Episode 151 - The Human Impact

This week's episode of the "Leading and Learning Through Safety" podcast, hosted by Dr. Mark French, delves into the significance of safety in workplaces, particularly focusing on forklift and powered industrial vehicle incidents. Dr. French emphasizes the importance of creating strong organizational values, providing learning opportunities, fostering teamwork, and ensuring safety to protect employees.

The episode begins with a discussion on an occupational accident involving a forklift that resulted in a fatality. Dr. French reflects on the human impact of workplace accidents and the importance of addressing significant injuries and potential fatalities. He highlights the need for organizations to focus on safety, investing time and effort in training and preparing employees to handle heavy equipment and other high-risk tasks safely.

Dr. French also discusses the broader issue of workplace safety culture, questioning why some organizations fail to prioritize safety despite the severe consequences of neglecting it. He contrasts this with how some companies invest heavily in monitoring productivity rather than ensuring safety.

The podcast underlines the importance of leaders investing their time in meaningful safety practices and empowering employees to identify and mitigate risks. Dr. French encourages leaders to focus on significant safety risks and to humanize the workplace by considering the well-being of their employees.

In conclusion, Dr. French calls for a balanced approach to safety management, where both leaders and employees are engaged in maintaining a safe work environment. He stresses the importance of taking the time to address safety concerns properly and the potential long-term benefits of such investments.

Transcript

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This week on the leading and learning to safety podcast, we're talking about four trucks powered and foot industrial vehicles. We'll talk more about that in the psychology of safety this week on the podcast. 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. And welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hi, I'm your host Mark. And I am always excited to have these chats with you. Thank you for choosing my podcast, I am truly honored by every download. And listen, I thank you for that. This week, I came across a news story. And it only jumped out of me because of the details in it when it was listed. So the aggregate news that I get sometimes has just like basic information, sometimes it's very technical, it just says this happened, we don't know much. And they were some sort of occupational issue. So I, I read it, I keep going in. Again, this strikes me I'm gonna take one quick step back to talk about the profession that is occupational safety. And just how interesting it is and how heavy it can be at times not that other jobs do not have they do. Every job has a stress all its own. And you don't understand it too, you've walked a mile on someone else's shoes. But there's certain things that amazed me every day about this profession in general. And the first one is sometimes how callous and apathetic people can be to the human condition. To simply say that, you know, as that happens to someone else, and I've been doing a lot of back to basics kind of work here recently really reflecting on, let's go back to the fundamentals of what it means to have an organization that is safe, and a lot of focus on significant injuries and fatalities, or precursors to those things or potential significant incident fatalities, what could have been the worst case scenario? Could it have happened with only a few changes and variables? Could it have happened? And how do we help people see these in notify and flag that these are more important? These are the ones that we should, as an organization as a consensus of a group talk about and the fact that as part of my job, or as part what I feel like as part of my job, that's what I feel like part of my profession is, is to watch presentations and to go through the news and look for death. On it unbelievable to me that that feels normal that I do that. And I learn a lot from it. And it scares me at a fundamental level because I read it and I go could it happen to someone I know, could it happen in an organization? I know could it happen to my peers to someone, someone else will have highest respect for within the industry. And I've met a lot of wonderful people in the safety and HR world that I have utmost respect for. Could it happen to someone they know, could it happen in their organization? And it's a little scary to think that the smallest decisions or the decisions in general can get us there. Let me go to the news story. This one caught my attention because just of the details and this was a fork truck or powered industrial truck incident. The person was working on a construction project at a school and in Oregon, and it starts off with a single mother died after becoming trapped under a forklift machine while working on a construction project 33 years old. And trapped under a fork, truck details are not all the way there are lots of really interviews of just how things are stopped. Right now OSHA is investigating support for the family. Lots of will like good, positive information about her and her work and who she was. And I look at that, and I, it hits me every when we humanize this, it is interesting in sad that, when we humanize it, it really does hit hard to think just how the wide effect of an occupational fatality has the people that affects the expansion of of what it does and how it changes, and how it should change the way things are done. And sometimes it doesn't even unfortunately, as I've seen in some other other case studies that I've looked at that maybe it doesn't change the behavior of the organization. It makes me wonder, what is it that allows them to company? What is it about maybe an owner, what is it about someone who manages or supervises, that allows them to turn it off, to dehumanize to go these aren't people their resources to be used. And honestly, this theme is not uncommon. There are so many talks about the Industrial Revolution, pre industrial, post industrial, even current working conditions of where people are. And I think it's a sign indicative of where it is as workplace isn't another here's an unrelated news story that I'm going to try to tie together, if I can, I was reading where there was a very large banking firm, and they fired someone. Because they found that they thought they were falsifying time, because they were a remote workplace. And the person had downloaded and installed, what it is called a mouse mover. So it keeps the computer alive through a software program. So your computer doesn't go into a rest mode. So that when your company is monitoring how often you were on your computer, or how long that you're in, like logged into the computer doing things, it never shows it, it goes to sleep. So it shows that you've been working the eight hours, maybe instead, by simply just moving the mouse, depending on whatever who knows how much work was actually getting done. Is that where we are in the trust world, that we truly don't even trust our team to do their work. And instead of holding people accountable to get the work done, we spy on them, monitor them. And we probably put more resources into monitoring if they're doing their work than we do to see that they're doing it safe. And that's where I'm kind of getting it. It's amazing that the very large corporate entity would invest to be the people that have to digest the data, the work it takes to install it, the work it took to investigate it, all of that work in one side of it. And I flip over to the other side of work, where work is actually happening. And I go holy cow. Why wasn't that much effort? Why couldn't another organization put that much effort into safety? Why wouldn't they? Where is the effort? Where is the time in one of my biggest things I really focus on is time. Time is limited. Perception. We could argue that philosophically physics, all that you I get it, I'm making a generalization and it hits me that even I in my own mind wanted to argue with myself. But time is limited. And what we give as leaders as managers, as people who are focused on businesses, we focus by giving our time investing our time into something we believe in or something we feel will bring something back to us. Let's talk a little bit more about that investment in time. On the next half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, humanizing the workplace, it is the leading learning through safety podcast. D is D, a 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 ESDA consulting.com. Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning thread safety podcast this week, found a new story and they did a really fantastic job of humanizing. What happens when in a workplace fatality happens. And I this one was revolving around Ford trucks and I have the theme was there of just heavy equipment, and not and things happening. And there's a lot of variables when there's heavy equipment, because there's someone operating it there's so people around it, there's the load, there's all kinds of variables that have to be controlled, for it to work well. And it's underestimated that you can just jump on a piece of equipment, go run around, get done with business and you're done. The truth is, it does take a lot of work, it does take a lot of effort, it takes some time and investment to get people ready for that. I'm not saying this has anything to do with that news story, it just caught my attention because of how well I'm going to post a link to the news story. They did a good job of making it real and making it human. And it hit me again, as going back to what we have to do as basics. And the theme was time investment. How do we invest? Where do you invest your time? Where do you spend your time? Whether, especially when I'm going to go with the idea of when you're at work? Where is your time spent? What are you doing? And is it meaningful to the what you're doing? Does it meet with your core values? Does it help humanize who is around you? And as supervisors, managers and leaders, I asked that question a lot of where is your time invested? Is it actually invested in doing safety things? Is it invested elsewhere? Is it invested in doing other work? And is there an opportunity to invest a little bit more where it can make a difference in helping someone? And sometimes it's creating a system sometimes it's being in the field. And here's the great thing I struggle with a lot. And that's the balance of can I go out and find everything versus how much can I empower other people to look for the key items. And that's where it really carries is we can find a lot of things in safety. And sometimes we're focused on the details on getting the little things right. Before we do that, we have to take a step back and think about are we doing the big things right? Are we out there helping look for the really large risks in being able to find something to put into place to fix it? Or have we taught other people what to look for that are these high potential, the ones that have that opportunity. So working with heavy equipment is one of them. Moving manual and mechanical handling of of material, working in high energy energized equipment, so electricity, gravity, all those things that thermal chemical nucular making sure that the energy is de energized before we enter into wherever we're working. confined spaces. All these are just pieces of what are opportunities for high potential incidents and this is where I have been really going back to thinking about is how how do we how do I how say we like we're doing maybe we are in the journey together. Let's let's take the journey together. Now I especially I am having to really focus on how do I help go back to the basics and not making the as your one of my and I've said this before, my greatest Folly is that I assume way too often that because I know what someone else knows it. And because I never want to feel like I'm condescending, or that I'm talking down to someone, I want to feel like I'm helping educate that I'm helping to provide information. But I also don't want to bore somebody with something with that they already know. Or I don't want to just sound like I am a know it all and be condescending when I'm teaching or trying to convey some kind of knowledge. It's a worry about those things. And when going back and talking to people, or listening into organizations, or thinking, basically introspection, of what I tried to do every day as a professional, in safety, or as as a human being, and to a certain degree, when we think about that, is when we see those big items, how do we say something? And how do we convey that, hey, that is dangerous, or it could be dangerous? And what protections are in place? And sometimes, it's just getting curious, that looks like it's a little bit dangerous, looks a little risky. What protections are in place? Like what what did we do differently? Or what are we doing to protect ourselves? I don't know, sometimes a lot of what I'm seeing because the equipment could be different, the work could be different, the location could be different. But what I tried to do is just get curious enough to say, Hey, I would love to hear more about how things are protected, just to make sure you're okay. Can you walk me through what we've done? If I don't hear a lot that I'll ask questions like, could we is there anything else we could do? Could does or something you need? Is there more that we can try to protect the work area and the work that you're doing? Ultimately, it comes down to hoping that we have a system in place and a group of people who are willing to ask the questions. And that's the hardest part, I was watching a video safety video that actually talked about that one of the critical things to do. When there's a safety issues, you have to deliver the bad news sometimes. And I found that to be most of my career is delivering the bad news and not injury, bad news. But just bad news of we're going to need to stop and think about this, we're going to need to put more protections in place. That's not the way we can do that. We can find other ways. But we need to we need to take we need to make revision too. And it's tough to make that pause sometimes and try to engage in that longer conversation to get ready or to prep when it's needed. Makes it a little awkward. Sometimes when you have to be that one that's always always the one calling the timeout always the one having to say let's slow down always the one that say let's look at it one more time. In minutes, can lead to so much reward when you do it right. And sometimes we get caught up and losing those minutes but gaining so much more was deep. We'll lose the minutes but gain more. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the podcast. I really appreciate you joining me so happy that we took the journey together. Coming up later in August Kentucky safety conference Kentucky Sherm conference all amazing events. If you're interested in those, and until next time we chat. Stay safe. 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 leading and learning through safety Podcast