Episode 168 - Welcoming the New Year

OSHA’s Top 10 Cited Violations for 2024:

• Frequent safety issues such as fall protection, hazard communication, ladders, respiratory protection, lockout/tagout, powered industrial trucks, scaffolding, PPE, and machine guarding.
• The importance of addressing these life-critical hazards to prevent injuries and fatalities.

Leadership and Safety:

• Emphasis on the role of safety as a cornerstone of effective leadership.
• Connecting physical safety to psychological safety to foster better team morale and trust.

Emerging Trends in Workplace Safety:

• Insights from the American Psychological Association on 2025 trends, highlighting workplace tension related to hybrid/remote models and the growing gap between management and employees.
• Increasing unionization as employees seek to address safety and workplace concerns collectively.

Call to Action for Leaders:

• Encouragement for leaders to prioritize listening to their teams, especially on safety issues, to build trust and create a safer, more empathetic work environment.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the podcast, we're going to talk about OSHA's 2024, top 10 most frequently cited citations. Should be an interesting discussion as we kick off the new year with the leading and learning through safety podcast.

Announcer: 0:22

You Music. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's 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. You

Mark French: 1:27

Music. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so happy to welcome you into the new year for new podcasts. And as always, I'm so happy that you've joined me, and I'm sure you were wondering like, is he coming back? Is this podcast gonna continue? Because I took some time off, basically because December was busy, more busy than I really wanted, and it was just a good time to take a breath, reflect on life, get things back under control. We start fresh here in 2025 kicking off a new year with the podcast, new excitement, new topics. It's going to be great. We're going to have a wonderful time together as we talk about safety and most importantly, we talk about leadership, the higher level of how we become leaders, and it begins with safety. I truly don't see any other way that you can start good leadership without first caring about the safety of your people. And again, you can manage without worrying about the safety of your people. You can't lead without the safety of your people, and that's both physical and psychological. Let's not let's start with the physical. Let's move to the psychological. And I think this is going to be a great kick off to what we're going to talk about this year, and all the items that I'm sure are going to come our way as we have these little chats together about safety. So as with every end of year, OSHA always publishes their top 10 frequently cited violations for the previous year. And again, there's usually no surprises there. We end up with a list that they may move around a little bit within the top 10, but they generally speaking, stay the same. Why is that? Well, one a lot of these items are life critical. So you have OSHA focusing on these more because they are life critical. You have people complaining about these more because they're life critical. And unfortunately, you have more fatality investigations that lead to these citations? Because most of them are life critical, so the list not exactly skewed, but there has to be an understanding of the background of it, and how do these citations come about, and how do they remain, and how do they happen? And a lot of it is because there is a focus, if you're always it's the psychological analogy that if you start noticing and thinking about a red car, suddenly you see a whole lot more of red cars. Same thing here, if we're focused on those things that are life critical, if that's what we need to be looking for, as we should, then those are what will show up. And indeed, here we are at the end, beginning of 2025 with the 2024 list being very common, and unfortunately, common. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if suddenly we didn't have to worry about these life critical items, because suddenly we made improvement that organizations made a real push to to do better, to lead better. And unfortunately, I'm not seeing a trend of that nature. I'm seeing a lot of good work by those who I see, those who care getting better, and those who. Don't staying right where they are, and in doing the same things over and over again, that's unfortunate. What I would love to see is like true revolution and in safety. And I keep hoping for it, and I keep looking for it, and maybe, maybe someday we'll see it. But some other interesting items may make that happen for different reasons. We'll talk more about that. Have a lot of interesting information this year, but let's jump into the 2024, list of the violations number one, fall protection. No, no argument there. Fall Protection is so it's ignored. It shouldn't be Oh, wow, wouldn't fall. They can't fall. Or there's no way they would do that, or they're always stable on their feet. Or it's expensive, yeah, fall protection is not cheap, because it is made to keep you from dying if you fall. And lot of violations there. So it's number one, and it pops up as number one fairly frequently, as far as just companies that. And it astounds me how poorly this can be managed and how much risk is involved. General industry is a four foot standard. Over four feet high you fall, you got to be protected from open edges in construction at six feet, falls from just standing in falling can be fatal, and there's just not enough work around protecting people from falls. I think that work can never stop. It has to continue. We have to continually look for better ways to prevent people from falling from any height, because it is. It's all random risk at the point of when you start to fall, if the fall begins, it's all going to be a luck of the fate, of how the injury that may come from it. Number two was hazard communication. This is one that it's an easy citation a lot of the time. I'm not going to say it's life critical a lot. Sometimes it can be absolutely there are some very terrible chemicals out there that need that people need to know what it is a lot of the time. And I'm using generalities here because I don't have the facts and figures in front of me, but it's an easy one to cite. You walk in, you walk around, you look for a chemical that's sitting around on a cabinet, and you go, Hey, show me the SDS about it. You ask the team about, do you work around any chemicals? And they go, No, I don't work around chemicals. And they're like, Well, what's that? WD, 40, oh, it's a chemical. And, well, you didn't train your people appropriately. So we those are some of the citations that come out of the has come standard, because it is so easy to find, uh, exceptions to the rule, because you imagine walking into a janitorial closet and suddenly he's decided to bring in a new cleaner that has never been brought in before, and didn't get the SDS sheet, and now you have azcom problem that ends up in the remedy is simple. You get the SDS, you show you've put it in your book or your digital book, and boom, there it is. People have to know how to find them. And it's easy for people to forget where to find those safety data sheets. In a day of digital age, you hope that they can remember that there's a QR code somewhere, or that there is an online system. Yeah, I go to that computer over there, I look it up on my phone, or I go to HR and ask for it, or safety find the computer that I can use the kiosk. And then, unfortunately, there are companies that just don't care and deserve those citations. Number three, ladders. So here we go, another form of fall protection. Bad ladders, broken ladders, misused ladders. Oh yeah, all of that happens so frequently, respiratory protection and then lock out, tag out, rounding out the top five. So respiratory protect is a complex standard fit testing and making sure it's appropriate people know how to don and doff. There's a lot there that a lot of companies don't recognize. That needs to be done to assure that you are in compliance with every letter of the respiratory protection law. And there's a lot of work there, so if you bring in respiratory protection, it has to be done the right way. And a lot of times, I just hand out dust masks or have them provide and people slap one on for just general nuisance dust. Well, there's a voluntary standard part of that that people can voluntarily use one when it's not necessary by law, but you have to record. You have to train on that. And in some cases, have signatures that say they understand that this is voluntary only, that they are choosing to wear it, they they're choosing to wear it any way they want to, and that. We're not responsible for, like training, because we don't have to be, because it's not a legal threshold. And so you have to have people know that lock out, tag out, oh, yeah, energy control is such a powerful standard and continues to be misused and misread, and it's complex, and it takes a lot of work, a lot of due diligence, but it is so critical. Well, I'm going to take a quick break here. We're going to come back, and I want to briefly talk about the rest of the list, and then I want to bump into a little bit of psychological safety, talk about some of the items that we're seeing on that space and how it ties together with what we're seeing with physical safety. 2025 can shape up to be a very interesting year for safety. More on the leading and learning through safety podcast. You are

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Mark French: 11:42

Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Welcome to 2025 this week. We're talking about OSHA's top 10 for 2024 closing out 2024 welcoming in 2025 in hopes that things will continue to get better for the safety world, rounding out the rest of the top 10, powered industrial trucks, fall protection, again under training requirements, scaffolding, PPE, and then finally, machine guarding, all of those so critical to just basic life safety of our teams, and to think that there are companies out there that some of them maybe there's a mistake, but so many times, too many times we talk about it here on the podcast or see it in the news of where it led to something terrible, and it was on purpose, or not really on purpose, just complete neglect. I'll put it that way to me that feels like it's on purpose when you just neglect it, but I'll reserve that as a personal opinion that I'll keep for that and when we look at the training requirements for fall protection, it's not just telling people that you need to wear your fall protection on certain times. It's educating on the prevention like, how do we can we use guardrails? How do we set up better systems than just fall protection, but most especially, how to don and doff and verification of donning and doffing of the fall protection equipment? Do they really know how to wear it the right way? And a lot of there are too many times that I see fall protection being worn wrong that can lead to an injury or it failing. In some cases, scaffolding. No surprise there, because it it there's a lot to build good scaffolding as it should be. I would not want to get on a scaffold that wasn't built the right way. All of this leads to what we're seeing actually, interestingly in psychology. And I received the January, February edition of The American Psychological Association's monitor on psychology, and what they published in their first issue was the top 10 emerging trends in psychology. So we closed out 2024 with the physical safety what OSHA did last year, and we'll probably see the same focus as this year. And then now let's look at what what are psychologists saying are going to be some of the trends of 2025 the one that caught my attention the most is workplaces at a boiling point. The focus of the article is this confusion around remote, hybrid, in person, management, leadership, all of those things are coming together and what it really is saying, and when I really summarize, what is it that the article is saying? Is that the gap between management and the people they manage is growing, the lack of understanding, the lack of appreciation, the lack of just in. Empathy, sympathy, those things that we should have as leaders, not as managers, but as leaders that we should be focused on. And you can probably guess what I'm going to say next is that a good leader first focuses on the safety of their people. Number one, that is a moral imperative. It is something that is meaningful to both and we see the gap growing. And one of the stats that they called out in this is that with this boiling point reaching more and more organizations, the people of the organizations are entering collective bargaining agreements, that unionization is starting to have a re emergence, so that the people have a voice within the company where they feel like management isn't listening. Management isn't giving them the letting them have a voice in one of the we, I have a profession I have there is the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Because of the work of collective bargaining and unions, they wanted safe the first, some of the first rally cries, fair pay, a safe place to work, a place I can go to work and earn my pay and not die or be significantly injured by doing it, and OSHA became what it is because of those rally cries for a safer workplace for people can't ignore that, no matter where everything else comes after that. There's a lot of controversy there. I've read lots of books on these things, of just the ups and downs of collective bargaining and unions and management and leadership. It all ties together, and it's super interesting, and that's for a whole nother topic, but I could go down that rabbit hole, unfortunately, gonna do my best not to right now, but it's interesting to see them siding that we're seeing success rates of unionization increasing because people want that voice, I will say, if you want to, as a leader, give Your people voice to let them be heard. The first and most important item you can hear is safety, because that's one of the first items that's pulled into is some things like fast working paces or dangerous environments, and they feel like they're being ignored. And the way you don't get ignored anymore is you collectively bargain for those rights to be safe and to have safety features in place, and then, along with a lot of other items. And this is not a pro or anti union discussion, it's a Do you listen to your people discussion? Are you a manager? Are you a leader? What is it a good leader is gonna hear and the first thing we can hear about is safety that creates physical safety. It creates psychological safety. It bridges the gap between leaders and people, and that's what we're here to do is bridge that gap so we know what we can do to protect our team, protect our livelihoods, protect our communities. This is what we do. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So happy you've joined me. Thank you. I look forward to a wonderful discussion and just a wonderful 2025 with you until next time we chat, stay safe.

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