term implications of 2020 COVID of the COVID-19 that really came in and 2020 and 2021 and rocked the workplaces, especially health care, especially other types of places that were essential to be open. Those areas are still having fallout from what was truly the respiratory illness. How did it affect you? What is the long term effects? How do we even record those injuries and illnesses, illnesses technically sorry, for that item? We're still working through it. And so these are being still accumulated evaluated. The methods that we have recorded them had been fairly inconsistent. I'm going to be perfectly open and honest. And I think everybody knows that the reporting structure of what is what is not a true respiratory work related issue is iffy. Wow, can you prove did I get it at work? Did I get it at home? Did I get it at the store all of that. And there was so much argument about it even in the legal sector, especially in the political sector, especially, but even in the safety sector, of doing enough due diligence, to make sure that we did it the right way. And I struggled with that there's no doubt that when someone brought a case of a respiratory issue, reevaluating and evaluating how did it happen, talking to the person without getting without breaking too much into the private world of what's going on. But trying to understand the mechanisms and trying to trace it back one to see if we can prevent it. Number one, how do we fix it? So it doesn't happen again? Number two, how did it happen? How do we record it appropriately? It took a lot of work. And it took a lot of effort. And there's no doubt that that should have seen that increase because we're still understanding it. We're still figuring it out. We're still asking people to report it. And it brought a lot of light to reporting those styles of issues to the workplace, bringing it up recording it. I would estimate that's probably still low, because people still may not be reporting. There may be also times where it wasn't recorded or reported. Because the maybe the company determined it wasn't work related, or maybe the company didn't care and just simply didn't do it at all. No due diligence. Maybe. And I'm sure or it's out there. I'm sure there's some statistical method of those out there that had that, because it happens even with injuries. But what can really is interesting or concerning, is the increase even in injuries last year, and we work in, in a world in a country, that is an economic powerhouse. And I've, I've kind of jumped on the soapbox a few times, we owe it to people to try to do our very best to protect, Am I perfect? No, I'll be the first one to point out the gaps in my programs, the work I do. And to admit that it's, it's a never ending progression of improvement. And it should be, and there's always going to be an opportunity to get better, listen more, do more. There's should also be a distinct focus on the system, a system that prioritizes processes to fix injuries to prevent them from happening, looking at what is causing harm, what is causing hurt to our people, and going in there to remedy it. Too many times so many times, it's up, Someone got hurt. Let's retrain them, oh, Someone got hurt more PPE, oh, Someone got hurt, we need an administrative process around that. Is there more we can do? Is there engineering? Is there development are there methods, processes, items that we can do, physically, to make it better for our team, and really look at what is going on there. The rise in respiratory illness cases was up 35.4% 365,000 cases. And that came after a decrease from 2020 to 2021. So the number of illness cases in 2022, of course, is higher than 2019 is pre pandemic level, no doubt. But it's an interesting trend to see that it declined in one year, when it was actually happening. And it increased the next. Here again, and I liken it to the first part of what we were talking about in the podcast of that after something is over, you think about it, you're more aware of what happened and you're more likely to talk about it. Because now the awareness, the the adrenaline, the the work that was there, the everything else we were worried about when that was happening is over. And now we're focused on what really happened and how do I really feel it? Should I be talking more about these types of things in the workplace? I'll tell you a story. And I'll make it very quick here that at one point, I remember having a conversation with someone in a leadership position of like, do we really want to, like ask people and make them aware of this issue, because then they're gonna report it and we'll have to do something about it. Like, you know, if we don't know we can't fix it. And the first step is we got to know we got to fix it. They agreed with me, but it was an interesting first responsive do we really want to ask because once we ask, we'll know when we got to do something about it. But that's the right way to do it. Even though it's hard. That's the hard path. It's the right path. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I hope you'll join me again, more podcasts coming lots of old archive podcasts out there. And I hope that you enjoy the content. I hope I look forward to the new year the content of course, there's still more left this year that we'll get to. But most importantly, until next time we chat. Stay safe.

Announcer: 19:06

Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast, more content is available online@www.ts da consulting.com. All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. This has been the lead Again learning through safety podcast