Leading and Learning Through Safety

Do you want to engage your culture? Safety is the first step to creating the motivation needed for people to perform their best. Each day, we have the chance to lead our teams and learn more about our people through an understanding of our safety climate. Through looking at current issues in HSE, we chat about creating cultural value through safety. Your host is Dr. Mark French, CSP, SPHR aka The Safety Dude.

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Leading and Learning Through Safety

Episode 170 - Preventing All Injuries

January 24, 2025 • Dr. Mark A French

This week's podcast focuses on workplace safety, particularly on whether all accidents and injuries are preventable. Key points include:

Safety Philosophy:
- Initially, Dr. French believed all injuries could be prevented, especially in controlled environments like factories. However, his view has evolved to recognize that while striving for zero injuries is noble, some risks, particularly in public and uncontrolled environments, might be unavoidable.
Hierarchy of Controls:
- Emphasis on using elimination, substitution, and engineering controls to reduce risks within an organization's sphere of influence.
- Examples include better equipment, safer driving policies, and training.
Public Risk Challenges:
- Dr. French shares examples of safety challenges in public spaces, such as commuting accidents, where some factors remain uncontrollable.
Cultural Shift:
- Transitioning from an "all-or-nothing" mindset to focusing on mitigating risks wherever possible rather than achieving perfection.
Real-life Examples:
- Stories of workplace fatalities and public incidents highlight the importance of proactive safety measures and awareness.

The overarching message is the shared responsibility for safety and the need for leaders to actively work towards reducing risks in controllable ways while recognizing limitations.

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the leading and learning through safety podcast, we're going to talk about are all accidents truly preventable? Let's talk a little bit of safety philosophy coming up this week on the leading and learning through safety podcast. You

Announcer: 0:33

mark, 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: 1:30

mark, welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hi. I am your host, Mark, And as always, I am honored and happy and excited that you've chosen to join me on this journey of leadership, leadership that begins with the fundamental to me, this is impaired moral imperative, as if we protect our people, it's got to be the first thing we focus on. Nothing else can help progress. Motivation can help progress. Empathy can help progress, any part of what a modern day employee needs, like being able to work at a safe workplace, and let's begin there. So welcome this week, as I kind of previewed, I want to begin by talking about the safety philosophy. And this has been debated time and time and time again. Is that? Is it true that all injuries are preventable? Now, if you had spoken to me, let's say two years ago, maybe even three I would have been a die hard, die hard that it's an absolute 100% yes. And now I may be changing a little bit. And yeah, I'm kind of teasing out a little bit what's going on, but I want to give some background of why did I believe that, and why I still very much believe in safety, first of all, that I'll get there, of why I may be changing a little bit. And I look at the point of where I was coming from, at the time, was a lot of factory work inside a very controlled environment. When you're inside that level of controlled environment, I always felt that there was always something that could have been engineered better or removed or substituted. When I looked at the hierarchy of controls, it always felt that there was with any type of injury, with any type of potential risk, there was a way to assure that it didn't happen. When you did the root cause analysis of most things there were, even though some of them were a little bit extreme, of how you could have prevented it, it was still preventable, even if you had the the money, the materials. I remember one where it was like a speck of dust landed in someone's eye. It happened to be the perfect angle needed removal, recordable injury, and it's okay. What do we well, I mean, technically, could we have done a better job with cleaning, done a better job with keeping vacuums available. Could we have done different? Yeah, there were still elements. Even though it was stretching, there were elements to say that that was preventable. I move forward, and I think about where I'm working in, like, fast forwarding to where working in more of a public arena, and that is where I really start to think of like there's a lot of things you can do when working in the public I'll come back to a point that I just want to get to at some piece of this, there's something you can do. There's. Processes that can be in place to lower the risk. But is it always 100% preventable? Theoretically? I'm going to say yes, of course, theoretically, in certainly do I love the idea of trying to strive for the fact that you can prevent every single injury. Yeah, I think that's a noble way to go, after your philosophy and safety that we never want to see anyone get hurt. And we have to control the controllable. Now in some organizations, and I have seen this, and I see this in even smaller areas. That's not as critical as safety, but it feels like that, just because, well, you know, there's still a chance that could happen. Let's just do nothing. We haven't. We haven't given it 100% so instead of going the 80% we're just going to not do anything at all. Have I been in that mindset before? Unfortunately, yeah, we had an engineering issue. I remember we were trying to think of ways to break up material so that it would be easier to handle. And I wanted to solve it all. I wanted to break it, handle it. I wanted to be completely hands off from the employee standpoint. I didn't want them to have to touch it. And so it was like a big engineering deal, and there was a supervisor that decided that instead of waiting and doing nothing, they would at least figure out a way to get the material broken up. And that was probably 60% of the risk was trying to get the material separated, and I wanted it completely hands off. And that's where I got too focused. I got too if I couldn't do it all, I just got hung up with just waiting until I could do it all. And now some organizations use that as an excuse to just quit trying. Now that's a whole different philosophy. That's very different philosophy, and that's a very different mentality. But in this case, the supervisor came up with an idea that got a 60, 70% there. It helped, and that taught me a great lesson in getting better, rather than being perfect, or do something even, even if it's not going to get you all the way. Start reducing it. Start putting things in place, start working on those items, rather than using it as a method to halt or to get stuck, as I did. And when I go back to the idea of like, can they all be prevented? Yeah, theoretically it still can be. There are still ways and methods. The more that I work again in the public arena, the more it concerns me that that may not be 100% true. So for when you're just commuting back and forth to work, that's not and here's where also the law gets a little weird, right? What a recordable injury is. And I've heard this from attorneys and people in trainings time and time again, the OSHA record keeping laws were not meant to be fair. They were meant for the government to be able to get as much data as possible. And so when we're measuring ourselves on Did you have an injury, and that usually gets defined as recordable or worse, we get focused on was that a recordable or not, rather than Was it an injury? And when does the injury occur? It's when you're on the clock. So when I'm driving to work, driving home from work, that's not considered on the clock if I'm driving from location to location while at work. So if my job is traveling around doing things, then I have the same exact risk of an accident than I did when I was just driving from home. And that's a sobering thought, that in a workplace, we can put more some engineering in place. There's a lot of really neat cameras with AI and notifications. You can do a lot to try to change the behavior of someone who's driving back and forth, commuting, and then when they get into the company vehicle or begin on company time, that would be considered as something the company would have to recognize as an injury, and I'm just using driving as an example. That risk doesn't really change a lot. You can alter some of the risk, but it's still there. It's still a significant risk to be behind the wheel of a car, or even in a car, and with that, how do you fly in this idea of, can all injuries be prevented? Oh, of course, there could have been like, if we'd re engineered the roads, and if we had stopped that person, that other driver, from swerving into the lane somehow. Or you think of all the options and the truth. This, that's not really feasible. And so now we have to think about, well, if that blanket and anytime you use the word like blanket philosophy, there's always exceptions. You just can't find it. It's too complicated. But let's really talk about what we're striving for in the world of safety, how we handle it, and still, there's real results when things don't go well. Let's talk about that on the second half of the podcast,

Stinger: 10:33

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dsda Consulting learn you lead others. Traditional development focuses too much on weaknesses. They make you believe that the only way to find success is through improving your faults, strengths based coaching instead focuses on creating success through using your natural talents. Dr Mark French at tsda Consulting is an authorized Clifton Strengths coach. Your customized report and a personalized approach help bring out the best in you and your team. For more information, visit us on the web at tsda consulting.com

Mark French: 11:18

Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast this week, we're talking about the philosophy of if all injuries can be prevented, and not necessarily did my goals or my core feelings about safety shift, but my ideas behind being a very staunch defender of that all injuries are absolutely wanted to present, prevented. Yes, I have evolved from that standpoint. I think where I have moved to is more of look at everything within your control, and there's a lot of things like, you're eliminating a lot of risk when you look at what are in the sphere of control of the organization, and do your very best to control those things. Use the hierarchy of controls, elimination, substitution, engineering. Look at those key items in where you can utilize those to reduce risk in what you can control. So let's use the example of driving that I used before. The risk remains the same. If you're on the road, the risk is there of weather conditions, the risk is there of other drivers. The risk is in my area, a giant deer running across the road at an instant. There's things that can happen that truly because you're in the public sphere, you're in the name the natural world, you're outside of that microcosm of a factory. There are factors that happen. Are there things we can do? We can put good policies in place to make sure that we're not driving when the weather is poor, that we're going to just maybe halt driving for a while. We can have aI cameras we can set up, and we can make sure that we're buying the best safety features on vehicles and that we're getting them regularly serviced. We're keeping the tires serviced. We're keeping the car serviced. We can do a lot, and we can control a lot of things. We can train people on safe driving. Still, the outside risk of something happening, unfortunately, is very real and very much out of our control in some cases and again, we can get in. This is where my all or nothing mentality had to really shift, because for me, it was kind of unacceptable to think about the all or like, not to have it as all or nothing. I felt it was necessary as as a safety person, as someone who never wanted to see people get hurt, that I had to have that passion, and now I've realized that that's a heavy burden to bear as a leader, to think that you should be trying to control everything, and you can't, but you can control a lot. You can influence a lot. You can do a lot to help prevent to help increase that safety factor. Wherever you are now, especially if you're within a factory, there's a lot more within your control, because you control the environment. You control who comes in and out. You control a lot involved in that. And what made me think about this this week is, again, I'm reading through the fatalities of the week, which is a very sobering experience. And there was a lot of crushed in between, Fort trucks, pinning people, other moving vehicles inside, like powered industrial style vehicles or other such items, pinning people. I think there were two or three examples this week. Of people getting pinned in places and factories and losing their life because of being in an area that maybe the company should said, no one be in this area when there's moving equipment or better visibility or better controls or in there are a lot now here's one of the situations where the technology is there to help really create prevention, and especially just the elimination of the hazard of saying, if this is happening, no one be in the area, and if even possible, keep the area separate to where walking pedestrians and equipment don't have to intermingle, or have to intermingle, as Very little as possible. Those are controllable. And it made me think about what is controllable within that environment. But then I saw another story that just rattled me a little bit because of again, here is the public and here's the story. And this came from a news out of Columbus, Ohio, a truck driver. And I'll just read it word for word, because it's a little short paragraph, and it stunned me, a truck driver is dead after being struck twice by separate vehicles. Wednesday evening on the far west side of the city, according to the Columbus police, a white tractor trailer was traveling west on a road at

6: 16:20

21pm, so dark when it stopped in the left turn lane in front of the warehouse, for reasons yet unknown, the driver exited the truck and stepped into the left travel lane of west bound traffic. At that time, a a honda cr V was heading west in the left lane and struck the truck driver, he was knocked into the right lane, and while laying in the right lane of the westbound lanes, a maroon Alexis struck him again, and he was pronounced

dead at the scene at 6: 16:51

28pm, this is where we have to think about is public citizens. Are you slowing down for the mailman when he's in the road? Are you slowing down for the trash truck drivers? Are you getting out of the way for emergency vehicles when you see a car on the side of the road or in the middle of the road and they've got their flashers on, or they seem to be having issues, are you slowing down and paying a little bit more attention? Because you you can't take that back once it happens. And not just one, but two, two people not maybe paying as much attention as what they could have been to see that things were evolving and changing. And I don't know the full circumstances of what was happening or why it happened, yet. There it is, the risk and the so much that might have been controlled. But even when you think back of how do you control it, what do you control? Do you not get out of your truck? Why was he out of his truck? Were the traffic paying attention was, did he have reflective gear? Did he have any means of being seen better? Did so much that might have been within the control but still may not have been the prevention that was needed to create the safety that be necessary to prevent the loss of life. And so it's up to all of us. This is where I think safety is. We all have to be responsible for it, because when we see it, even as a pedestrian in everyday life, we have to pay attention for the things that still influence the workers that are around us, that are out there. So as we close out, I want you to think about what is within our control as leaders to make our workplaces, our people feel and become more safe. How do we control it? What is within our control? How far can we take it? How much can we invest in it? Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast, and until next time we chat, stay safe.

Announcer: 19:14

Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda 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. You. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast. You.