Free and completely unsolicited advice for Labor Secretary Solis
Dear Madam Secretary,
Congratulations on your appointment. As you said at your Senate confirmation hearings, it is an honor to serve the country in a leadership position, especially when you have the opportunity to make a difference in, as you said, “an especially difficult moment” for working Americans.
I know you have been, and will be, flooded with proposals for appointees, regulations, executive orders, priorities and calls for immediate interventions on numerous labor-related fronts. The chorus for change regarding one of your agencies, OSHA, is loud and clear from many interest groups who have been on the outside looking in at OSHA operations in the past eight years, or who are just plain tired of the same old same old out of the agency.
I’ve been observing OSHA activity from the outside since Ronald Reagan vowed (in vain) to trim back the regulatory thicket in the early ‘80s. Since then, OSHA has proven resilient but erratic in terms of performance. It has at times been bound and gagged by political partisanship. Your agency problem child provokes strong emotions and controversy, with unfortunately little consensus support for steps taken in any direction.
You’ve heard it from others; this new political and economic landscape unleashes forces combining to present a rare chance to rethink how OSHA can best contribute to safe and healthy workplaces. To do so, here are ten suggestions:
Don’t rush it. There are folks passionate about protecting workers from job hazards who have been waiting since the 1970s for the return of an activist and aggressive OSHA. Calm them down.
Steer away from “safety first.” Please refrain from the easy, empty rhetoric about job safety. Safety and health professionals and employees have been served up platitudes about safety forever, and in too many cases know that words will not be backed by action.
Avoid revisiting an ergonomics standard. OSHA’s been there, tried that. Resist your boss’s pledge during his campaign to have another go at an ergo standard. It will be a battle royale, and OSHA’s scant resources are better spent elsewhere.
Push for injury/illness prevention program requirements. Here’s one place to invest OSHA resources. Some say this should have been the first standard the agency ever issued. The variability in the quality of workplace safety and health programs, ranging from world-class to absolutely nothing, leaves far too many workers at risk.
Don’t gloat over declines in injury and illness rates. This has been an annual exercise for the Department of Labor for years, regardless of administration. The declines have paralleled the increasing automation and overseas outsourcing of manufacturing, and the rise of less hazardous service industries. Also, the sampling base is small, and the under-reporting of injuries and illnesses, especially in small firms or where an immigrant workforce is involved, is anything but rare.
Remember back in 1995 when you held hearings and pushed for heavier enforcement of laws against sweatshops after California authorities raided that El Monte building where 72 Thai workers sweated 18 hours a day stitching garments? What kind of injury records did you find there?
Recognize the safety and health profession’s silent majority. There are thousands of dedicated safety and health professionals who have spent decades (their average age today is in the early 50s range) protecting their workforces. Many have pushed their programs beyond what OSHA rules call for. That’s a reason why, when we polled readers about their 2009 aspirations for OSHA, only 21 percent wanted more OSHA standards-setting and 26 percent wanted increased enforcement. Only 18 percent said OSHA compliance was still a difficult objective to achieve.
This speaks to the need to target OSHA standards enforcement where you’ll get your biggest bang for the buck.
Rein in the pendulum swing. Your predecessor, Elaine Chao, got it right when she told The Washington Post “the Department of Labor is probably the most partisan of all the departments. People have very different world views about… what’s best for the workplace.” That’s about the only thing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO will agree on when it comes to OSHA.
It will require significant will and restraint to resist partisanship and give OSHA much needed credibility by being open to all input. And it’s not only external forces that make this difficult. Recognize OSHA’s institutional and historic “dogged” reluctance to operate with a spirit of cooperative consideration for all stakeholder views, as the workplace safety and health consultancy of ORC Worldwide put it in a November, 2008 White Paper, “Breaking the Cycle: New Approaches to Establishing National Workplace Safety and Health Policy.”
Appoint an OSHA chief much like yourself. At your Senate confirmation hearing you concluded by telling the committee, “You have my commitment that, if confirmed, I will listen and respond to your concerns. My door will always be open to you and your colleagues in the House and Senate. We may not always agree. But I promise that I will not let those disagreements get in the way of the pursuit of our common goal.”
Hopefully, you intend to extend that openess beyond politicians. And your assistant secretary of labor for OSHA also needs to keep an open door, listen and respond to concerns, and not allow disagreements to once again paralyze efforts to update permissible exposure limits, for example, and other outdated standards, improve job safety in small firms, and bring OSHA into the 21st century of global safety and health policy-making.
It will take courageous leadership to break the “culture of confrontation” as ORC describes the decades-old gridlock over U.S. workplaces safety and health policy. Courage like you showed in one of your first acts in the California Assembly, when you sided with labor against the tobacco industry and your own Democratic leadership by voting in 1993 for legislation to ban smoking in all workplaces.
Cover the back of your OSHA boss. The boldness of your OSHA assistant secretary will be commensurate with the public and private political cover you provide, and the amount of discretion you allow.
Prepare OSHA for infrastructure rebuilding. If the president pours billions into repairing or replacing bridges, highways, public works and buildings, OSHA must get serious about long-delayed standards for the safety of construction confined spaces, crystalline silica exposures, excessive noise on construction sites, the safety of cranes and derricks, and take the lead in contractor safety issues and protecting immigrant and minority work populations.
Madame Secretary, OSHA has been the proverbial political football since its inception, most often kicked about without energy or enthusiasm by Democratic and Republican players alike. Workers deserve better. Here’s hoping you and your OSHA appointees take the air out of the ball.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Bill Belichick’s Leadership Problem
Learn how the famed coach gained respect & success
We’re not talking here about how he’s got to pick up the pieces after his team’s shocking last-minute loss to the Giants in this year’s Super Bowl. Or how he’ll restore his credibility after allegations his team stole signals from one opponent and filmed another’s practice. No, this concerns a challenge familiar to almost any leader in the business world. Bill Belichick, winner of three Super Bowls as football coach of the New England Patriots, is now widely hailed a football genius (at least until the last Super Bowl), but he faced a formidable problem when he started his first job as an assistant coach of a National Football League team.
It wasn’t that he went to work for an extremely cheap organization, and got his foot in the door by offering to work for free.
It was 1975, and Belichick has just graduated from Wesleyan College, a small liberal arts school in Connecticut. He faced a dilemma many safety and health professionals confront — and not necessarily only in their early years. How would Belichick earn the respect of his players (employees are the parallel for safety and health pros) and the other coaches, general manager and owner (supervisors and upper management for safety and health pros)?
Barriers to leadership
Belichick came to his first job younger than most of his players. In the ultra-macho world of NFL locker rooms (something like construction, mining and logging rolled into one) he cut an unimpressive figure. He wasn’t an athletic stud, like his players, but rather small and slow. He didn’t have the jut-jawed, chiseled features of authority figures like NFL coaches Mike Ditka, Dick Vermeil or Bill Cowher. He had no charisma about him. No gift for gab, no one-liners, no “attaboy attitude.” Seldom did he smile, and quick was he to get in your face. Suffice to say Belichick probably did not have Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” on his nightstand. Sportswriters would later dub him “Dr. Doom.” (Something akin to safety and health managers being zinged as “Dr. No.”)
As described in the late David Halberstam’s book, “The Education of a Coach” (Hyperion, 2005), Belichick “had not attended a great football program… he came from outside the game as they (the players) knew it.” And football players, size and ego aside, are really no different from other employees: they judge those who come into their world by the person’s job experience. It’s no different on an assembly, a shipping dock or up on a skyscraper. “Have you walked in my shoes? Paid your dues? Played this game?”
Anxious for respect
No, no, and no would be Belichick’s answer to those questions. It’s the same for safety and health managers armed with college degrees stepping onto a construction site or into a mill for the first time. Yet, Belichick “could not succeed unless he gained (the players’) respect and could impose his authority,” writes Halberstam. About this potential resistance he was more than a little anxious at first. Many of you reading this can relate — whether it was coming to your first job, your most recent job, or a new consulting gig.
Belichick’s father was a coaching lifer, and Bill had been around college players and the game since he was a boy. Like many a safety and health pro, he was observant, a quick study, and came to understand human nature. “The most important thing, he believed, the thing that in the end generated respect, was not necessarily a loud and commanding or threatening voice, but knowledge,” writes Halberstam.
Use your head
In Belichick’s world of football, “players respected coaches who could help them play better and who knew things they didn’t know,” according to Halberstam. It’s an easy transition to the work-a-day world of safety and health pros. Employees respect safety and health managers (or safety coaches) who can help them work safer, avoid injury, and who know things about safety and health (hazards, exposures, chemicals, regulations, PPE, the list goes on) they don’t know.
Wait a minute — isn’t this just the old “knowledge is power” thing?
Well yes, but the trick is how you go about, in a practical sense, applying this cliché. Belichick, like almost all workaholic young NFL assistant coaches, had one goal from the start: to be the man, the head coach. As he quickly ascended the ranks he learned how to leverage his knowledge, expertise, rare insights and instincts to earn respect, lead his players, in fact empower them. Much like safety and health pros, Belichick as a coach wanted his men — his workforce — to know what to do in the rush of the moment when no one would be watching over their shoulders, barking instructions.
Taking the reins
By the time Belichick got his first head coaching job, in Cleveland, he knew how to wield his power. Again, the parallels to safety and health come readily. He put aside his ego. (No arrogant safety know-it-alls.) He was obsessed with organization (a management system) and preparation (meetings and training). He wanted team players who blended well together (just like your safety team), not high-maintenance all-pros.
Belichick made mistakes, abused his power and paid the price, in that Cleveland job. He bent his rules for certain players. His intense, private personality clashed mightily with the owner’s flashy celebrity style. In the parlance of safety and health, his community outreach efforts were virtually nil. Worst of all, Belichick unceremoniously cut the team’s popular if aging quarterback in mid-season. Cleveland’s passionate fans and the media launched what Halberstam called something “like a football lynching.” Belichick needed police stationed near his family’s home. He was fired after Cleveland went 5-11 in his last season.
Lessons learned
Several leadership lessons emerge here: Before you take a leadership position, check your compatibility with the boss. Are you going to have a fair shot to develop your (safety and health) program in an acceptable time frame? (The Cleveland owner was financially strapped and needed to win immediately to fill seats.) One set of rules goes for everyone.
And this is important: “You can be right, but sometimes when you are right you are wrong, too,” writes Halberstam, “which is what happened in Cleveland.” Years later, Belichick blamed himself for mishandling the quarterback’s brutal dumping and humiliation. “He thought he was just doing his job, but he had been mistaken; he had defined his job too narrowly,” writes Halberstam.
That’s a danger for safety and health pros, too. The stereotype is narrow: the safety guy as OSHA expert, the compliance cop. Check out your culture: you might just have more leverage, more opportunities, more influence — more power — than you think. A healthy dose of self-confidence helps. That’s not a problem for most coaches. Just don’t over do it and show up to work in Belichick’s trademark sideline sweatshirt hoodie.
We’re not talking here about how he’s got to pick up the pieces after his team’s shocking last-minute loss to the Giants in this year’s Super Bowl. Or how he’ll restore his credibility after allegations his team stole signals from one opponent and filmed another’s practice. No, this concerns a challenge familiar to almost any leader in the business world. Bill Belichick, winner of three Super Bowls as football coach of the New England Patriots, is now widely hailed a football genius (at least until the last Super Bowl), but he faced a formidable problem when he started his first job as an assistant coach of a National Football League team.
It wasn’t that he went to work for an extremely cheap organization, and got his foot in the door by offering to work for free.
It was 1975, and Belichick has just graduated from Wesleyan College, a small liberal arts school in Connecticut. He faced a dilemma many safety and health professionals confront — and not necessarily only in their early years. How would Belichick earn the respect of his players (employees are the parallel for safety and health pros) and the other coaches, general manager and owner (supervisors and upper management for safety and health pros)?
Barriers to leadership
Belichick came to his first job younger than most of his players. In the ultra-macho world of NFL locker rooms (something like construction, mining and logging rolled into one) he cut an unimpressive figure. He wasn’t an athletic stud, like his players, but rather small and slow. He didn’t have the jut-jawed, chiseled features of authority figures like NFL coaches Mike Ditka, Dick Vermeil or Bill Cowher. He had no charisma about him. No gift for gab, no one-liners, no “attaboy attitude.” Seldom did he smile, and quick was he to get in your face. Suffice to say Belichick probably did not have Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” on his nightstand. Sportswriters would later dub him “Dr. Doom.” (Something akin to safety and health managers being zinged as “Dr. No.”)
As described in the late David Halberstam’s book, “The Education of a Coach” (Hyperion, 2005), Belichick “had not attended a great football program… he came from outside the game as they (the players) knew it.” And football players, size and ego aside, are really no different from other employees: they judge those who come into their world by the person’s job experience. It’s no different on an assembly, a shipping dock or up on a skyscraper. “Have you walked in my shoes? Paid your dues? Played this game?”
Anxious for respect
No, no, and no would be Belichick’s answer to those questions. It’s the same for safety and health managers armed with college degrees stepping onto a construction site or into a mill for the first time. Yet, Belichick “could not succeed unless he gained (the players’) respect and could impose his authority,” writes Halberstam. About this potential resistance he was more than a little anxious at first. Many of you reading this can relate — whether it was coming to your first job, your most recent job, or a new consulting gig.
Belichick’s father was a coaching lifer, and Bill had been around college players and the game since he was a boy. Like many a safety and health pro, he was observant, a quick study, and came to understand human nature. “The most important thing, he believed, the thing that in the end generated respect, was not necessarily a loud and commanding or threatening voice, but knowledge,” writes Halberstam.
Use your head
In Belichick’s world of football, “players respected coaches who could help them play better and who knew things they didn’t know,” according to Halberstam. It’s an easy transition to the work-a-day world of safety and health pros. Employees respect safety and health managers (or safety coaches) who can help them work safer, avoid injury, and who know things about safety and health (hazards, exposures, chemicals, regulations, PPE, the list goes on) they don’t know.
Wait a minute — isn’t this just the old “knowledge is power” thing?
Well yes, but the trick is how you go about, in a practical sense, applying this cliché. Belichick, like almost all workaholic young NFL assistant coaches, had one goal from the start: to be the man, the head coach. As he quickly ascended the ranks he learned how to leverage his knowledge, expertise, rare insights and instincts to earn respect, lead his players, in fact empower them. Much like safety and health pros, Belichick as a coach wanted his men — his workforce — to know what to do in the rush of the moment when no one would be watching over their shoulders, barking instructions.
Taking the reins
By the time Belichick got his first head coaching job, in Cleveland, he knew how to wield his power. Again, the parallels to safety and health come readily. He put aside his ego. (No arrogant safety know-it-alls.) He was obsessed with organization (a management system) and preparation (meetings and training). He wanted team players who blended well together (just like your safety team), not high-maintenance all-pros.
Belichick made mistakes, abused his power and paid the price, in that Cleveland job. He bent his rules for certain players. His intense, private personality clashed mightily with the owner’s flashy celebrity style. In the parlance of safety and health, his community outreach efforts were virtually nil. Worst of all, Belichick unceremoniously cut the team’s popular if aging quarterback in mid-season. Cleveland’s passionate fans and the media launched what Halberstam called something “like a football lynching.” Belichick needed police stationed near his family’s home. He was fired after Cleveland went 5-11 in his last season.
Lessons learned
Several leadership lessons emerge here: Before you take a leadership position, check your compatibility with the boss. Are you going to have a fair shot to develop your (safety and health) program in an acceptable time frame? (The Cleveland owner was financially strapped and needed to win immediately to fill seats.) One set of rules goes for everyone.
And this is important: “You can be right, but sometimes when you are right you are wrong, too,” writes Halberstam, “which is what happened in Cleveland.” Years later, Belichick blamed himself for mishandling the quarterback’s brutal dumping and humiliation. “He thought he was just doing his job, but he had been mistaken; he had defined his job too narrowly,” writes Halberstam.
That’s a danger for safety and health pros, too. The stereotype is narrow: the safety guy as OSHA expert, the compliance cop. Check out your culture: you might just have more leverage, more opportunities, more influence — more power — than you think. A healthy dose of self-confidence helps. That’s not a problem for most coaches. Just don’t over do it and show up to work in Belichick’s trademark sideline sweatshirt hoodie.
Jack Welch: An Imaginary Meeting
Many an exec keeps safety at a safe distance. Why? The pain of people issues.
"I'll try to make this as painless as possible."
Sounds like a dentist firing up the drill, right? But no, it's the annual performance review.
"So let's see… This year you're getting a 6."
"What's that mean, boss?"
"6? That's a 'good.' Got it? Let's do lunch."
"Ah, what did I do to get a 6?"
"Let's see. They change these darn instructions every year. Well, according to this, you 'objectively assess situations independently and make win-win decisions quickly'. Now, how about lunch?"
"Boss, are they your words or from the manual?"
"What, you want a 7? That's 'very good.' I can do that. Now let's eat."
"What's the difference between 'good' and 'very good'?"
Silence. "Ok, I'll score you an 8. But somebody else is going to have to get a 2."
At arm's length
Been there, done that? For all the talk in safety circles about the importance of conversations and relationships in building trust, caring and safer workplaces, the annual evaluation ritual shows how uncomfortable many managers are with the "people" side of the ledger. And why they would almost instinctively keep safety at arm's length.
I remember two small business owners who dispensed their appraisals on short walks with employees to the post office. Call it feedback on the fly. Another boss would always close the door and whisper, with a look like he was passing stones, "Let's get this over with." Once, late at night eating dinner on the road, I heard a sales rep "reviewed" in the rear of the restaurant over a table of empty beer bottles.
Whatever it takes to ease the pain. And dealing with "people issues" is painful for more than a few managers. What is it that makes someone so smooth at sales presentations squirm and mumble when it comes to sitting down with an employee and talking about how they're doing? Or sitting down and talking about safety issues, for that matter?
Talking to Jack
For insight into the management mind, what better source than "Jack: Straight from the Gut," the autobiography of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, called by Fortune "The Manager of the Century," the man all CEOs want to emulate, according to billionaire Warren Buffet. His style? A relentless focus on results. Love of numbers, facts, energy and passion. Little patience for anything that cannot be fixed, sold or properly executed.
Jack calls one of his favorite methods for dealing with the complexities of people "differentiation." Sounds harsh and it is. Not exactly the actively caring model favored by our Psychology of Safety columnist Dr. E. Scott Geller, but nonetheless, every year all GE businesses were told to rank their top executives either in the "Top 20," "the Vital 70," or the "Bottom 10." A, B, and C players, according to Jack. A's would get raises two to three times the size given to B's. B's would "search every day for what they're missing to become A's," he explains. C's would be "redeployed elsewhere."
Safety and health pros have been urged since long before OSHA to talk management's language to succeed. Here you have it. Gray is out. People are segmented on a black and white "vitality curve" like products. Don't let feelings get in the way of facts. This ranking business is war, Jack concedes. "Managers who can't differentiate soon find themselves in the C category," he writes.
This is where safety and health pros can run into trouble adopting "management's language."
There's not much of a vocabulary in corner offices for emotional issues, including safety. Layoffs?
"We didn't fire people, we fired positions," says Jack.
To be sure, you can find companies that embrace employees. Fortune devotes a "Best Companies to Work For" issue to them each year. But in many, many workplaces, how people are managed boils down to three basics: praise, blame, and train 'em.
Worlds collide
You can see the collision course. Safety and health pros deal in shades of gray, deal with people issues every day. Risk-taking. Decision-making. Feelings. Distractions. Awareness. Habits. Attitudes. Fears. Complaints. Everything from denial and apathy to drugs and violence.
Going to a Jack Welch type to discuss, say, psycho-social stress or some other "soft" issue can be like trying to call on a cell phone from the mountains. Hello? Hello? What? I'm losing you…
"Ah, Jack, I wanted to talk to you about our employees' sense of belonging…"
"Where's the data?"
"People are stressed out around here, Jack. They have esteem issues. They don't feel in personal control."
"We've got it under control. Check our stock price at the closing bell yesterday?"
"We need to open up, talk, listen and be more transparent about safety and health."
"Listen, I'm not running a cruise ship here. We need speedboats in this race."
"But belonging affects mindfulness, and mindfulness affects quality!"
"You scare me with this mindfulness stuff. But, OK, you might be on to something. Post 'Who Moved My Cheese?' on the Web site. And crank out more Black Belts in Six Sigma. I want those numbers to go up."
Closing the gap
This is the gap that safety and health pros often must bridge between their world and the front office. Savvy ones know how to cross the great divide with facts in hand and their passion intact. They close the gap. And you sure don't find them in the C category.
"I'll try to make this as painless as possible."
Sounds like a dentist firing up the drill, right? But no, it's the annual performance review.
"So let's see… This year you're getting a 6."
"What's that mean, boss?"
"6? That's a 'good.' Got it? Let's do lunch."
"Ah, what did I do to get a 6?"
"Let's see. They change these darn instructions every year. Well, according to this, you 'objectively assess situations independently and make win-win decisions quickly'. Now, how about lunch?"
"Boss, are they your words or from the manual?"
"What, you want a 7? That's 'very good.' I can do that. Now let's eat."
"What's the difference between 'good' and 'very good'?"
Silence. "Ok, I'll score you an 8. But somebody else is going to have to get a 2."
At arm's length
Been there, done that? For all the talk in safety circles about the importance of conversations and relationships in building trust, caring and safer workplaces, the annual evaluation ritual shows how uncomfortable many managers are with the "people" side of the ledger. And why they would almost instinctively keep safety at arm's length.
I remember two small business owners who dispensed their appraisals on short walks with employees to the post office. Call it feedback on the fly. Another boss would always close the door and whisper, with a look like he was passing stones, "Let's get this over with." Once, late at night eating dinner on the road, I heard a sales rep "reviewed" in the rear of the restaurant over a table of empty beer bottles.
Whatever it takes to ease the pain. And dealing with "people issues" is painful for more than a few managers. What is it that makes someone so smooth at sales presentations squirm and mumble when it comes to sitting down with an employee and talking about how they're doing? Or sitting down and talking about safety issues, for that matter?
Talking to Jack
For insight into the management mind, what better source than "Jack: Straight from the Gut," the autobiography of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, called by Fortune "The Manager of the Century," the man all CEOs want to emulate, according to billionaire Warren Buffet. His style? A relentless focus on results. Love of numbers, facts, energy and passion. Little patience for anything that cannot be fixed, sold or properly executed.
Jack calls one of his favorite methods for dealing with the complexities of people "differentiation." Sounds harsh and it is. Not exactly the actively caring model favored by our Psychology of Safety columnist Dr. E. Scott Geller, but nonetheless, every year all GE businesses were told to rank their top executives either in the "Top 20," "the Vital 70," or the "Bottom 10." A, B, and C players, according to Jack. A's would get raises two to three times the size given to B's. B's would "search every day for what they're missing to become A's," he explains. C's would be "redeployed elsewhere."
Safety and health pros have been urged since long before OSHA to talk management's language to succeed. Here you have it. Gray is out. People are segmented on a black and white "vitality curve" like products. Don't let feelings get in the way of facts. This ranking business is war, Jack concedes. "Managers who can't differentiate soon find themselves in the C category," he writes.
This is where safety and health pros can run into trouble adopting "management's language."
There's not much of a vocabulary in corner offices for emotional issues, including safety. Layoffs?
"We didn't fire people, we fired positions," says Jack.
To be sure, you can find companies that embrace employees. Fortune devotes a "Best Companies to Work For" issue to them each year. But in many, many workplaces, how people are managed boils down to three basics: praise, blame, and train 'em.
Worlds collide
You can see the collision course. Safety and health pros deal in shades of gray, deal with people issues every day. Risk-taking. Decision-making. Feelings. Distractions. Awareness. Habits. Attitudes. Fears. Complaints. Everything from denial and apathy to drugs and violence.
Going to a Jack Welch type to discuss, say, psycho-social stress or some other "soft" issue can be like trying to call on a cell phone from the mountains. Hello? Hello? What? I'm losing you…
"Ah, Jack, I wanted to talk to you about our employees' sense of belonging…"
"Where's the data?"
"People are stressed out around here, Jack. They have esteem issues. They don't feel in personal control."
"We've got it under control. Check our stock price at the closing bell yesterday?"
"We need to open up, talk, listen and be more transparent about safety and health."
"Listen, I'm not running a cruise ship here. We need speedboats in this race."
"But belonging affects mindfulness, and mindfulness affects quality!"
"You scare me with this mindfulness stuff. But, OK, you might be on to something. Post 'Who Moved My Cheese?' on the Web site. And crank out more Black Belts in Six Sigma. I want those numbers to go up."
Closing the gap
This is the gap that safety and health pros often must bridge between their world and the front office. Savvy ones know how to cross the great divide with facts in hand and their passion intact. They close the gap. And you sure don't find them in the C category.
Techno-Stress & You
Know the causes & the cures
Maybe you missed this dispatch from Reuters new service last month: "The round-the-clock availability that cell phones and pagers have brought to people's lives may be taking a toll on family life, a new study suggests."
You were probably in a meeting, on a plane, or deleting emails.
Chances are the consumer alert issued last year by the American Society of Hand Therapists also slipped past you: Handheld electronics are causing an increasing amount of carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis.
It's an unfortunate consequence of Blackberry addiction. Feel any throbbing between your thumb and wrist lately?
Or have you experienced what a researcher terms "negative spillover"? It's when life's boundaries dissolve before your eyes and you're thumbing your Blackberry under the dinner table or fielding a call at work from one of your kids whose practice was cancelled and wants to know how he's getting home.
Rising stress levels
An association executive captured the essence of negative spillover in an email response to an interview request: "This is a particularly busy time. Today is the deadline for spring registration and winter workshop feedback worksheets, we're shipping off this year's accreditation exam to the computer delivery vendor, I'm on travel this coming Sunday - Wednesday and I just moved my 89-year-old mother from an independent apartment to assisted living!"
Sometimes spillover can be more of a flood. A well-known safety expert recently emailed: "Sorry for my earlier email, but I get stressed out when my plate is overflowing. Let me know what else I can do to expedite the process. This project is a priority in my professional life. And that is the only life I have these days."
He's right in there with the 50.2 percent of ISHN readers who reported greater levels of stress in their lives last year, according to our White Paper survey. A more fortunate 42.1 percent were at least able to keep a lid on stress, reporting levels unchanged from a year earlier.
Intriguing are the 5.6 percent who figured out how to decrease their stress. Retirement? Or maybe they went cold turkey on their "Crackberry addiction," like the dean of the Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies did after even acupuncture brought no relief, according to a Washington Post article.
Causal factors
A host of factors expose EHS professionals to techno stress:
• It's the nature of the EHS job to be on call virtually 24/7/365. The voice mail greeting of many pros invariably includes detailed instructions for reaching them in the event of an emergency.
• Many professionals have left the corporate world, voluntarily or otherwise, to become entrepreneurial consultants. A good percentage work from home, which is sure to scramble one's sense of time and space. And consulting work introduces a new pressure point: the client. "Sorry, I've got to take this other call," an EHS entrepreneur says, cutting off an interview. When money calls, a magazine article can wait.
• If EHS pros aren't joining the swelling ranks of consultants, odds are good they work for multinationals, or cover multiple job sites or a region in the states.
The EHS world is becoming bi-polar. You work as consultant, or for a large company. The idea of a full-time EHS professional whose sole responsibility is, say, a 250-person plant, seems like a luxury from a generation ago. It's no surprise that the groups of EHS pros reporting the most increases in stress are those working in facilities with 1,000+ employees (65.8 percent) and those with international responsibilities (70.9 percent). Corporate life and techno stress are joined at the hip.
• EHS work is deadline-driven. An insurance company loss control representative not long ago was searching for someone to help him out of a jam. "We're updating the safety policy manual for a client," he explained. When do revisions need to be finished? "Oh, in about a week." How many pages? "Hmm, I'd say about 500."
• Technology keeps creating more "market opportunities" — each with its own set of deadlines, meetings, customer demands and communication challenges. Once upon a time magazine publishing was limited to producing print editions. Now we produce e-newsletters, e-zines, blogs, web updates, email blasts, audio conferences, web casts, pod casts, RSS feeds, digital magazines. It's no different than any business that intends to remain in business.
Warning signs
You very well may be too preoccupied these days to notice the effects of techno stress. Ignorance can be a cushion. But as a service in the name of professional sanity we offer these 11 warning signs to look for:
1 - That pain between your thumb and wrist.
2 - You start using your Blackberry thumb to ring doorbells or to point directions.
3 - You start breakfast conversation by mentioning how many emails you answered last night.
4 - Your business card lists a general phone number, a direct line, an 800 number, a cell number, a facsimile number, a voice mail number, your home phone line, pager number, along with obligatory email and web site addresses. Double techno stress points if you list more than one email address.
5 - You find yourself nostalgic for the days your fax machine actually spit out relevant communications.
6 - A 50-foot spruce tree falls on your house in a wind storm. Your spouse is concerned about the roof. You worry about your DSL connection.
7 - You're driving a stick shift up a twisting mountain road, scrolling through your cell phone directory looking for a number, when the car in front of you stops suddenly. You jam on the brakes, your car stalls out, and starts sliding back toward the car coming up behind you. (Or some such similar near-hit.)
8 - You have an involuntary reflex reaction to reach for your cell the second your plane reaches the gate. Or you have a similar uncontrollable urge to whip out your cell or Blackberry when leaving the lobby of a customer. Can't wait 'til you get to your car? Double techno stress points.
9 - A colleague critiques your report in a meeting in a manner you find rude and baseless.
Instead of facing off with him afterward, or calling him on the phone, you email your grievances.
10 - You find more contact with your family (text messages, calls at work, working from home, etc.) leads to greater dysfunctionality.
11 - You doze off while reading this quote from David Greenfield, a Connecticut psychologist who specializes in high tech issues: "Our culture is about distraction, numbing oneself. There is no self-reflection, no sitting still. It's absolutely exhausting."
Tech time outs
OK, if you feel some techno numbness or can't sit still, what's the antidote? An internet search using keywords "techno stress" offered these recommendations:
First, speaking of internet searches, if you can't find what you're looking for after the first two pages of links, stop. Ignore the other 537,864 listings.
Turn off all phones during family meal times — that's if you have family meals. Some recommendations call for turning off cell phones at church and during funerals. Others say vibration mode is acceptable.
Alternate with your spouse the days you will be "on call" for your kids. "Sorry about that migraine Johnny, but your mother's on call today. Want her number?"
Keep your emails short. "Tank car derailed. More later."
Take a gadget break. Do something completely different. Walk the dog. Change the oil in your car. Find your inner Luddite.
Maybe you missed this dispatch from Reuters new service last month: "The round-the-clock availability that cell phones and pagers have brought to people's lives may be taking a toll on family life, a new study suggests."
You were probably in a meeting, on a plane, or deleting emails.
Chances are the consumer alert issued last year by the American Society of Hand Therapists also slipped past you: Handheld electronics are causing an increasing amount of carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis.
It's an unfortunate consequence of Blackberry addiction. Feel any throbbing between your thumb and wrist lately?
Or have you experienced what a researcher terms "negative spillover"? It's when life's boundaries dissolve before your eyes and you're thumbing your Blackberry under the dinner table or fielding a call at work from one of your kids whose practice was cancelled and wants to know how he's getting home.
Rising stress levels
An association executive captured the essence of negative spillover in an email response to an interview request: "This is a particularly busy time. Today is the deadline for spring registration and winter workshop feedback worksheets, we're shipping off this year's accreditation exam to the computer delivery vendor, I'm on travel this coming Sunday - Wednesday and I just moved my 89-year-old mother from an independent apartment to assisted living!"
Sometimes spillover can be more of a flood. A well-known safety expert recently emailed: "Sorry for my earlier email, but I get stressed out when my plate is overflowing. Let me know what else I can do to expedite the process. This project is a priority in my professional life. And that is the only life I have these days."
He's right in there with the 50.2 percent of ISHN readers who reported greater levels of stress in their lives last year, according to our White Paper survey. A more fortunate 42.1 percent were at least able to keep a lid on stress, reporting levels unchanged from a year earlier.
Intriguing are the 5.6 percent who figured out how to decrease their stress. Retirement? Or maybe they went cold turkey on their "Crackberry addiction," like the dean of the Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies did after even acupuncture brought no relief, according to a Washington Post article.
Causal factors
A host of factors expose EHS professionals to techno stress:
• It's the nature of the EHS job to be on call virtually 24/7/365. The voice mail greeting of many pros invariably includes detailed instructions for reaching them in the event of an emergency.
• Many professionals have left the corporate world, voluntarily or otherwise, to become entrepreneurial consultants. A good percentage work from home, which is sure to scramble one's sense of time and space. And consulting work introduces a new pressure point: the client. "Sorry, I've got to take this other call," an EHS entrepreneur says, cutting off an interview. When money calls, a magazine article can wait.
• If EHS pros aren't joining the swelling ranks of consultants, odds are good they work for multinationals, or cover multiple job sites or a region in the states.
The EHS world is becoming bi-polar. You work as consultant, or for a large company. The idea of a full-time EHS professional whose sole responsibility is, say, a 250-person plant, seems like a luxury from a generation ago. It's no surprise that the groups of EHS pros reporting the most increases in stress are those working in facilities with 1,000+ employees (65.8 percent) and those with international responsibilities (70.9 percent). Corporate life and techno stress are joined at the hip.
• EHS work is deadline-driven. An insurance company loss control representative not long ago was searching for someone to help him out of a jam. "We're updating the safety policy manual for a client," he explained. When do revisions need to be finished? "Oh, in about a week." How many pages? "Hmm, I'd say about 500."
• Technology keeps creating more "market opportunities" — each with its own set of deadlines, meetings, customer demands and communication challenges. Once upon a time magazine publishing was limited to producing print editions. Now we produce e-newsletters, e-zines, blogs, web updates, email blasts, audio conferences, web casts, pod casts, RSS feeds, digital magazines. It's no different than any business that intends to remain in business.
Warning signs
You very well may be too preoccupied these days to notice the effects of techno stress. Ignorance can be a cushion. But as a service in the name of professional sanity we offer these 11 warning signs to look for:
1 - That pain between your thumb and wrist.
2 - You start using your Blackberry thumb to ring doorbells or to point directions.
3 - You start breakfast conversation by mentioning how many emails you answered last night.
4 - Your business card lists a general phone number, a direct line, an 800 number, a cell number, a facsimile number, a voice mail number, your home phone line, pager number, along with obligatory email and web site addresses. Double techno stress points if you list more than one email address.
5 - You find yourself nostalgic for the days your fax machine actually spit out relevant communications.
6 - A 50-foot spruce tree falls on your house in a wind storm. Your spouse is concerned about the roof. You worry about your DSL connection.
7 - You're driving a stick shift up a twisting mountain road, scrolling through your cell phone directory looking for a number, when the car in front of you stops suddenly. You jam on the brakes, your car stalls out, and starts sliding back toward the car coming up behind you. (Or some such similar near-hit.)
8 - You have an involuntary reflex reaction to reach for your cell the second your plane reaches the gate. Or you have a similar uncontrollable urge to whip out your cell or Blackberry when leaving the lobby of a customer. Can't wait 'til you get to your car? Double techno stress points.
9 - A colleague critiques your report in a meeting in a manner you find rude and baseless.
Instead of facing off with him afterward, or calling him on the phone, you email your grievances.
10 - You find more contact with your family (text messages, calls at work, working from home, etc.) leads to greater dysfunctionality.
11 - You doze off while reading this quote from David Greenfield, a Connecticut psychologist who specializes in high tech issues: "Our culture is about distraction, numbing oneself. There is no self-reflection, no sitting still. It's absolutely exhausting."
Tech time outs
OK, if you feel some techno numbness or can't sit still, what's the antidote? An internet search using keywords "techno stress" offered these recommendations:
First, speaking of internet searches, if you can't find what you're looking for after the first two pages of links, stop. Ignore the other 537,864 listings.
Turn off all phones during family meal times — that's if you have family meals. Some recommendations call for turning off cell phones at church and during funerals. Others say vibration mode is acceptable.
Alternate with your spouse the days you will be "on call" for your kids. "Sorry about that migraine Johnny, but your mother's on call today. Want her number?"
Keep your emails short. "Tank car derailed. More later."
Take a gadget break. Do something completely different. Walk the dog. Change the oil in your car. Find your inner Luddite.
NASA Tries Mending a Cracked Safety Culture
How to deal with ambitious, aggressive, fearless attitudes
Examining how NASA got into such a mess over its safety culture — or lack of one. Just how does a safety culture get fractured so badly for all the world to see?
A Google search using keywords “NASA safety culture” conducted on Labor Day, 2003, turned up 1,370 news stories. Never has the notion of safety culture received such attention. But as usual when it comes to job safety, the headlines follow a tragedy, and the stories are uniformly negative.
The Washington Post: “Experts doubt fix for NASA safety culture.”
FOX News: “NASA’s safety culture may be too broken to fix.”
The Associated Press: “The Columbia accident investigators are giving NASA months, if not years, to change the deeply rooted culture that led to the destruction of Columbia and the deaths of seven astronauts on Feb. 1 (2003).”
Among the many options: A housecleaning at the top. Hauling back Apollo-era decision-makers. Perhaps even a new name for the agency.
It’s a story with many parallels to workplaces in industry: Tight schedules. Resource constraints. Managers pressed to show results. Employees concerned but intimidated. Fluctuating priorities. Conflicting goals of cost, scheduling and safety. Mixed signals sent from on high. Near miss incidents ignored.
With one small difference. Your safety program will never be the subject of 1,370 news stories.
Born behind the eight ball
Investigators claim the causes of NASA’s cracked safety culture are rooted in history. So let’s go back to the beginning.
On October 4, 1957, Sputnik I shot into Earth orbit shrouded in the usual Soviet secrecy. All we knew was that the mission was guided by The Chief Designer, a dark genius straight out of James Bond. In the U.S., panic set in immediately.
The country is in a race for survival, cried The New York Times. We face national extinction if we don’t catch up, House Speaker John McCormack thundered. The Soviets could rain nuclear bombs on us from platforms built in space.
Gloom deepened two months later when the Navy tried launching the first American satellite with a Vanguard rocket. Before a national TV audience, the rocket shuddered six inches off the launch pad, exploded like a cigar, and sank ignobly into the sand amid billowing smoking and flames. On the other side of the world, Soviet kingpin Khrushchev flashed his mocking grin.
Government, military and aircraft industry officials hurriedly convened an emergency meeting in March, 1958 to figure out how to get a man in space before the Russians. There was no time to waste. The Air Force called it the “Man in Space Soonest,” or MISS mission. It would become Project Mercury, and the job of outfoxing The Chief Designer would go to the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Into this pressure cooker environment NASA was born, with an initial payroll of 8,000 employees and a budget of $100. From the very start, the heat was turned way up. Tom Wolfe, in his book, “The Right Stuff,” wrote that there was no time for orderly progress. A quick and dirty approach was seized on to save the free world.
What kind of safety culture — values, norms and employee attitudes — takes root in this type of do-or-die climate? And what happens to safety when there is no time for orderly progress, when the stakes are nothing less than extinction of the free world?
Fearless role models
In the race against the Russians, NASA needed the nation’s best and brightest technical minds, and pilots — astronauts — willing to hang their hide out over the edge, as Wolfe described. And so the country was introduced to a team of fearless risk-takers, the original seven Mercury astronauts.
They were role models, heroes, furnished with new homes and an exclusive contract with Life magazine. The energy, confidence and ambition of these fighter jocks from the Navy, Air Force and Marines set the tone for NASA — and its fledgling culture. Supreme self-confidence was a prerequisite. As pilots of small, high-performance jets, the Mercury Seven lived on the edge: they faced a 23 percent probability of dying in an aircraft accident if they planned to fly for 20 years, according to Navy estimates. A 56 percent probability of being ejected from the cockpit like a cannonball at some point.
Today, General Electric has the reputation of a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners culture. But what GE exec ever faced one-in-four odds of violent death? NASA’s high-risk, ride the envelope’s edge culture was something entirely different, and an “It can’t happen to me” mindset was part of the package.
Those highly publicized original seven Mercury astronauts epitomized NASA’s can-do culture. Never succumb to psychological stress. Never challenge the confidence needed to stare down the odds. Support the mission or get out of the way.
Here’s an example of that mindset. One of the seven, Deke Slayton, was furious when doctors grounded him for an irregular heartbeat. Wolfe described his anger in “The Right Stuff”: Docs don’t make operation decisions, fumed Slayton. There are too many goddamn docs in the way.
Whistling past the graveyard
Close calls wouldn’t get in the way, either. Gus Grissom nearly drowned when the hatch blew off his capsule and it sank in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the second piloted Mercury flight. John Glenn flew parts of his last two orbits manually because of an autopilot failure. Scott Carpenter narrowly survived reentry after ignoring warnings about wasting fuel and splashed down 250 miles off target.
Mission control’s reaction to Carpenter’s near disaster reflected that determined mindset. The immediate thought was not about Carpenter, but that program would have been set back a year or worst had he died, wrote Wolfe. In NASA’s culture, it was all about the program, the mission, success.
It had to be. President Kennedy had raised the bar for all to see in May, 1961. In a speech on “Urgent National Needs”, Kennedy rallied Congress and the public, claiming the U.S. faced extraordinary challenges and needed to commit to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Kennedy’s “stretch goal” compelled NASA to take more risks. In 1968, Apollo 8 took off on a historic mission to orbit the moon. That wasn’t the original plan. The mission was initially set up to test Apollo hardware in the relatively safe confines of low Earth orbit. But a senior engineer and the Apollo program manager pressed for approval to make it a circumlunar flight. They got it. The program moved closer to Kennedy’s goal. And NASA won more praise for its technical genius. To the gamblers went the plaudits.
Reap what you sow
Flash forward 35 years. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concludes that a cluster of attitudes and behaviors rooted in NASA’s history is as much to blame for the second shuttle disaster as the suitcase-size piece of foam insulation that struck Columbia’s wing.
● NASA’s managers are chided for thinking they are too smart for outside advice.
● For being too ambitious. For believing they are bulletproof to failure.
● For pushing to get on with the mission and accepting more and more risk to stay on schedule. For accepting near misses as the norm.
● For inbred groupthink that squelched dissenting opinion.
● For a safety program that was skimmed over and silent when it should have spoken up.
“We were too gung-ho about the schedule,” admitted NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe (who left NASA and became Chancellor of Louisiana State University in February, 2005).
Nothing new there. NASA had been gung-ho since day one, when it was hatched in that emergency meeting in 1958, egged on by Khrushchev, urged on by Kennedy.
Too ambitious? Too arrogant? Too accepting of risks? No surprises there, either. From the beginning, managers were told that nothing less than the fate of the free world depended on their mission. Engineers and scientists had to close the technology gap, and fast. Brilliant technicians and charismatic risk-takers were recruited, and lauded in the press. Walter Cronkite became an admiring astro-buff. Ticker-tape showered down on the parading dare-devils
Mixed messages
Goals, deadlines and marching orders have changed over the decades, but the pressure on NASA’s culture has been constant. At a Congressional hearing in the summer of 2002, NASA officials were told by lawmakers (who control their funding) that “it is critical to be bold and innovative.” You are the “intellectual pioneers” of the country. It is essential to remain “the jewel of the federal government.”
But by the way, we can’t tolerate your delays and cost over-runs.
And you are getting smaller and smaller, older and older, with no sign of rejuvenation, said one congresswoman. What are you going to do to avoid becoming a museum artifact?
Think about it. What happens to safety in private industry when managers are scolded for delays, cost over-runs, and threatened with extinction — shuttering the plant or maybe moving it to Mexico?
What happens when the message is mixed? Be bold, but be safe. Do it faster, cheaper, better, and oh yes, safer. Be the best and brightest, but be open to others’ advice. Honor your tradition, but don’t be held hostage by it.
As you see, NASA managers weren’t the only ones sending mixed signals. And for that reason, NASA alone can’t fix its safety culture.
Outside influences
Sure, numerous steps can be taken from within. Bring in new managers. Clean house. Eliminate communication barriers. Set new policies. Train and retrain on safety procedures. Send out more safety memos, like the one administrator O’Keefe dispatched in April, 2002, when he told employees “it is a good time to recommit ourselves” to “our core value to safety.” Look in the mirror, as O’Keefe said he would. Admit to blind spots and concede “We are the cause,” as O’Keefe did. Set up independent safety boards. Hire quality assurance gurus. (O’Keefe was replaced as NASA administrator by Michael Griffin in April, 2005.)
But more steps need to be taken. Taken by the outside forces that give NASA’s culture its cues, its goals, its budget, its rewards. Congress, the White House, the media and public opinion all have influential roles in any reform move.
The same holds true in the private sector. Want to mend a broken safety culture? It’s not just a job for line employees, supervisors, and execs. Sure they have a role. But you can’t ignore the influence of shareholders, customers, regulators, board directors, activists, agitators, image-makers and other outsiders in shaping cultural values and perceptions. If the culture has become a self-protective cocoon, as NASA’s has been described, ask yourself: What are they afraid of?
Examining how NASA got into such a mess over its safety culture — or lack of one. Just how does a safety culture get fractured so badly for all the world to see?
A Google search using keywords “NASA safety culture” conducted on Labor Day, 2003, turned up 1,370 news stories. Never has the notion of safety culture received such attention. But as usual when it comes to job safety, the headlines follow a tragedy, and the stories are uniformly negative.
The Washington Post: “Experts doubt fix for NASA safety culture.”
FOX News: “NASA’s safety culture may be too broken to fix.”
The Associated Press: “The Columbia accident investigators are giving NASA months, if not years, to change the deeply rooted culture that led to the destruction of Columbia and the deaths of seven astronauts on Feb. 1 (2003).”
Among the many options: A housecleaning at the top. Hauling back Apollo-era decision-makers. Perhaps even a new name for the agency.
It’s a story with many parallels to workplaces in industry: Tight schedules. Resource constraints. Managers pressed to show results. Employees concerned but intimidated. Fluctuating priorities. Conflicting goals of cost, scheduling and safety. Mixed signals sent from on high. Near miss incidents ignored.
With one small difference. Your safety program will never be the subject of 1,370 news stories.
Born behind the eight ball
Investigators claim the causes of NASA’s cracked safety culture are rooted in history. So let’s go back to the beginning.
On October 4, 1957, Sputnik I shot into Earth orbit shrouded in the usual Soviet secrecy. All we knew was that the mission was guided by The Chief Designer, a dark genius straight out of James Bond. In the U.S., panic set in immediately.
The country is in a race for survival, cried The New York Times. We face national extinction if we don’t catch up, House Speaker John McCormack thundered. The Soviets could rain nuclear bombs on us from platforms built in space.
Gloom deepened two months later when the Navy tried launching the first American satellite with a Vanguard rocket. Before a national TV audience, the rocket shuddered six inches off the launch pad, exploded like a cigar, and sank ignobly into the sand amid billowing smoking and flames. On the other side of the world, Soviet kingpin Khrushchev flashed his mocking grin.
Government, military and aircraft industry officials hurriedly convened an emergency meeting in March, 1958 to figure out how to get a man in space before the Russians. There was no time to waste. The Air Force called it the “Man in Space Soonest,” or MISS mission. It would become Project Mercury, and the job of outfoxing The Chief Designer would go to the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Into this pressure cooker environment NASA was born, with an initial payroll of 8,000 employees and a budget of $100. From the very start, the heat was turned way up. Tom Wolfe, in his book, “The Right Stuff,” wrote that there was no time for orderly progress. A quick and dirty approach was seized on to save the free world.
What kind of safety culture — values, norms and employee attitudes — takes root in this type of do-or-die climate? And what happens to safety when there is no time for orderly progress, when the stakes are nothing less than extinction of the free world?
Fearless role models
In the race against the Russians, NASA needed the nation’s best and brightest technical minds, and pilots — astronauts — willing to hang their hide out over the edge, as Wolfe described. And so the country was introduced to a team of fearless risk-takers, the original seven Mercury astronauts.
They were role models, heroes, furnished with new homes and an exclusive contract with Life magazine. The energy, confidence and ambition of these fighter jocks from the Navy, Air Force and Marines set the tone for NASA — and its fledgling culture. Supreme self-confidence was a prerequisite. As pilots of small, high-performance jets, the Mercury Seven lived on the edge: they faced a 23 percent probability of dying in an aircraft accident if they planned to fly for 20 years, according to Navy estimates. A 56 percent probability of being ejected from the cockpit like a cannonball at some point.
Today, General Electric has the reputation of a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners culture. But what GE exec ever faced one-in-four odds of violent death? NASA’s high-risk, ride the envelope’s edge culture was something entirely different, and an “It can’t happen to me” mindset was part of the package.
Those highly publicized original seven Mercury astronauts epitomized NASA’s can-do culture. Never succumb to psychological stress. Never challenge the confidence needed to stare down the odds. Support the mission or get out of the way.
Here’s an example of that mindset. One of the seven, Deke Slayton, was furious when doctors grounded him for an irregular heartbeat. Wolfe described his anger in “The Right Stuff”: Docs don’t make operation decisions, fumed Slayton. There are too many goddamn docs in the way.
Whistling past the graveyard
Close calls wouldn’t get in the way, either. Gus Grissom nearly drowned when the hatch blew off his capsule and it sank in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the second piloted Mercury flight. John Glenn flew parts of his last two orbits manually because of an autopilot failure. Scott Carpenter narrowly survived reentry after ignoring warnings about wasting fuel and splashed down 250 miles off target.
Mission control’s reaction to Carpenter’s near disaster reflected that determined mindset. The immediate thought was not about Carpenter, but that program would have been set back a year or worst had he died, wrote Wolfe. In NASA’s culture, it was all about the program, the mission, success.
It had to be. President Kennedy had raised the bar for all to see in May, 1961. In a speech on “Urgent National Needs”, Kennedy rallied Congress and the public, claiming the U.S. faced extraordinary challenges and needed to commit to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Kennedy’s “stretch goal” compelled NASA to take more risks. In 1968, Apollo 8 took off on a historic mission to orbit the moon. That wasn’t the original plan. The mission was initially set up to test Apollo hardware in the relatively safe confines of low Earth orbit. But a senior engineer and the Apollo program manager pressed for approval to make it a circumlunar flight. They got it. The program moved closer to Kennedy’s goal. And NASA won more praise for its technical genius. To the gamblers went the plaudits.
Reap what you sow
Flash forward 35 years. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concludes that a cluster of attitudes and behaviors rooted in NASA’s history is as much to blame for the second shuttle disaster as the suitcase-size piece of foam insulation that struck Columbia’s wing.
● NASA’s managers are chided for thinking they are too smart for outside advice.
● For being too ambitious. For believing they are bulletproof to failure.
● For pushing to get on with the mission and accepting more and more risk to stay on schedule. For accepting near misses as the norm.
● For inbred groupthink that squelched dissenting opinion.
● For a safety program that was skimmed over and silent when it should have spoken up.
“We were too gung-ho about the schedule,” admitted NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe (who left NASA and became Chancellor of Louisiana State University in February, 2005).
Nothing new there. NASA had been gung-ho since day one, when it was hatched in that emergency meeting in 1958, egged on by Khrushchev, urged on by Kennedy.
Too ambitious? Too arrogant? Too accepting of risks? No surprises there, either. From the beginning, managers were told that nothing less than the fate of the free world depended on their mission. Engineers and scientists had to close the technology gap, and fast. Brilliant technicians and charismatic risk-takers were recruited, and lauded in the press. Walter Cronkite became an admiring astro-buff. Ticker-tape showered down on the parading dare-devils
Mixed messages
Goals, deadlines and marching orders have changed over the decades, but the pressure on NASA’s culture has been constant. At a Congressional hearing in the summer of 2002, NASA officials were told by lawmakers (who control their funding) that “it is critical to be bold and innovative.” You are the “intellectual pioneers” of the country. It is essential to remain “the jewel of the federal government.”
But by the way, we can’t tolerate your delays and cost over-runs.
And you are getting smaller and smaller, older and older, with no sign of rejuvenation, said one congresswoman. What are you going to do to avoid becoming a museum artifact?
Think about it. What happens to safety in private industry when managers are scolded for delays, cost over-runs, and threatened with extinction — shuttering the plant or maybe moving it to Mexico?
What happens when the message is mixed? Be bold, but be safe. Do it faster, cheaper, better, and oh yes, safer. Be the best and brightest, but be open to others’ advice. Honor your tradition, but don’t be held hostage by it.
As you see, NASA managers weren’t the only ones sending mixed signals. And for that reason, NASA alone can’t fix its safety culture.
Outside influences
Sure, numerous steps can be taken from within. Bring in new managers. Clean house. Eliminate communication barriers. Set new policies. Train and retrain on safety procedures. Send out more safety memos, like the one administrator O’Keefe dispatched in April, 2002, when he told employees “it is a good time to recommit ourselves” to “our core value to safety.” Look in the mirror, as O’Keefe said he would. Admit to blind spots and concede “We are the cause,” as O’Keefe did. Set up independent safety boards. Hire quality assurance gurus. (O’Keefe was replaced as NASA administrator by Michael Griffin in April, 2005.)
But more steps need to be taken. Taken by the outside forces that give NASA’s culture its cues, its goals, its budget, its rewards. Congress, the White House, the media and public opinion all have influential roles in any reform move.
The same holds true in the private sector. Want to mend a broken safety culture? It’s not just a job for line employees, supervisors, and execs. Sure they have a role. But you can’t ignore the influence of shareholders, customers, regulators, board directors, activists, agitators, image-makers and other outsiders in shaping cultural values and perceptions. If the culture has become a self-protective cocoon, as NASA’s has been described, ask yourself: What are they afraid of?
The Blackburg Tragedy
What do you say to the survivors?
Dr. E. Scott Geller, a columnist for ISHN since 1990 and a psychology professor at Virginia Tech, was driving from his home to the campus this past Monday morning (April 16, 2007) for a scheduled 11:15 am class when his cell phone rang.
Turn around and go home, he was told. There's been a shooting rampage, an unknown number of students and teachers are injured or dead, the campus is locked down and you can't get in.
A day later, Dr. Geller was in the football stadium attending a campus memorial service with the President of the United States and thousands of others for the 32 students and professors massacred.
"Everything has stopped," he said. "Classes are cancelled for the week. What a tragedy. The worst in history."
No accident
What happened in Blacksburg, Va., Monday morning was no accident. But the effect on emotions was similar to a workplace fatality. The jolt is sudden, unexpected, shocking; the incident senseless, seemingly random and a horror.
And what the campus community is now experiencing in the aftermath mirrors a workplace after a fatality.
Activity comes to a halt. There is a lockdown or stand-down. Investigations begin. Surveillance tapes are reviewed, witnesses interviewed, timelines plotted, communications and personnel records reviewed. The cause or causes will become known later — if ever.
It happened at the Sago Mine in West Va. The BP refinery at Texas City, Texas. After the explosions of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles.
It happened at more than 5,000 work sites in America in 2005. The number of fatal job-related incidents reported by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics totaled 5,702.
That's more than 100 on-the-job fatalities every week.
As the leadership at Virginia Tech is struggling with this week, what do employers say to victims' families back home? To friends, coworkers, witnesses, survivors? To investigators? To reporters?
How did this happen?
Thousands of workplaces grapple with this question, and the pain and suffering surrounding it, every year.
"It's something I never want to go through again," said a Ford Motor Company executive after a boiler exploded at Ford's River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1999, killing six employees and injuring two dozen more.
Of course he doesn't. That's why we need defenses. Dr. Geller would call it a perceptual bias: It can't happen here. Not at our workplace. Not to us.
Which leads to one of the most famous (infamous) sayings in safety: It won't happen to me. Accidents happen to the other guy.
BLS statistics largely support this common perception of risk: The rate at which fatal work incidents occurred in 2005 was four deaths per 100,000 workers. Odds are, you're right, it will happen to someone else, somewhere else.
Which can give a safety manager fits. He or she battle the long odds of lightning ever striking their work site in safety training classes with employees, in safety meetings with supervisors, in budget reviews with execs. It's too easy to calculate the odds and doze off in another hazcom training class, or turn down a safety initiative budget request.
Just one phone call
But all it takes is a call like Dr. Geller received driving to work, and nothing is ever quite the same again.
"It doesn't hit you until it gets personal," said Dr. Geller. "It's just numbers of people at first. But my secretary knew one of the teachers who was killed, knew her family, her two small children. When I saw how upset she was, well, it goes right through you."
"I'm still kind of shaky," a Virginia Tech freshman told an Associated Press reporter on Tuesday. She was heading for her car and home, tears streaming down her face. "I had to pump myself up just to kind of come out of the building. I was going to come out, but it took a little bit of 'OK, it's going to be all right'."
You can't stay locked down in a dorm, at home, or at work. The statistics are in your favor. But employees, supers, execs and organizations should give the need for safety the respect it's due. Despite the odds, more than a hundred workplaces will be jolted this week like Dr. Geller was Monday morning.
Dr. E. Scott Geller, a columnist for ISHN since 1990 and a psychology professor at Virginia Tech, was driving from his home to the campus this past Monday morning (April 16, 2007) for a scheduled 11:15 am class when his cell phone rang.
Turn around and go home, he was told. There's been a shooting rampage, an unknown number of students and teachers are injured or dead, the campus is locked down and you can't get in.
A day later, Dr. Geller was in the football stadium attending a campus memorial service with the President of the United States and thousands of others for the 32 students and professors massacred.
"Everything has stopped," he said. "Classes are cancelled for the week. What a tragedy. The worst in history."
No accident
What happened in Blacksburg, Va., Monday morning was no accident. But the effect on emotions was similar to a workplace fatality. The jolt is sudden, unexpected, shocking; the incident senseless, seemingly random and a horror.
And what the campus community is now experiencing in the aftermath mirrors a workplace after a fatality.
Activity comes to a halt. There is a lockdown or stand-down. Investigations begin. Surveillance tapes are reviewed, witnesses interviewed, timelines plotted, communications and personnel records reviewed. The cause or causes will become known later — if ever.
It happened at the Sago Mine in West Va. The BP refinery at Texas City, Texas. After the explosions of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles.
It happened at more than 5,000 work sites in America in 2005. The number of fatal job-related incidents reported by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics totaled 5,702.
That's more than 100 on-the-job fatalities every week.
As the leadership at Virginia Tech is struggling with this week, what do employers say to victims' families back home? To friends, coworkers, witnesses, survivors? To investigators? To reporters?
How did this happen?
Thousands of workplaces grapple with this question, and the pain and suffering surrounding it, every year.
"It's something I never want to go through again," said a Ford Motor Company executive after a boiler exploded at Ford's River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1999, killing six employees and injuring two dozen more.
Of course he doesn't. That's why we need defenses. Dr. Geller would call it a perceptual bias: It can't happen here. Not at our workplace. Not to us.
Which leads to one of the most famous (infamous) sayings in safety: It won't happen to me. Accidents happen to the other guy.
BLS statistics largely support this common perception of risk: The rate at which fatal work incidents occurred in 2005 was four deaths per 100,000 workers. Odds are, you're right, it will happen to someone else, somewhere else.
Which can give a safety manager fits. He or she battle the long odds of lightning ever striking their work site in safety training classes with employees, in safety meetings with supervisors, in budget reviews with execs. It's too easy to calculate the odds and doze off in another hazcom training class, or turn down a safety initiative budget request.
Just one phone call
But all it takes is a call like Dr. Geller received driving to work, and nothing is ever quite the same again.
"It doesn't hit you until it gets personal," said Dr. Geller. "It's just numbers of people at first. But my secretary knew one of the teachers who was killed, knew her family, her two small children. When I saw how upset she was, well, it goes right through you."
"I'm still kind of shaky," a Virginia Tech freshman told an Associated Press reporter on Tuesday. She was heading for her car and home, tears streaming down her face. "I had to pump myself up just to kind of come out of the building. I was going to come out, but it took a little bit of 'OK, it's going to be all right'."
You can't stay locked down in a dorm, at home, or at work. The statistics are in your favor. But employees, supers, execs and organizations should give the need for safety the respect it's due. Despite the odds, more than a hundred workplaces will be jolted this week like Dr. Geller was Monday morning.
In Our Post-9/11 World
Protection and risk assessment become crucial
Safety and health experts worry about declining enrollment in university safety and health programs. One of 9/11's many lessons: Someone's got to take on the risks of the world — and the workplace.
Intuitively we seem to know this world can be a scary place. Maybe that’s why we have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. Then as we adjust to our surroundings early on, we see threats everywhere: monsters in the closet, in our dreams, under the bed.
As we grow older, though, we’re trained to forget these fears. Don’t be a baby, say parents, teachers, coaches and friends. Come on, you can do it, jump off that diving board. A mom tries to convince her frozen ten-year-old to roll down a five-foot-high “quarter-pipe” at a skate park. Look, Timmy’s doing it and he’s only seven. A frustrated dad pulls his boy aside after they drive home from a soccer game, pushes him in the chest a couple of times to “toughen him up”, and tells him he’s got to be more aggressive out there.
We get other messages, of course: Anything you can do I can do better. You got to take some risks to get ahead. We learn to compete and not to complain, not too much anyway. Suck it up. So we keep our fears to ourselves and build a network of defenses to keep the outside world at bay. We learn to rationalize. Make excuses. Look the other way. Nah, it can’t happen to me. Stuff like that only happens in movies.
Then one day real life becomes something out of a movie. Teens take over a school and shoot up students and teachers. Or jumbo jets plow into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. It’s shocking. Horrifying. Yet somehow not completely unexpected. Two years ago my kids didn’t want to go to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the millennium because it was reported to be a terrorist target. When police cleared us out of Union Station on New Year’s Eve for a private party, the kids at first swore a terrorist attack was underway. Told you so, dad.
Self-defense
We’ve got all sorts of coping mechanisms to contain our fears, from Paxil to the pub around the corner. Perhaps the most common and most powerful is pure denial. Denial is strong and enduring. For hundreds of years, for instance, we believed that two oceans protect us in this country from the rest of the world’s problems. Until September 11th.
Safety pros deal with the power of denial everyday. No one wants to think about getting hurt on the job, so basically they don’t. It gets back to our training, our defenses, and the fact that you’ve got to get out of bed in the morning and make a buck. So we go through our days denying and even risking the dangers that can happen. It struck me in the days after September 11th how fortunate we are to have those who deal with the darkness we’d rather deny. Everyone from the guy who plots the evacuation routes in your building to agents monitoring terrorist movements around the globe. It’s an impressive list: police, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, military personnel, and yes, workplace safety and health personnel. Most of us don’t have a clue how these people go about their work.
But I’m grateful they’re on the job. Too bad we don’t grasp how much we need these kinds of courageous souls until something goes wrong and our defenses are pierced. That’s denial for you. I wouldn’t be moved to acknowledge them now if not for September 11th. But after all we’ve seen since, how can we not?
A calling
A few summers ago I went to dinner one night in Michigan with a longtime safety pro, a down to earth man proud of his accomplishments. He had a large family, with a half-dozen or so children, and I asked why none of them had followed him into safety. He said they probably saw how his job was around-the-clock. Heard late night phone calls to families of victims, to a boss, a reporter, an inspector. “You’ve got to have a passion for this,” he told me. “It’s like a calling.”
We ran a news story several issues ago about how fewer students these days are hearing the call to pursue careers in occupational safety and health. Ah, it’s not sexy, some safety vets told us. You can make better money in tech fields, explained others.
After September 11th, I hope more grade schoolers to college students realize that it can be pretty “cool” to have a job protecting and helping others. You can’t deny it, we depend on them. Tremendously. Always have, always will.
Safety and health experts worry about declining enrollment in university safety and health programs. One of 9/11's many lessons: Someone's got to take on the risks of the world — and the workplace.
Intuitively we seem to know this world can be a scary place. Maybe that’s why we have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. Then as we adjust to our surroundings early on, we see threats everywhere: monsters in the closet, in our dreams, under the bed.
As we grow older, though, we’re trained to forget these fears. Don’t be a baby, say parents, teachers, coaches and friends. Come on, you can do it, jump off that diving board. A mom tries to convince her frozen ten-year-old to roll down a five-foot-high “quarter-pipe” at a skate park. Look, Timmy’s doing it and he’s only seven. A frustrated dad pulls his boy aside after they drive home from a soccer game, pushes him in the chest a couple of times to “toughen him up”, and tells him he’s got to be more aggressive out there.
We get other messages, of course: Anything you can do I can do better. You got to take some risks to get ahead. We learn to compete and not to complain, not too much anyway. Suck it up. So we keep our fears to ourselves and build a network of defenses to keep the outside world at bay. We learn to rationalize. Make excuses. Look the other way. Nah, it can’t happen to me. Stuff like that only happens in movies.
Then one day real life becomes something out of a movie. Teens take over a school and shoot up students and teachers. Or jumbo jets plow into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. It’s shocking. Horrifying. Yet somehow not completely unexpected. Two years ago my kids didn’t want to go to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the millennium because it was reported to be a terrorist target. When police cleared us out of Union Station on New Year’s Eve for a private party, the kids at first swore a terrorist attack was underway. Told you so, dad.
Self-defense
We’ve got all sorts of coping mechanisms to contain our fears, from Paxil to the pub around the corner. Perhaps the most common and most powerful is pure denial. Denial is strong and enduring. For hundreds of years, for instance, we believed that two oceans protect us in this country from the rest of the world’s problems. Until September 11th.
Safety pros deal with the power of denial everyday. No one wants to think about getting hurt on the job, so basically they don’t. It gets back to our training, our defenses, and the fact that you’ve got to get out of bed in the morning and make a buck. So we go through our days denying and even risking the dangers that can happen. It struck me in the days after September 11th how fortunate we are to have those who deal with the darkness we’d rather deny. Everyone from the guy who plots the evacuation routes in your building to agents monitoring terrorist movements around the globe. It’s an impressive list: police, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, military personnel, and yes, workplace safety and health personnel. Most of us don’t have a clue how these people go about their work.
But I’m grateful they’re on the job. Too bad we don’t grasp how much we need these kinds of courageous souls until something goes wrong and our defenses are pierced. That’s denial for you. I wouldn’t be moved to acknowledge them now if not for September 11th. But after all we’ve seen since, how can we not?
A calling
A few summers ago I went to dinner one night in Michigan with a longtime safety pro, a down to earth man proud of his accomplishments. He had a large family, with a half-dozen or so children, and I asked why none of them had followed him into safety. He said they probably saw how his job was around-the-clock. Heard late night phone calls to families of victims, to a boss, a reporter, an inspector. “You’ve got to have a passion for this,” he told me. “It’s like a calling.”
We ran a news story several issues ago about how fewer students these days are hearing the call to pursue careers in occupational safety and health. Ah, it’s not sexy, some safety vets told us. You can make better money in tech fields, explained others.
After September 11th, I hope more grade schoolers to college students realize that it can be pretty “cool” to have a job protecting and helping others. You can’t deny it, we depend on them. Tremendously. Always have, always will.
The Columbia Shuttle Calamity
Seven stages of human reaction to disaster
In the hours and days after the stunning on-the-job deaths of the seven Columbia astronauts, a cycle of emotions, rhetoric and searching began to be played out. Here we examine seven stages of human reaction to disaster. Many of you can personally relate.
Where were you last Saturday morning (February 1, 2003) when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in flames against a cloudless sky 40 miles over Texas?
A friend in Coppell, Texas, near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, heard a loud bang and thought a bird had smashed a back porch window, or a garden tool had crashed on his wife’s car in the garage.
He had no idea a space shuttle was screaming overhead at 12,500 m.p.h., 16 minutes from a scheduled landing in Florida.
He wasn’t alone. Typically, most Americans reacted to the Columbia catastrophe saying, “I didn’t even know they were up there.”
Or as President Bush said, “It has become easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket.”
These national calamities carry special resonance with safety and health professionals, who work every day to make sure dangers are not overlooked and workers return home safe each night. “The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home,” the President said.
Seven stages of reaction
1. Shock
Disbelief is the first reaction. The risky becomes the routine, and we forget to pay attention. After 113 shuttle flights, we overlook that these missions amount to “riding a stick of dynamite into space” as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist described to a reporter.
Who wants to think of the worst? Astronauts are no different than miners, ironworkers, firefighters, or maintenance workers.
Last month, a 29-year-old overnight maintenance worker was crushed to death by a machine that resets bowling pins at a Wichita, Kansas, bowling alley. Imagine the shock when employees arriving at work about 8 a.m. found the man still pinned inside the machine.
What are the odds of that happening?
The 16-day Columbia mission had gone off without a hitch. A Philadelphia newspaper’s Saturday morning edition devoted all of two sentences to its expected blue sky landing on page four. After wrapping up more than two weeks of scientific research in orbit, Columbia aimed for homecoming under heavy security at Cape Canaveral, due to an Israeli astronaut on board, the paper reported.
A far different story, of course, appeared beneath the inch-and-a-half “COLUMBIA LOST” banner headline a day later.
2. Scrutiny
Next come the investigations. “We’re trying to understand what this problem is,” said the deputy associate administrator for the space shuttle program. “We’re going to find the problem. We’re going to fix it,” said the manager of the program.
But he admitted, “It’s a mystery to us, and we seem to have conflicting information.”
Cascading failures, complex events, conflicting reports, missing evidence, assumptions, false findings —safety investigators of all stripes know the struggle.
They also know someone is always looking over their shoulder — reporters, regulators, lawmakers. Outsiders. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the committee that oversees NASA, said the first hearing would convene next week.
3. Blame
A culprit, a root cause, must be found to settle the matter and get the operation back on track. Always, there are timetables to meet; budgets and trust at stake; political and public relations pressures. And in the case of the shuttle program, three astronauts in the orbiting International Space Station scheduled to run out of supplies this summer. (If the shuttles remain grounded, a Russian escape vehicle attached to the station, or a Russian shuttle sent from Earth, could bring the crew back).
NASA declares that there will be no rush to judgment, no shortcuts, no scapegoating. But no one wants a dragged-out investigation, either, like the one 17 years ago following the Challenger explosion that kept the shuttle fleet grounded for almost three years.
NASA takes just about all questions head on, like a crisis manager would advise. There are two press briefings a day early on. The major networks are allowed to set up inside the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers. Interviews are granted with relatives of astronauts.
NASA’s space shuttle program manager speaks with candor. “I’m the accountable individual,” he tells reporters.
“We want to know if we made any erroneous assumptions. We want to know if we made any mistakes.”
Hurry up and find out what happened, but you better be thorough…
4. Told you so
It never takes long for echoes of dusty reports and forgotten advisory committees to emerge.
Second-guessing comes quickly. A San Diego professor holds a press conference after Columbia is lost to assert that he had long ago raised alarms about the fragility of the 20,000 heat-resistant ceramic tiles hand laid on the shuttle’s nose and underside.
Three days after Columbia’s fiery end, The New York Times reported: “As early as 1997, a senior NASA engineer warned that hardened foam popping off the external fuel tank on the Columbia shuttle had caused significant damage to the ceramic tiles.” NASA, though, decided the problem did not threaten the survival of the spacecraft.
Old red flags are raised again: Six outside consultants on a safety panel were fired in March, 2001, the press reports, after warning that the shuttle program needed more money and newer equipment or risk rising safety dangers.
“I have never been as concerned for space shuttle safety as I am right now,” the safety panel’s chairman told Congress in April, 2002.
5. Guilt & doubt
“Somebody should have done more,” said a former quality assurance chief at the Kennedy Space Center. Alarms should have sounded across the agency, around the world, he said.
But… but… the best and brightest engineers, quality, safety, tile and tank experts and mission managers had agreed: a safe landing was not compromised by the damage to tiles cause by liftoff debris. Officials a few days ago announced the investigation was going in another direction.
After calmly explaining the technical details of the investigation to reporters, the shuttle program manager described how he coped with his personal anguish: “I can stay pretty well focused on what I need to do, as long as I’m at work. The hardest thing that I’ve had to do over the past two days was drive home in my car Saturday afternoon alone with my own thoughts.”
“You can only imagine how it felt when someone comes up to you to tell you that you’ve lost the vehicle and the crew,” he told reporters, his eyes reddening. “It’s not something I would want you to go through.”
6. Making amends
Said a Texas Congressman: “Given that the basic technology is 30 years old, why not build a new fleet? “
That’s after Congress presided over a 40 percent decline in NASA’s budget in the last decade. After reports of “long-delayed safety improvements to the space shuttle” and “safety losing out in the battle for scarce NASA funds.”
The title of NASA’s 2004 budget proposal from the President underscored the White House’s thinking before Columbia went down: “Setting Priorities and Bringing Costs Under Control.” Did spending constraints put astronauts at risk? “That should be part of the investigation,” said Senator McCain.
A newspaper headline days after the accident: “Several Chief Lawmakers Vow a Rapid Push for Money to Improve the Shuttle’s Safety”.
7. Moving on
“The investigation we have just launched will find the cause, we’ll fix it, and we’ll move on,” said NASA’s space flight chief.
That’s always the objective: learned the lessons and get back to business.
In 1986, NASA vowed to put safety first, ahead of budget constraints and political pressures, after the Challenger space shuttle exploded on live TV.
But priorities shift. Cost pressures mount and public support fades. NASA tried to wring longer life out of old equipment, just like in industry. Columbia was considered for retirement in 2001. Improvements to reduce risk were deferred or eliminated, according to reports. Retrofitting Columbia with an emergency escaped system was deemed too costly. The number of quality assurance inspectors for each shuttle was reduced.
And few people know. A Philadelphia teenage could speak for many when she told a reporter: “The space program isn’t anything I can relate to, it’s so far out of my league. Space travel happens every day. You don’t die unless you’re an astronaut.”
It won’t happen to me. I can’t relate. Safety pros know the tune. And then the cycle repeats.
In the hours and days after the stunning on-the-job deaths of the seven Columbia astronauts, a cycle of emotions, rhetoric and searching began to be played out. Here we examine seven stages of human reaction to disaster. Many of you can personally relate.
Where were you last Saturday morning (February 1, 2003) when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in flames against a cloudless sky 40 miles over Texas?
A friend in Coppell, Texas, near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, heard a loud bang and thought a bird had smashed a back porch window, or a garden tool had crashed on his wife’s car in the garage.
He had no idea a space shuttle was screaming overhead at 12,500 m.p.h., 16 minutes from a scheduled landing in Florida.
He wasn’t alone. Typically, most Americans reacted to the Columbia catastrophe saying, “I didn’t even know they were up there.”
Or as President Bush said, “It has become easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket.”
These national calamities carry special resonance with safety and health professionals, who work every day to make sure dangers are not overlooked and workers return home safe each night. “The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home,” the President said.
Seven stages of reaction
1. Shock
Disbelief is the first reaction. The risky becomes the routine, and we forget to pay attention. After 113 shuttle flights, we overlook that these missions amount to “riding a stick of dynamite into space” as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist described to a reporter.
Who wants to think of the worst? Astronauts are no different than miners, ironworkers, firefighters, or maintenance workers.
Last month, a 29-year-old overnight maintenance worker was crushed to death by a machine that resets bowling pins at a Wichita, Kansas, bowling alley. Imagine the shock when employees arriving at work about 8 a.m. found the man still pinned inside the machine.
What are the odds of that happening?
The 16-day Columbia mission had gone off without a hitch. A Philadelphia newspaper’s Saturday morning edition devoted all of two sentences to its expected blue sky landing on page four. After wrapping up more than two weeks of scientific research in orbit, Columbia aimed for homecoming under heavy security at Cape Canaveral, due to an Israeli astronaut on board, the paper reported.
A far different story, of course, appeared beneath the inch-and-a-half “COLUMBIA LOST” banner headline a day later.
2. Scrutiny
Next come the investigations. “We’re trying to understand what this problem is,” said the deputy associate administrator for the space shuttle program. “We’re going to find the problem. We’re going to fix it,” said the manager of the program.
But he admitted, “It’s a mystery to us, and we seem to have conflicting information.”
Cascading failures, complex events, conflicting reports, missing evidence, assumptions, false findings —safety investigators of all stripes know the struggle.
They also know someone is always looking over their shoulder — reporters, regulators, lawmakers. Outsiders. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the committee that oversees NASA, said the first hearing would convene next week.
3. Blame
A culprit, a root cause, must be found to settle the matter and get the operation back on track. Always, there are timetables to meet; budgets and trust at stake; political and public relations pressures. And in the case of the shuttle program, three astronauts in the orbiting International Space Station scheduled to run out of supplies this summer. (If the shuttles remain grounded, a Russian escape vehicle attached to the station, or a Russian shuttle sent from Earth, could bring the crew back).
NASA declares that there will be no rush to judgment, no shortcuts, no scapegoating. But no one wants a dragged-out investigation, either, like the one 17 years ago following the Challenger explosion that kept the shuttle fleet grounded for almost three years.
NASA takes just about all questions head on, like a crisis manager would advise. There are two press briefings a day early on. The major networks are allowed to set up inside the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers. Interviews are granted with relatives of astronauts.
NASA’s space shuttle program manager speaks with candor. “I’m the accountable individual,” he tells reporters.
“We want to know if we made any erroneous assumptions. We want to know if we made any mistakes.”
Hurry up and find out what happened, but you better be thorough…
4. Told you so
It never takes long for echoes of dusty reports and forgotten advisory committees to emerge.
Second-guessing comes quickly. A San Diego professor holds a press conference after Columbia is lost to assert that he had long ago raised alarms about the fragility of the 20,000 heat-resistant ceramic tiles hand laid on the shuttle’s nose and underside.
Three days after Columbia’s fiery end, The New York Times reported: “As early as 1997, a senior NASA engineer warned that hardened foam popping off the external fuel tank on the Columbia shuttle had caused significant damage to the ceramic tiles.” NASA, though, decided the problem did not threaten the survival of the spacecraft.
Old red flags are raised again: Six outside consultants on a safety panel were fired in March, 2001, the press reports, after warning that the shuttle program needed more money and newer equipment or risk rising safety dangers.
“I have never been as concerned for space shuttle safety as I am right now,” the safety panel’s chairman told Congress in April, 2002.
5. Guilt & doubt
“Somebody should have done more,” said a former quality assurance chief at the Kennedy Space Center. Alarms should have sounded across the agency, around the world, he said.
But… but… the best and brightest engineers, quality, safety, tile and tank experts and mission managers had agreed: a safe landing was not compromised by the damage to tiles cause by liftoff debris. Officials a few days ago announced the investigation was going in another direction.
After calmly explaining the technical details of the investigation to reporters, the shuttle program manager described how he coped with his personal anguish: “I can stay pretty well focused on what I need to do, as long as I’m at work. The hardest thing that I’ve had to do over the past two days was drive home in my car Saturday afternoon alone with my own thoughts.”
“You can only imagine how it felt when someone comes up to you to tell you that you’ve lost the vehicle and the crew,” he told reporters, his eyes reddening. “It’s not something I would want you to go through.”
6. Making amends
Said a Texas Congressman: “Given that the basic technology is 30 years old, why not build a new fleet? “
That’s after Congress presided over a 40 percent decline in NASA’s budget in the last decade. After reports of “long-delayed safety improvements to the space shuttle” and “safety losing out in the battle for scarce NASA funds.”
The title of NASA’s 2004 budget proposal from the President underscored the White House’s thinking before Columbia went down: “Setting Priorities and Bringing Costs Under Control.” Did spending constraints put astronauts at risk? “That should be part of the investigation,” said Senator McCain.
A newspaper headline days after the accident: “Several Chief Lawmakers Vow a Rapid Push for Money to Improve the Shuttle’s Safety”.
7. Moving on
“The investigation we have just launched will find the cause, we’ll fix it, and we’ll move on,” said NASA’s space flight chief.
That’s always the objective: learned the lessons and get back to business.
In 1986, NASA vowed to put safety first, ahead of budget constraints and political pressures, after the Challenger space shuttle exploded on live TV.
But priorities shift. Cost pressures mount and public support fades. NASA tried to wring longer life out of old equipment, just like in industry. Columbia was considered for retirement in 2001. Improvements to reduce risk were deferred or eliminated, according to reports. Retrofitting Columbia with an emergency escaped system was deemed too costly. The number of quality assurance inspectors for each shuttle was reduced.
And few people know. A Philadelphia teenage could speak for many when she told a reporter: “The space program isn’t anything I can relate to, it’s so far out of my league. Space travel happens every day. You don’t die unless you’re an astronaut.”
It won’t happen to me. I can’t relate. Safety pros know the tune. And then the cycle repeats.
Accidental Anguish
Sago Mine survivors struggle with post-traumatic stress
Every day, 9,000 workers in the U.S. are injured on the job seriously enough to be considered at least temporarily disabled, according to NIOSH estimates. Sixteen workers are fatally injured each day.
But the toll goes beyond these numbers.
What about the coworkers who witnessed or survived these incidences — falls, amputations, crashes, cave-ins and electrocutions, for instance?
What about the rescue or recovery workers?
Are you prepared to handle cases of post-traumatic stress in your workplace?
The horror continues
On September 23, 2006, fire boss John Boni, 63, a survivor of the Sago Mine explosion that killed 12 miners earlier this year, committed suicide. Mr. Boni, who retired after the January 2nd blast, had detected low levels of methane in the mine five days before the explosion and reported it to a supervisor. But nothing came of it.
On August 29, Bill Chisolm, 47, an above-ground dispatcher at the mine who was on duty the morning of the explosion, committed suicide.
Both men shot themselves, police told The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette.
"…the horror of the disaster continues to be a source of stress and pain today," relatives of the men who died at Sago said in a prepared statement. "There must have been enormous stress on Mr. Boni and Mr. Chisolm."
Almost 1,000 people attended Mr. Boni's visitation. But most of the 16 miners working in another section under the mountain at the time of explosion, who survived by climbing through dust and debris to the surface, decided not to go, according to an October 8th article in
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"I guess I should have gone," a survivor told the paper.
"Avoidance" is one of three categories of symptoms signaling post-traumatic stress, according to the web site MedicineNet.com.
Avoidance refers to a person's attempts to avoid trauma-related thoughts or feelings and activities or situations that might trigger painful memories.
Days after the Sago blast, grief counselors arrived on the scene, prepared to hold weekly meetings with miners for as long as necessary. But only three people showed up, all juveniles, and the sessions were cancelled, according to the Post-Gazette.
Too many memories
Reliving the shock — "re-experiencing" — is the second major symptom of post-traumatic stress. "I think about it (the explosion) every time I'm in there," one of the surviving miners said in the article. More than ten months after the disaster, he often spends hours tossing in bed before finding sleep.
"Too many memories," another survivor told the Associated Press. "It brings tears to your eyes. Too many good men."
At least two of the surviving miners have left Sago to work in another mine.
"Your nerves stay shot," one of the miners who moved on told the Post-Gazette. "Every single noise, you jump. You're on edge all of the time."
This is "increased arousal" — the third category of symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress. Being on edge or being easily startled are forms of arousal. Nightmares and insomnia can also signal an aroused, agitated nervous system.
Watching the Weather Channel late at night sometimes helps relax the miner who often finds sleep elusive. "It's got that music to it," he said.
The last straw
Post-traumatic stress (PTS) doesn't make someone commit suicide "out of the blue," a psychologist told the Post-Gazette. But it can be the last straw, he said.
Sleeplessness, spontaneous crying, anxiety and fear — all occurrences of PTS — don't always show up immediately after the fact. All the more reason to be on alert if a shocking accident occurs in your workplace.
If such an incident does happen, consider the workers who might be affected:
• Those who were personally threatened with death or serious injury due to the accident.
• Workers who learned about the death, near death or serious injury of a relative or close friend.
• Those who witnessed the incident.
It's estimated that 5.2 million Americans ages 18-54 are diagnosed with PTS, according to the web site HealthyPlace.com. One study estimated that eight percent of Manhattan residents living below 110th Street (approximately 67,000 people) have probable PTS related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
What are the antidotes?
"You just can't say, 'Counseling is available'," Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia told the Associated Press after privately meeting with people touched by the Sago tragedy earlier this month.
Many people, such as miners, construction workers, firefighters, police and others who pride themselves on toughness and steady nerves, are reluctant to seek out professional help.
That's a reason the relatives of some of the men who died at Sago publicly urged surviving miners to seek help. "There is no shame in acknowledging that the horror of the disaster continues to be a source of stress and pain today," they said in their statement.
That kind of message should be relayed by safety managers in the wake of a wrenching accident. Communicate, but don't counsel. Leave that to the experts.
The American Red Cross is now working with mental health professionals trained in trauma treatment. For information or referral, contact your local American Red Cross chapter, or the American Psychological Association at (800) 374-2721; (202) 336-5500.
After a traumatic accident, keep your eyes and ears open. Not just in the immediate days following, but months later as well. "You ain't going to live forever," one of the surviving miners told the Post-Gazette this month. "I guess we're all just walking dead men."
Believing that the future will be short is a way to block out the pain of post-traumatic stress — avoidance, as the psychologists say.
Every day, 9,000 workers in the U.S. are injured on the job seriously enough to be considered at least temporarily disabled, according to NIOSH estimates. Sixteen workers are fatally injured each day.
But the toll goes beyond these numbers.
What about the coworkers who witnessed or survived these incidences — falls, amputations, crashes, cave-ins and electrocutions, for instance?
What about the rescue or recovery workers?
Are you prepared to handle cases of post-traumatic stress in your workplace?
The horror continues
On September 23, 2006, fire boss John Boni, 63, a survivor of the Sago Mine explosion that killed 12 miners earlier this year, committed suicide. Mr. Boni, who retired after the January 2nd blast, had detected low levels of methane in the mine five days before the explosion and reported it to a supervisor. But nothing came of it.
On August 29, Bill Chisolm, 47, an above-ground dispatcher at the mine who was on duty the morning of the explosion, committed suicide.
Both men shot themselves, police told The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette.
"…the horror of the disaster continues to be a source of stress and pain today," relatives of the men who died at Sago said in a prepared statement. "There must have been enormous stress on Mr. Boni and Mr. Chisolm."
Almost 1,000 people attended Mr. Boni's visitation. But most of the 16 miners working in another section under the mountain at the time of explosion, who survived by climbing through dust and debris to the surface, decided not to go, according to an October 8th article in
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"I guess I should have gone," a survivor told the paper.
"Avoidance" is one of three categories of symptoms signaling post-traumatic stress, according to the web site MedicineNet.com.
Avoidance refers to a person's attempts to avoid trauma-related thoughts or feelings and activities or situations that might trigger painful memories.
Days after the Sago blast, grief counselors arrived on the scene, prepared to hold weekly meetings with miners for as long as necessary. But only three people showed up, all juveniles, and the sessions were cancelled, according to the Post-Gazette.
Too many memories
Reliving the shock — "re-experiencing" — is the second major symptom of post-traumatic stress. "I think about it (the explosion) every time I'm in there," one of the surviving miners said in the article. More than ten months after the disaster, he often spends hours tossing in bed before finding sleep.
"Too many memories," another survivor told the Associated Press. "It brings tears to your eyes. Too many good men."
At least two of the surviving miners have left Sago to work in another mine.
"Your nerves stay shot," one of the miners who moved on told the Post-Gazette. "Every single noise, you jump. You're on edge all of the time."
This is "increased arousal" — the third category of symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress. Being on edge or being easily startled are forms of arousal. Nightmares and insomnia can also signal an aroused, agitated nervous system.
Watching the Weather Channel late at night sometimes helps relax the miner who often finds sleep elusive. "It's got that music to it," he said.
The last straw
Post-traumatic stress (PTS) doesn't make someone commit suicide "out of the blue," a psychologist told the Post-Gazette. But it can be the last straw, he said.
Sleeplessness, spontaneous crying, anxiety and fear — all occurrences of PTS — don't always show up immediately after the fact. All the more reason to be on alert if a shocking accident occurs in your workplace.
If such an incident does happen, consider the workers who might be affected:
• Those who were personally threatened with death or serious injury due to the accident.
• Workers who learned about the death, near death or serious injury of a relative or close friend.
• Those who witnessed the incident.
It's estimated that 5.2 million Americans ages 18-54 are diagnosed with PTS, according to the web site HealthyPlace.com. One study estimated that eight percent of Manhattan residents living below 110th Street (approximately 67,000 people) have probable PTS related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
What are the antidotes?
"You just can't say, 'Counseling is available'," Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia told the Associated Press after privately meeting with people touched by the Sago tragedy earlier this month.
Many people, such as miners, construction workers, firefighters, police and others who pride themselves on toughness and steady nerves, are reluctant to seek out professional help.
That's a reason the relatives of some of the men who died at Sago publicly urged surviving miners to seek help. "There is no shame in acknowledging that the horror of the disaster continues to be a source of stress and pain today," they said in their statement.
That kind of message should be relayed by safety managers in the wake of a wrenching accident. Communicate, but don't counsel. Leave that to the experts.
The American Red Cross is now working with mental health professionals trained in trauma treatment. For information or referral, contact your local American Red Cross chapter, or the American Psychological Association at (800) 374-2721; (202) 336-5500.
After a traumatic accident, keep your eyes and ears open. Not just in the immediate days following, but months later as well. "You ain't going to live forever," one of the surviving miners told the Post-Gazette this month. "I guess we're all just walking dead men."
Believing that the future will be short is a way to block out the pain of post-traumatic stress — avoidance, as the psychologists say.
Hospitals Confront At-Risk Behavior
But “walls of silence” must come down
It’s the stuff legends are made of: a brilliant, demanding surgeon with patients coming to him from around the world for his extraordinary skill loses his patience in the operating room — throwing a pair of scissors that won’t cut at a nurse, narrowly missing her. He then calls another nurse “lame-brain” and “an idiot” for not being better prepared, and vents his frustration at the whole OR team.
Increasingly, research suggests that swearing, yelling, and throwing objects by physicians are putting patients at risk by increasing the likelihood of medical errors, according to an article in The Boston Globe.
The Joint Commission, the national organization that accredits healthcare systems, issued a safety alert to hospitals in July, saying outbursts threaten patient safety because they prevent caregivers from working as a team.
And setting a precedent, the Joint Commission is requiring all hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities to adopt "zero-tolerance" policies by January 1, 2009, including codes of conduct, ways to encourage staff to report bad behavior, and a process for helping and, if necessary, disciplining offenders, according to The Globe.
Let’s put this in a workplace context.
Manager, supervisor and especially line employee behaviors have been under the microscope at many worksites for years now, thanks to the popularity of behavior-based safety programs.
But what happens — really — when one of your employees at your worksite is observed performing an at-risk behavior. OK, he or she is probably not throwing scissors at someone. Maybe they’re wearing their goggles or respirator around their neck when they should be firmly in place. Perhaps lockout-tagout procedures are skipped. Or a manager or supervisor is yelling, threatening, bullying and cursing an employee or group of employees.
What are the odds at your workplace someone will step forward and confront the individual and his or her at-risk behavior on the spot?
Or will the observation of dangerous, out of line behavior be formally reported?
Does your workplace have an official “zero tolerance” policy, like hospitals are being forced to adopt, which includes conduct codes, reporting systems, and discipline if necessary?
Industry still wrestles with reporting at-risk behaviors
Industry, which is 10-15 years ahead of healthcare in observing and reporting on at-risk behaviors, still wrestles with the challenge of standing up and speaking up to at-risk behaviors.
This includes rude, boorish and bullying verbal behavior, many times coming from supervisors and managers. Drinking or abusing drugs on the job. Flashes of violent outbursts and threats that could be preludes to fatal rampages. Risky horseplay and short-cuts. Cutting compliance corners. Sleeping through training classes. Poor lifting techniques, straying into the line of fire, even something as simple as constantly running up and down stairs or ignoring trash on the floor.
Major or minor, how often in any of these cases does someone speak up or file a report?
Whether they do or not brings us back to one of the most popular safety and health topics of the day — culture. For instance, most hospital cultures have a tradition of tolerating abusive behaviors to placate high-intensity surgeons, according to The Boston Globe article.
Industry has its organization charts, making it tough for a line employee to call out a manager for abusive language. Healthcare has something more intimidating, called the “authority gradient,” which has been ingrained in hospitals seemingly forever.
It’s a very steep gradient, with physicians and surgeons at the top, operating very often literally with near-impunity due to their authority, schooling, skill at saving lives, and ability to make money for the institution. Further down the hierarchy are the nurses, nurses aides, lead technicians, materials technicians, and others on the OR team or in various departments.
Tradition calls for deference to the surgeon, especially during the intensity of the surgical procedure. As for reporting incidents after the fact, hospitals’ long-standing “walls of silence” most often cover-up behavior that led, or could have led to medical errors and patient harm.
And we’re not limited to talking about the operating theatre here. The Joint Commission cites several studies linking bad behavior to medical errors outside the OR. One survey found that some nurses and pharmacists had avoided consulting with a prescribing doctor because they did not want to interact with that particular doctor, according to The Globe’s report.
Does your workplace culture silently adhere to its own authority gradient? Or have you been able to build a culture of trust, encouraged caring, perhaps anonymous observation reporting, and overall open and honest communication between all levels of the organization?
What’s your policy?
Policies to address and rectify at-risk behavior are just emerging in healthcare. Patient safety experts say a key issue is making sure staff members are comfortable reporting colleagues' outbursts without fear of retaliation.
"These incidents happen because the OR environment is so high stress," said Dr. Marc Rubin, chairman of the surgery department at Massachusetts’ North Shore Salem Hospital, in The Globe article. "Surgeons hold patients' lives in their hands, yet they're dependent on equipment and people who are outside their control.”
Most hospitals don't track how many doctors, nurses, and other employees engage in disruptive behavior. Does your workplace track at-risk (and positive) safety-related behaviors?
Administrators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center estimate that four to six percent of doctors and nurses have repeated outbursts, according to The Globe article. Have you found it tends to be the same small group of employees, supers and managers who repeatedly flaunt behaviorial expectations?
Vanderbilt, which has one of the most extensive programs to track and deal with such behavior, began focusing on the problem a decade ago when administrators found that physicians who were sued often were more likely to have abusive outbursts. The medical center now advises 34 healthcare facilities on addressing the problem.
Can you link or document a connection between repeated at-risk behavior and dollar losses? That’s a major challenge in industry, which has the workers’ comp shield protecting the company, not malpractice worries.
Shared stress
But many workplaces and healthcare facilities share one burden: growing financial pressures amid dwindling resources and the threats of downsizing and consolidation that weigh on employees’ minds, elevate stress levels, and can lead to at-risk outbursts or behaviors.
"You're looking at a very stressed out industry," David Yamada, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in employment issues including workplace bullying, said in the article, referring to healthcare. "You have an industry in crisis where people are having to do much more with limited resources. That combination can be a potent one."
But you already knew that, right?
Is zero tolerance the answer?
There’s another challenge industry shares with healthcare: focus more attention on the behaviors that lead to near-misses, injuries or in the case of healthcare, medical errors; encourage your staff to report bad behavior more often; and executives might see reporting numbers escalate and call for harsh measures, like “zero tolerance” codes.
Beware of these pitfalls of a “zero tolerance” policy, cited by safety consultant DJ Borbidge, before introducing one to your culture:
● Often violations are narrowly defined, allowing for no extenuating circumstances.
● Many employees are reluctant to come forward to “rat” on violators either because there is a lack of trust that enforcement will be taken or conversely, they consider the policy extreme and become fearful.
● Sometimes, this emphasis on reporting opens the door for an employee to get back at someone he/she does not like.
● It is nearly impossible for management/supervision to catch all or even most acts of misconduct. Many incidents slip through the cracks.
● The word “intolerance” itself is a strong catalyst for fear. Extensive research strongly indicates that “fear in the workforce” rarely increases productivity, quality or safety.
Take a look at your workplace culture. Are there “walls of silence” that inhibit confronting or reporting at-risk behavior? Is there an authority gradient that goes unchallenged? Can you document the consequences of inaction?
Taking care of your culture
You might want to conduct a perception or climate survey to get some answers from the line troops. Healthcare is ahead of industry in its acceptance and growing use of perception surveys as cultural learning tools. You can find out about trust levels in your organization, fear levels, what employees really think about reporting and communication systems.
And you can learn perhaps how much work you have to do to create a culture that prioritizes addressing at-risk behaviors. That can include policies with teeth, reporting and communications systems with integrity, and training and coaching sessions on building inter-personal skills to tackle the difficult challenge of confronting bad behavior at all levels of the organization.
It’s the stuff legends are made of: a brilliant, demanding surgeon with patients coming to him from around the world for his extraordinary skill loses his patience in the operating room — throwing a pair of scissors that won’t cut at a nurse, narrowly missing her. He then calls another nurse “lame-brain” and “an idiot” for not being better prepared, and vents his frustration at the whole OR team.
Increasingly, research suggests that swearing, yelling, and throwing objects by physicians are putting patients at risk by increasing the likelihood of medical errors, according to an article in The Boston Globe.
The Joint Commission, the national organization that accredits healthcare systems, issued a safety alert to hospitals in July, saying outbursts threaten patient safety because they prevent caregivers from working as a team.
And setting a precedent, the Joint Commission is requiring all hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities to adopt "zero-tolerance" policies by January 1, 2009, including codes of conduct, ways to encourage staff to report bad behavior, and a process for helping and, if necessary, disciplining offenders, according to The Globe.
Let’s put this in a workplace context.
Manager, supervisor and especially line employee behaviors have been under the microscope at many worksites for years now, thanks to the popularity of behavior-based safety programs.
But what happens — really — when one of your employees at your worksite is observed performing an at-risk behavior. OK, he or she is probably not throwing scissors at someone. Maybe they’re wearing their goggles or respirator around their neck when they should be firmly in place. Perhaps lockout-tagout procedures are skipped. Or a manager or supervisor is yelling, threatening, bullying and cursing an employee or group of employees.
What are the odds at your workplace someone will step forward and confront the individual and his or her at-risk behavior on the spot?
Or will the observation of dangerous, out of line behavior be formally reported?
Does your workplace have an official “zero tolerance” policy, like hospitals are being forced to adopt, which includes conduct codes, reporting systems, and discipline if necessary?
Industry still wrestles with reporting at-risk behaviors
Industry, which is 10-15 years ahead of healthcare in observing and reporting on at-risk behaviors, still wrestles with the challenge of standing up and speaking up to at-risk behaviors.
This includes rude, boorish and bullying verbal behavior, many times coming from supervisors and managers. Drinking or abusing drugs on the job. Flashes of violent outbursts and threats that could be preludes to fatal rampages. Risky horseplay and short-cuts. Cutting compliance corners. Sleeping through training classes. Poor lifting techniques, straying into the line of fire, even something as simple as constantly running up and down stairs or ignoring trash on the floor.
Major or minor, how often in any of these cases does someone speak up or file a report?
Whether they do or not brings us back to one of the most popular safety and health topics of the day — culture. For instance, most hospital cultures have a tradition of tolerating abusive behaviors to placate high-intensity surgeons, according to The Boston Globe article.
Industry has its organization charts, making it tough for a line employee to call out a manager for abusive language. Healthcare has something more intimidating, called the “authority gradient,” which has been ingrained in hospitals seemingly forever.
It’s a very steep gradient, with physicians and surgeons at the top, operating very often literally with near-impunity due to their authority, schooling, skill at saving lives, and ability to make money for the institution. Further down the hierarchy are the nurses, nurses aides, lead technicians, materials technicians, and others on the OR team or in various departments.
Tradition calls for deference to the surgeon, especially during the intensity of the surgical procedure. As for reporting incidents after the fact, hospitals’ long-standing “walls of silence” most often cover-up behavior that led, or could have led to medical errors and patient harm.
And we’re not limited to talking about the operating theatre here. The Joint Commission cites several studies linking bad behavior to medical errors outside the OR. One survey found that some nurses and pharmacists had avoided consulting with a prescribing doctor because they did not want to interact with that particular doctor, according to The Globe’s report.
Does your workplace culture silently adhere to its own authority gradient? Or have you been able to build a culture of trust, encouraged caring, perhaps anonymous observation reporting, and overall open and honest communication between all levels of the organization?
What’s your policy?
Policies to address and rectify at-risk behavior are just emerging in healthcare. Patient safety experts say a key issue is making sure staff members are comfortable reporting colleagues' outbursts without fear of retaliation.
"These incidents happen because the OR environment is so high stress," said Dr. Marc Rubin, chairman of the surgery department at Massachusetts’ North Shore Salem Hospital, in The Globe article. "Surgeons hold patients' lives in their hands, yet they're dependent on equipment and people who are outside their control.”
Most hospitals don't track how many doctors, nurses, and other employees engage in disruptive behavior. Does your workplace track at-risk (and positive) safety-related behaviors?
Administrators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center estimate that four to six percent of doctors and nurses have repeated outbursts, according to The Globe article. Have you found it tends to be the same small group of employees, supers and managers who repeatedly flaunt behaviorial expectations?
Vanderbilt, which has one of the most extensive programs to track and deal with such behavior, began focusing on the problem a decade ago when administrators found that physicians who were sued often were more likely to have abusive outbursts. The medical center now advises 34 healthcare facilities on addressing the problem.
Can you link or document a connection between repeated at-risk behavior and dollar losses? That’s a major challenge in industry, which has the workers’ comp shield protecting the company, not malpractice worries.
Shared stress
But many workplaces and healthcare facilities share one burden: growing financial pressures amid dwindling resources and the threats of downsizing and consolidation that weigh on employees’ minds, elevate stress levels, and can lead to at-risk outbursts or behaviors.
"You're looking at a very stressed out industry," David Yamada, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in employment issues including workplace bullying, said in the article, referring to healthcare. "You have an industry in crisis where people are having to do much more with limited resources. That combination can be a potent one."
But you already knew that, right?
Is zero tolerance the answer?
There’s another challenge industry shares with healthcare: focus more attention on the behaviors that lead to near-misses, injuries or in the case of healthcare, medical errors; encourage your staff to report bad behavior more often; and executives might see reporting numbers escalate and call for harsh measures, like “zero tolerance” codes.
Beware of these pitfalls of a “zero tolerance” policy, cited by safety consultant DJ Borbidge, before introducing one to your culture:
● Often violations are narrowly defined, allowing for no extenuating circumstances.
● Many employees are reluctant to come forward to “rat” on violators either because there is a lack of trust that enforcement will be taken or conversely, they consider the policy extreme and become fearful.
● Sometimes, this emphasis on reporting opens the door for an employee to get back at someone he/she does not like.
● It is nearly impossible for management/supervision to catch all or even most acts of misconduct. Many incidents slip through the cracks.
● The word “intolerance” itself is a strong catalyst for fear. Extensive research strongly indicates that “fear in the workforce” rarely increases productivity, quality or safety.
Take a look at your workplace culture. Are there “walls of silence” that inhibit confronting or reporting at-risk behavior? Is there an authority gradient that goes unchallenged? Can you document the consequences of inaction?
Taking care of your culture
You might want to conduct a perception or climate survey to get some answers from the line troops. Healthcare is ahead of industry in its acceptance and growing use of perception surveys as cultural learning tools. You can find out about trust levels in your organization, fear levels, what employees really think about reporting and communication systems.
And you can learn perhaps how much work you have to do to create a culture that prioritizes addressing at-risk behaviors. That can include policies with teeth, reporting and communications systems with integrity, and training and coaching sessions on building inter-personal skills to tackle the difficult challenge of confronting bad behavior at all levels of the organization.
Boozing Before Work
Casino construction workers caught juicing in the morning
“There was a time when drinking on the job was not only accepted, it was considered one of the major perks of joining the workforce.”
This comes from a 5,190-word article, “Juicing on the Job – The Working Drunk’s guide to getting crocked on the clock,” courtesy of Modern Drunkard magazine, which boasts of “standing up for your right to get falling down drunk since 1996.”
A 5,190-word piece on business boozing also proves: 1) There is a magazine for every lifestyle and individual imaginable; 2) Political correctness is not as pervasive as it may seem; and 3) Your workplace does indeed need a substance abuse policy that address alcohol as well as drugs.
This recent news story from Las Vegas reinforces the last point:
Two more union workers — electricians — were fired from a huge Vegas construction project after being identified in photographs as drinking alcohol at a bar and then entering the construction site, the project's general contractor said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
They had been photographed by the Review-Journal after the newspaper received reports from readers who said they had observed construction workers drinking at nearby bars.
Five union workers, including three ironworkers who were fired on August 7, have been fired by Perini Building Co., the general contractor on MGM Mirage's $9.2-billion development, after being photographed drinking and then entering the CityCenter job site in violation of rules set by the unions and contractors, according to the article.
Over a six-week period, ten workers were observed at bars across from the development drinking before entering the job site.
According to the most recent four-year labor agreement between contractors and United Association Union Local 525, which is composed of plumbers and pipe fitters on the CityCenter project, workers are prohibited from "having present in their bodies during working hours detectable levels of drugs or alcohol over the nationally recognized standard," according to the article.
But the union's language allowing random testing when there is "reasonable suspicion" a worker is under the influence of drugs does not mention alcohol.
The good conscience caveat
Even in Modern Drunkard’s “Juicing on the Job” article, which justifies imbibing because “most jobs suck,” the author offers this caveat:
“…if your job involves a steering wheel, great heights, carrying a suitcase containing nuclear launch codes, machinery that may casually remove a limb, or, for the love of God, driving a bus full of adorable school children, it’s best to find another job. Because you cannot, in good conscience, drink while working under those circumstances. For all its benefits, being lit doesn’t improve your motor skills, depth perception or sense of balance. The last thing you want to do is kill someone or lose a hand…”
That said, the article list construction work as one of the tried-and-true drinking professions: “Despite the inherent dangers, shrill investigative reporters (Editor’s Note: see the Las Vegas news account above) routinely catch these men getting hammered at lunch then jumping behind the controls of fifteen-ton cranes. If you ever wanted to gaze upon a monument to on-the-job drinking, stick your head out the nearest window and take a gander at your city’s skyline.”
At-risk industries
Research backs that up. Employers in certain industries are more at risk for employee substance use and abuse, including alcohol.
The major industry groups with the highest prevalence of illicit drug use during the period of one surveyed month were accommodations and food services and construction. Those with the lowest prevalence were the utilities industry, educational services, and public administration, according to “Worker Substance Use and Workplace Policies and Programs” published in 2007 by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS Publication No. SMA 07-4273, Analytic Series A-29).
About 16.9 percent of workers in the accommodations and food services industry and 13.7 percent of workers in the construction industry reported illicit drug use in the past month, according to the study.
The major industry groups with the highest prevalence of heavy alcohol use were construction, arts, entertainment and recreation, and mining. Those with the lowest were health care and social assistance and educational services.
About 15.9 percent of workers in the construction industry and 13.6 percent of workers in the arts, entertainment and recreation industry reported heavy alcohol use in the past month.
Heavy drinking is defined as five or more drinks on five or more occasions in the past month. Binge drinking: Five or more drinks on one occasion.
Statistics show…
As OSHA says on its web site topic page “Substance Use and Abuse”: Most drug users, binge and heavy drinkers, and people with substance use disorders are employed. And substance use and abuse is not necessarily limited to after work hours, leading to the risk of impairment on the job.
An estimated 3.1 percent of employed adults used illicit drugs before reporting to work or during work hours at least once in the past year, with about 2.9 percent working while under the influence of an illicit drug, according to the report, “Prevalence and distribution of illicit drug use in the workforce and in the workplace: Findings and implications from a U.S. national survey,” published in 2006 in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
An estimated 1.8 percent of employed adults consumed alcohol before coming to work, and 7.1 percent drank alcohol during the workday, according to the study, “Prevalence and distribution of alcohol use and impairment in the workplace: A U.S. national survey,” published in 2006 in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.
Finally, from the same report: An estimated 1.7 percent of employed adults worked while under the influence of alcohol, and 9.2 percent worked with a hangover in the past year.
Small businesses most vulnerable
Smaller firms may be particularly at risk of harm by worker substance use and abuse.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of all U.S. workers work for small and medium sized businesses (those with fewer than 500 employees). But about nine in ten currently employed illicit drug users and almost nine in ten employed heavy drinkers work for small and medium sized firms. That finding comes from “Worker Substance Use and Workplace Policies and Programs,” published in 2007 by the Department of Health and Human Service.
As OSHA says, smaller businesses are less likely to have programs in place to combat the problem. Yet they are more likely to be the employer-of-choice for illicit abusers. Individuals who can’t adhere to a drug-free workplace policy seek employment at firms flying under the radar. OSHA emphasizes the cost of just one error caused by an impaired employee can devastate a small company.
That risk is what magnifies the stakes of a seemingly minute and almost acceptable percentage — the estimated 1.7 percent of employed adults who work while buzzed on booze.
Basics of a substance abuse policy
Every organization’s policy should be tailored to meet its specific needs, according to OSHA. Still, all effective policies have these four common elements:
Reason: Rationale can be as simple as a company being committed to protecting the safety, health and well-being of its employees and patrons and recognizing that abuse of alcohol and other drugs compromises this dedication.
Clarity: At a minimum, this should include the following statement: “The use, possession, transfer or sale of illegal drugs by employees is prohibited. Note this sample policy does not address alcohol specifically, but you might want to.
Consequences: There may include discipline up to and including termination and/or referral for assistance. Consequences should be consistent with existing personnel policies and procedures and any applicable state laws, according to OSHA.
Communication: Sharing all policies with all employees is essential for success, says OSHA. Employers should be certain that all employees are aware of the policy and drug-free workplace program.
Editor’s Note: After several significant transportation accidents, Congress passed the Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act of 1991. Covering roughly 12.1 million employees in aviation, trucking, railroads, mass transit, pipelines and other transportation industries, the Department of Transportation publishes rules on who must conduct drug testing, how frequently, and under what circumstances.
The Act mandates pre-employment, reasonable suspicion, post-accident, random, and follow-up/return to duty drug and/or alcohol testing of state employees in positions requiring the possession of a Commercial Drivers License and defined as safety-sensitive.
The Act mandates that employees must not:
· Report for duty or remain on duty while having a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of 0.02 percent or higher;
· Possess, use, or be under the influence of alcohol while on duty;
· Perform any safety-sensitive function within four hours of using alcohol;
· Use alcohol for hours hours following an accident, or until such employee has undergone an alcohol test; or
· Refuse to submit to a required alcohol test.
· Report for duty or remain on duty when under the influence a controlled substance. Prohibited controlled substances include: cocaine, marijuana, opiates, amphetamines and phencyclidine.
“There was a time when drinking on the job was not only accepted, it was considered one of the major perks of joining the workforce.”
This comes from a 5,190-word article, “Juicing on the Job – The Working Drunk’s guide to getting crocked on the clock,” courtesy of Modern Drunkard magazine, which boasts of “standing up for your right to get falling down drunk since 1996.”
A 5,190-word piece on business boozing also proves: 1) There is a magazine for every lifestyle and individual imaginable; 2) Political correctness is not as pervasive as it may seem; and 3) Your workplace does indeed need a substance abuse policy that address alcohol as well as drugs.
This recent news story from Las Vegas reinforces the last point:
Two more union workers — electricians — were fired from a huge Vegas construction project after being identified in photographs as drinking alcohol at a bar and then entering the construction site, the project's general contractor said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
They had been photographed by the Review-Journal after the newspaper received reports from readers who said they had observed construction workers drinking at nearby bars.
Five union workers, including three ironworkers who were fired on August 7, have been fired by Perini Building Co., the general contractor on MGM Mirage's $9.2-billion development, after being photographed drinking and then entering the CityCenter job site in violation of rules set by the unions and contractors, according to the article.
Over a six-week period, ten workers were observed at bars across from the development drinking before entering the job site.
According to the most recent four-year labor agreement between contractors and United Association Union Local 525, which is composed of plumbers and pipe fitters on the CityCenter project, workers are prohibited from "having present in their bodies during working hours detectable levels of drugs or alcohol over the nationally recognized standard," according to the article.
But the union's language allowing random testing when there is "reasonable suspicion" a worker is under the influence of drugs does not mention alcohol.
The good conscience caveat
Even in Modern Drunkard’s “Juicing on the Job” article, which justifies imbibing because “most jobs suck,” the author offers this caveat:
“…if your job involves a steering wheel, great heights, carrying a suitcase containing nuclear launch codes, machinery that may casually remove a limb, or, for the love of God, driving a bus full of adorable school children, it’s best to find another job. Because you cannot, in good conscience, drink while working under those circumstances. For all its benefits, being lit doesn’t improve your motor skills, depth perception or sense of balance. The last thing you want to do is kill someone or lose a hand…”
That said, the article list construction work as one of the tried-and-true drinking professions: “Despite the inherent dangers, shrill investigative reporters (Editor’s Note: see the Las Vegas news account above) routinely catch these men getting hammered at lunch then jumping behind the controls of fifteen-ton cranes. If you ever wanted to gaze upon a monument to on-the-job drinking, stick your head out the nearest window and take a gander at your city’s skyline.”
At-risk industries
Research backs that up. Employers in certain industries are more at risk for employee substance use and abuse, including alcohol.
The major industry groups with the highest prevalence of illicit drug use during the period of one surveyed month were accommodations and food services and construction. Those with the lowest prevalence were the utilities industry, educational services, and public administration, according to “Worker Substance Use and Workplace Policies and Programs” published in 2007 by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS Publication No. SMA 07-4273, Analytic Series A-29).
About 16.9 percent of workers in the accommodations and food services industry and 13.7 percent of workers in the construction industry reported illicit drug use in the past month, according to the study.
The major industry groups with the highest prevalence of heavy alcohol use were construction, arts, entertainment and recreation, and mining. Those with the lowest were health care and social assistance and educational services.
About 15.9 percent of workers in the construction industry and 13.6 percent of workers in the arts, entertainment and recreation industry reported heavy alcohol use in the past month.
Heavy drinking is defined as five or more drinks on five or more occasions in the past month. Binge drinking: Five or more drinks on one occasion.
Statistics show…
As OSHA says on its web site topic page “Substance Use and Abuse”: Most drug users, binge and heavy drinkers, and people with substance use disorders are employed. And substance use and abuse is not necessarily limited to after work hours, leading to the risk of impairment on the job.
An estimated 3.1 percent of employed adults used illicit drugs before reporting to work or during work hours at least once in the past year, with about 2.9 percent working while under the influence of an illicit drug, according to the report, “Prevalence and distribution of illicit drug use in the workforce and in the workplace: Findings and implications from a U.S. national survey,” published in 2006 in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
An estimated 1.8 percent of employed adults consumed alcohol before coming to work, and 7.1 percent drank alcohol during the workday, according to the study, “Prevalence and distribution of alcohol use and impairment in the workplace: A U.S. national survey,” published in 2006 in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.
Finally, from the same report: An estimated 1.7 percent of employed adults worked while under the influence of alcohol, and 9.2 percent worked with a hangover in the past year.
Small businesses most vulnerable
Smaller firms may be particularly at risk of harm by worker substance use and abuse.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of all U.S. workers work for small and medium sized businesses (those with fewer than 500 employees). But about nine in ten currently employed illicit drug users and almost nine in ten employed heavy drinkers work for small and medium sized firms. That finding comes from “Worker Substance Use and Workplace Policies and Programs,” published in 2007 by the Department of Health and Human Service.
As OSHA says, smaller businesses are less likely to have programs in place to combat the problem. Yet they are more likely to be the employer-of-choice for illicit abusers. Individuals who can’t adhere to a drug-free workplace policy seek employment at firms flying under the radar. OSHA emphasizes the cost of just one error caused by an impaired employee can devastate a small company.
That risk is what magnifies the stakes of a seemingly minute and almost acceptable percentage — the estimated 1.7 percent of employed adults who work while buzzed on booze.
Basics of a substance abuse policy
Every organization’s policy should be tailored to meet its specific needs, according to OSHA. Still, all effective policies have these four common elements:
Reason: Rationale can be as simple as a company being committed to protecting the safety, health and well-being of its employees and patrons and recognizing that abuse of alcohol and other drugs compromises this dedication.
Clarity: At a minimum, this should include the following statement: “The use, possession, transfer or sale of illegal drugs by employees is prohibited. Note this sample policy does not address alcohol specifically, but you might want to.
Consequences: There may include discipline up to and including termination and/or referral for assistance. Consequences should be consistent with existing personnel policies and procedures and any applicable state laws, according to OSHA.
Communication: Sharing all policies with all employees is essential for success, says OSHA. Employers should be certain that all employees are aware of the policy and drug-free workplace program.
Editor’s Note: After several significant transportation accidents, Congress passed the Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act of 1991. Covering roughly 12.1 million employees in aviation, trucking, railroads, mass transit, pipelines and other transportation industries, the Department of Transportation publishes rules on who must conduct drug testing, how frequently, and under what circumstances.
The Act mandates pre-employment, reasonable suspicion, post-accident, random, and follow-up/return to duty drug and/or alcohol testing of state employees in positions requiring the possession of a Commercial Drivers License and defined as safety-sensitive.
The Act mandates that employees must not:
· Report for duty or remain on duty while having a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of 0.02 percent or higher;
· Possess, use, or be under the influence of alcohol while on duty;
· Perform any safety-sensitive function within four hours of using alcohol;
· Use alcohol for hours hours following an accident, or until such employee has undergone an alcohol test; or
· Refuse to submit to a required alcohol test.
· Report for duty or remain on duty when under the influence a controlled substance. Prohibited controlled substances include: cocaine, marijuana, opiates, amphetamines and phencyclidine.
Guns on Your Property
What’s your policy on concealed weapons in employees’ vehicles?
A recent news story caught our eye, illustrating once more that job safety issues are not confined to inside the plant walls.
This story poses a challenge: What is your company’s policy, if one exists at all, on allowing employees with concealed-weapons permits to keep guns in their cars in company parking lots?
A bit of background:
Several large Florida employers are trying to circumvent a law allowing workers to keep guns in their parked cars, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. In June, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supported the right to keep handguns at home.
The bigger story: Employers across the country now confront new dilemmas about how and when to allow weapons on company property, as they attempt to balance the Second Amendment rights of their employees (to keep and bear arms) with federal laws requiring them to provide a safe workplace.
Florida is one of at least nine states to pass legislation that allows employees with proper permits to bring guns to workplace parking lots, according to The Journal.
The guns at work debate goes back to 2002 when Weyerhaeuser Co. used search dogs to find drugs in parked vehicles at its Valliant, Okla., paper mill, according to the article. The search also found 12 cars containing guns in violation of a company policy prohibiting firearms. Several employees were fired. Gun-rights advocates got fired-up, pressing support for laws expressly permitting licensed owners to keep their weapons in their cars while at work.
Two years later, Oklahoma lawmakers barred employers from prohibiting "any person, except a convicted felon," from bringing a gun to work. Last year, a federal judge struck down the law, saying that it violated federal guidelines put out by OSHA. The state is appealing.
What federal guidelines?
Do a search for “guns” on www.osha.gov and you mostly get referred to compressed air guns, handheld nail/stapling guns, explosives and blasting agents, and such.
But there is an interesting letter from Richard Fairfax, OSHA’s director of enforcement programs, responding to a 2005 letter addressed to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. The letter writer petitioned Chao to establish a nationally binding policy that would ban guns from American workplaces.
Fairfax replied on September 13, 2006, stating in part: “While generally deferring to other federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies to regulate workplace homicides, OSHA did develop an enforcement policy with regard to workplace violence as early as 1992 in a letter of interpretation that stated:
“‘In a workplace where the risk of violence and serious personal injury are significant enough to be ‘recognized hazards,’ the general duty clause [specified by Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act)] would require the employer to take feasible steps to minimize those risks. Failure of an employer to implement feasible means of abatement of these hazards could result in the finding of an OSH Act violation.’”
Fairfax continued, “This policy statement permits the Agency to reinforce its guidance and outreach efforts with appropriate enforcement action.”
Fairfax’s statement itself seems open to interpretation. OSHA has reassured politicians and business groups many times that its guidelines are advisory and do not create new employer obligations.
Unanswered question
Still, OSHA workplace violence guidelines are not specific on the question of allowing or disallowing employees with permits to carry concealed weapons to bring them to work and leave them in their parked cars.
In the 1996, OSHA issued “Guidelines for Workplace Violence Prevention Programs for Night Retail Establishments” and in 1992 issued the “letter of interpretation” that Fairfax quoted. That letter went on to state: “…the occurrence of acts of violence which are not ‘recognized’ as characteristic of employment and represent random antisocial acts which may occur anywhere would not subject the employer to a citation for a violation of the OSH Act.
”Whether or not an employer can be cited for a violation of Section 5(a)(1) is entirely dependent upon the specific facts, which will be unique in each situation. The recognizability and foreseeability of the hazard, and the feasibility of the means of abatement are some of the critical factors to be considered.”
OSHA seems to be focusing the possible application of its General Duty Clause on workplaces such as 7-11s and other retail stores operating at night or 24/7, where the risk of robbery runs high. The agency does not seem ready to apply the General Duty Clause for unpredictable “random antisocial acts,” such as an irate employee fetching his gun from his car’s glove compartment after an argument with a supervisor and marching back to the super’s office to wreak revenge.
In light of such nebulous assumptions, you can see why The Wall Street Journal describes employers as currently scratching their heads and scrambling to figure out how and when to allow guns on company property.
Critics claim the new law increases the risk of workplace violence by making a gun readily available to a raging or unstable worker, according to the article. Plus, critics say, the guns-at-work laws provide no offsetting safety benefits because a law-abiding employee wouldn't have time, in the event of an assault in the parking lot, to access a gun locked inside a car.
So, what’s your policy?
A recent news story caught our eye, illustrating once more that job safety issues are not confined to inside the plant walls.
This story poses a challenge: What is your company’s policy, if one exists at all, on allowing employees with concealed-weapons permits to keep guns in their cars in company parking lots?
A bit of background:
Several large Florida employers are trying to circumvent a law allowing workers to keep guns in their parked cars, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. In June, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supported the right to keep handguns at home.
The bigger story: Employers across the country now confront new dilemmas about how and when to allow weapons on company property, as they attempt to balance the Second Amendment rights of their employees (to keep and bear arms) with federal laws requiring them to provide a safe workplace.
Florida is one of at least nine states to pass legislation that allows employees with proper permits to bring guns to workplace parking lots, according to The Journal.
The guns at work debate goes back to 2002 when Weyerhaeuser Co. used search dogs to find drugs in parked vehicles at its Valliant, Okla., paper mill, according to the article. The search also found 12 cars containing guns in violation of a company policy prohibiting firearms. Several employees were fired. Gun-rights advocates got fired-up, pressing support for laws expressly permitting licensed owners to keep their weapons in their cars while at work.
Two years later, Oklahoma lawmakers barred employers from prohibiting "any person, except a convicted felon," from bringing a gun to work. Last year, a federal judge struck down the law, saying that it violated federal guidelines put out by OSHA. The state is appealing.
What federal guidelines?
Do a search for “guns” on www.osha.gov and you mostly get referred to compressed air guns, handheld nail/stapling guns, explosives and blasting agents, and such.
But there is an interesting letter from Richard Fairfax, OSHA’s director of enforcement programs, responding to a 2005 letter addressed to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. The letter writer petitioned Chao to establish a nationally binding policy that would ban guns from American workplaces.
Fairfax replied on September 13, 2006, stating in part: “While generally deferring to other federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies to regulate workplace homicides, OSHA did develop an enforcement policy with regard to workplace violence as early as 1992 in a letter of interpretation that stated:
“‘In a workplace where the risk of violence and serious personal injury are significant enough to be ‘recognized hazards,’ the general duty clause [specified by Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act)] would require the employer to take feasible steps to minimize those risks. Failure of an employer to implement feasible means of abatement of these hazards could result in the finding of an OSH Act violation.’”
Fairfax continued, “This policy statement permits the Agency to reinforce its guidance and outreach efforts with appropriate enforcement action.”
Fairfax’s statement itself seems open to interpretation. OSHA has reassured politicians and business groups many times that its guidelines are advisory and do not create new employer obligations.
Unanswered question
Still, OSHA workplace violence guidelines are not specific on the question of allowing or disallowing employees with permits to carry concealed weapons to bring them to work and leave them in their parked cars.
In the 1996, OSHA issued “Guidelines for Workplace Violence Prevention Programs for Night Retail Establishments” and in 1992 issued the “letter of interpretation” that Fairfax quoted. That letter went on to state: “…the occurrence of acts of violence which are not ‘recognized’ as characteristic of employment and represent random antisocial acts which may occur anywhere would not subject the employer to a citation for a violation of the OSH Act.
”Whether or not an employer can be cited for a violation of Section 5(a)(1) is entirely dependent upon the specific facts, which will be unique in each situation. The recognizability and foreseeability of the hazard, and the feasibility of the means of abatement are some of the critical factors to be considered.”
OSHA seems to be focusing the possible application of its General Duty Clause on workplaces such as 7-11s and other retail stores operating at night or 24/7, where the risk of robbery runs high. The agency does not seem ready to apply the General Duty Clause for unpredictable “random antisocial acts,” such as an irate employee fetching his gun from his car’s glove compartment after an argument with a supervisor and marching back to the super’s office to wreak revenge.
In light of such nebulous assumptions, you can see why The Wall Street Journal describes employers as currently scratching their heads and scrambling to figure out how and when to allow guns on company property.
Critics claim the new law increases the risk of workplace violence by making a gun readily available to a raging or unstable worker, according to the article. Plus, critics say, the guns-at-work laws provide no offsetting safety benefits because a law-abiding employee wouldn't have time, in the event of an assault in the parking lot, to access a gun locked inside a car.
So, what’s your policy?
When Smart People Do Dumb Things
You must “see” safety as well as “think” safety
“Adults do the darndest things!” exclaimed OSHA chief Edwin Foulke, kicking off a May, 2006 speech to the Association of Georgia’s Textile, Carpet and Consumer Products Manufacturers.
OSHA’s boss brought pictures to prove it. There was a fellow standing with one foot on an unstable ladder, which leaned against power lines. An ”overconfident character” sat beneath a propped-up truck, “just waiting for trouble to come crashing down,” said Foulke. A forklift lifted another forklift, which carried two guys with “no safety harnesses, no hats, no concerns,” he said.
“And our first place winner for unsafe work practices goes to this guy overseeing a team of people fully-dressed in hazmat gear,” said Foulke. “He looks surprisingly calm while wearing no safety protection. I hope he at least wore sunscreen!”
Can we chalk up Foulke’s gallery of bloopers to foolishness, lack of training, reckless disregard for rules, or plain stupidity?
When union safety leaders got wind of Foulke’s speech and lamb blasted him for “blame the worker” finger-pointing, the headline in the Washington Post became, “OSHA Does The Darndest Things.”
Now was Foulke’s political faux pas due to foolishness, lack of training, or reckless disregard for political correctness? Plain stupidity? Doubtful, the man has a master’s degree in law from Georgetown University Law School and was a member of the Occupational Safety & Health Review Commission for five years.
“What was I thinking?”
The August issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine attempts to answer this puzzle in an article: “Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes.” Or as the author says, “Where was my mind when I needed it most?”
Why otherwise rational, well-schooled people do the irrational at times is a hot topic in medicine these days, with the growing patient safety movement putting the spotlight on misdiagnoses, why many docs refuse to wash their hands, and sometimes will operate on the wrong leg or wrong patient altogether.
Two recent books explore the underdeveloped cognitive side of medicine: “Better – A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance,” by Atul Gawande, M.D., and “How Doctors Think,” by Jerome Groopman, M.D.
It turns out surgeons, rock climbers, assistant secretaries of federal departments, airline pilots and fork lift operators all can succumb to intelligent mistakes and accidents, of course when least expected.
Dr. Pat Croskerry examined a forest ranger complaining of a pain in his chest one spring afternoon in an emergency room case related in “How Doctors Think.” The ranger was in his early 40s, trim and extremely fit, a wiry, muscular man, Dr. Croskerry noted. The doctor went over the list of risk factors for heart and lung disease. The man never smoked, had no family history of heart attack, stroke, or diabetes, and lived anything but a sedentary lifestyle.
Dr. Croskerry then performed a physical examination. Vital signs were normal. Everything sounded fine. An electrocardiogram, a chest x-ray, and blood work – all were normal.
“I’m not at all worried about your chest pain,” Croskerry told the ranger. “You probably overexerted yourself in the field.”
The next evening, Croskerry arrived in the emergency department and bumped into a colleague. “Very interesting case, that man you saw yesterday,” the doctor said. “He came in this morning with an acute myocardial infarction.”
Blinded by feelings
Croskerry was stunned. He realized that he had made a common cognitive error, one that could have been fatal. He didn’t miss it (what in retrospect was unstable angina caused by coronary disease that usually comes before a heart attack) because of any reckless or lazy behavior. His thinking was overinfluenced by how healthy this ranger looked.
“The effects of a doctor’s inner feelings on his thinking get short shrift in medical training,” writes Dr. Groopman in his book. Physicians rarely recognize and reflect on how other emotions influence a doctor’s perceptions and judgments, he says.
Feelings, emotions, prejudices, and blinders afflict far more than physicians. In December, 2006, three experienced, well-trained climbers ignored obvious clues that the weather on Oregon’s Mount Hood was deteriorating, sparking one of the largest rescue missions in the state’s history. The climbers were eventually found dead.
“We really don’t perceive the world most of the time,” writes Laurence Gonzales, the author of the National Geographic Adventure article. “Most things eventually fall into the category labeled ‘ignore’.”
In the workplace, this allows us to get our work out of the way, finish the shift, and hightail it home – without having to stop all the time and reexamined something. We conveniently deposit potential hazards, dubious circumstances, signs of risk into the “ignore” box because we’ve been lulled into complacency. We’ve not had to pay for our ignorance in the past. Our experience, success or luck shapes our behavior, writes Gonzales.
Not my problem
Attitudes can also warp our vision. It’s easy today to believe that someone else is responsible for our-well-being, discouraging us from taking responsibility for ourselves. Johnny gets bad grades, it’s the teacher’s fault. Jenny can’t crack the starting line-up, it’s the coach’s fault. A physician mishandles a surgery, sue him.
At work, we can come to see others as being responsible for our safety – the maintenance guy, the safety manager, the safety team, OSHA inspectors, the big boss plant manager. All of this social conditioning, from the time we’re young, encourages us to drop our guard and look for someone to blame when things go wrong.
How many banners or bumper stickers have you seen proclaiming, “THINK SAFETY”? But intelligent people can blunder into accidents because they must SEE SAFELY before the mind knows what to think.
New to his job, OSHA chief Foulke did not “see” the union critics who would attack his slide show as cold, blame-the-worker stuff.
Dr. Croskerry did not diagnose the forest ranger’s unstable angina because he saw before him a trim, muscular, fit man, and the doctor chose to ignore other signals.
Would the three Mount Hood climbers more clearly have seen the predicament they were in if they each wore emergency locator beacons, as later required by Oregon law, so rescuers could find them more easily? They might had been lulled into false security and seen no reason to worry – similar to how ship captains seized on radar when it was first introduced to drive their boats faster, according to Gonzales.
Seeing safely
“One of the most useful things I learned in survival school,” writes Gonzales, “came from watch my instructor.” While Gonzales was eager to blaze ahead through the woods, his instructor seemed stuck in slow motion. He ambled along, looking at flowers, and was in no hurry. “I realized… he was slowing down and paying attention. He was allowing himself to have second thoughts,” because first thoughts arise through the recall of past experience, not true unfiltered thinking.
Here’s the intelligent thing to do: “We should strive to slow down and examine what we are really doing,” says Gonzales. “Yes, I tell myself. It can really happen to me. It’s out there waiting for me now. It will come unannounced.
“Success in the wild… lies in the willingness to stop and question what you’re doing,” says Gonzales. The same holds true anywhere men and women are at work.
“Adults do the darndest things!” exclaimed OSHA chief Edwin Foulke, kicking off a May, 2006 speech to the Association of Georgia’s Textile, Carpet and Consumer Products Manufacturers.
OSHA’s boss brought pictures to prove it. There was a fellow standing with one foot on an unstable ladder, which leaned against power lines. An ”overconfident character” sat beneath a propped-up truck, “just waiting for trouble to come crashing down,” said Foulke. A forklift lifted another forklift, which carried two guys with “no safety harnesses, no hats, no concerns,” he said.
“And our first place winner for unsafe work practices goes to this guy overseeing a team of people fully-dressed in hazmat gear,” said Foulke. “He looks surprisingly calm while wearing no safety protection. I hope he at least wore sunscreen!”
Can we chalk up Foulke’s gallery of bloopers to foolishness, lack of training, reckless disregard for rules, or plain stupidity?
When union safety leaders got wind of Foulke’s speech and lamb blasted him for “blame the worker” finger-pointing, the headline in the Washington Post became, “OSHA Does The Darndest Things.”
Now was Foulke’s political faux pas due to foolishness, lack of training, or reckless disregard for political correctness? Plain stupidity? Doubtful, the man has a master’s degree in law from Georgetown University Law School and was a member of the Occupational Safety & Health Review Commission for five years.
“What was I thinking?”
The August issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine attempts to answer this puzzle in an article: “Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes.” Or as the author says, “Where was my mind when I needed it most?”
Why otherwise rational, well-schooled people do the irrational at times is a hot topic in medicine these days, with the growing patient safety movement putting the spotlight on misdiagnoses, why many docs refuse to wash their hands, and sometimes will operate on the wrong leg or wrong patient altogether.
Two recent books explore the underdeveloped cognitive side of medicine: “Better – A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance,” by Atul Gawande, M.D., and “How Doctors Think,” by Jerome Groopman, M.D.
It turns out surgeons, rock climbers, assistant secretaries of federal departments, airline pilots and fork lift operators all can succumb to intelligent mistakes and accidents, of course when least expected.
Dr. Pat Croskerry examined a forest ranger complaining of a pain in his chest one spring afternoon in an emergency room case related in “How Doctors Think.” The ranger was in his early 40s, trim and extremely fit, a wiry, muscular man, Dr. Croskerry noted. The doctor went over the list of risk factors for heart and lung disease. The man never smoked, had no family history of heart attack, stroke, or diabetes, and lived anything but a sedentary lifestyle.
Dr. Croskerry then performed a physical examination. Vital signs were normal. Everything sounded fine. An electrocardiogram, a chest x-ray, and blood work – all were normal.
“I’m not at all worried about your chest pain,” Croskerry told the ranger. “You probably overexerted yourself in the field.”
The next evening, Croskerry arrived in the emergency department and bumped into a colleague. “Very interesting case, that man you saw yesterday,” the doctor said. “He came in this morning with an acute myocardial infarction.”
Blinded by feelings
Croskerry was stunned. He realized that he had made a common cognitive error, one that could have been fatal. He didn’t miss it (what in retrospect was unstable angina caused by coronary disease that usually comes before a heart attack) because of any reckless or lazy behavior. His thinking was overinfluenced by how healthy this ranger looked.
“The effects of a doctor’s inner feelings on his thinking get short shrift in medical training,” writes Dr. Groopman in his book. Physicians rarely recognize and reflect on how other emotions influence a doctor’s perceptions and judgments, he says.
Feelings, emotions, prejudices, and blinders afflict far more than physicians. In December, 2006, three experienced, well-trained climbers ignored obvious clues that the weather on Oregon’s Mount Hood was deteriorating, sparking one of the largest rescue missions in the state’s history. The climbers were eventually found dead.
“We really don’t perceive the world most of the time,” writes Laurence Gonzales, the author of the National Geographic Adventure article. “Most things eventually fall into the category labeled ‘ignore’.”
In the workplace, this allows us to get our work out of the way, finish the shift, and hightail it home – without having to stop all the time and reexamined something. We conveniently deposit potential hazards, dubious circumstances, signs of risk into the “ignore” box because we’ve been lulled into complacency. We’ve not had to pay for our ignorance in the past. Our experience, success or luck shapes our behavior, writes Gonzales.
Not my problem
Attitudes can also warp our vision. It’s easy today to believe that someone else is responsible for our-well-being, discouraging us from taking responsibility for ourselves. Johnny gets bad grades, it’s the teacher’s fault. Jenny can’t crack the starting line-up, it’s the coach’s fault. A physician mishandles a surgery, sue him.
At work, we can come to see others as being responsible for our safety – the maintenance guy, the safety manager, the safety team, OSHA inspectors, the big boss plant manager. All of this social conditioning, from the time we’re young, encourages us to drop our guard and look for someone to blame when things go wrong.
How many banners or bumper stickers have you seen proclaiming, “THINK SAFETY”? But intelligent people can blunder into accidents because they must SEE SAFELY before the mind knows what to think.
New to his job, OSHA chief Foulke did not “see” the union critics who would attack his slide show as cold, blame-the-worker stuff.
Dr. Croskerry did not diagnose the forest ranger’s unstable angina because he saw before him a trim, muscular, fit man, and the doctor chose to ignore other signals.
Would the three Mount Hood climbers more clearly have seen the predicament they were in if they each wore emergency locator beacons, as later required by Oregon law, so rescuers could find them more easily? They might had been lulled into false security and seen no reason to worry – similar to how ship captains seized on radar when it was first introduced to drive their boats faster, according to Gonzales.
Seeing safely
“One of the most useful things I learned in survival school,” writes Gonzales, “came from watch my instructor.” While Gonzales was eager to blaze ahead through the woods, his instructor seemed stuck in slow motion. He ambled along, looking at flowers, and was in no hurry. “I realized… he was slowing down and paying attention. He was allowing himself to have second thoughts,” because first thoughts arise through the recall of past experience, not true unfiltered thinking.
Here’s the intelligent thing to do: “We should strive to slow down and examine what we are really doing,” says Gonzales. “Yes, I tell myself. It can really happen to me. It’s out there waiting for me now. It will come unannounced.
“Success in the wild… lies in the willingness to stop and question what you’re doing,” says Gonzales. The same holds true anywhere men and women are at work.
It Hits You “Like a Ton Of Bricks”
Coping with close calls on the frontlines in Iraq
“Daddy’s got to go to work,” a soldier tells his young child in a last phone call home before deployment from Fort Dix, New Jersey to Iraq in 2004.
This is a different kind of work, of course. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count combat injuries and deaths in its annual surveys. If it did, the military would unquestionably qualify as America’s most dangerous job.
No, this dad going to “work” is not a lobsterman who might drown in a storm after getting entangled in nets and being dragged overboard.
He’s not a logger who could get struck in the head and killed by a loose log rolling down a hillside.
He’s not a crop duster, a steel worker, a power line installer, a truck driver, farm laborer, construction worker, a road-weary salesman. He’s not in any of the jobs ranked by the BLS as the ten most dangerous in the U.S.
“If you let the fear get to you…”
Sergeant Steve Pink, 24, was one of three National Guardsman who agreed to use small, hand-held cameras and film their year in Iraq. “An ongoing day-to-day account from the fine eyes of the soldiers of Charlie Company,” says one of them, in the documentary that resulted, “The War Tapes.”
Pink approaches his work with a mental attitude similar to many who confront what might be called “high-hazard risks” on the job. “There are times you’re kind of afraid,” he says. “If you let the fear get to you, you’re really not going to be doing your job.”
Another of the soldier-filmmakers, Specialist Mike Moriarty, ponders at one point, “What motivates a soldier to go into a situation he might not come back from?”
Why would miners in Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine trek 1,500 feet under an unstable “bouncing” mountain as one miner described, day after day? What makes ironworkers scale skeletons of skyscrapers and bridge spans? Motivates fishermen to go out to the seas in ships in some terrible weather conditions, and risk falling overboard and drowning?
For many, it’s more than a paycheck. Pride, for instance.
The morning commute
“For many occupations danger is part of the job description,” reported CNNMoney.com in an article on America’s most dangerous jobs. None more so than soldiering in a war zone. Charlie Company arrives at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. “You are in danger right here, right now,” is the official greeting they receive in a pre-recorded televised briefing.
Among the risks: Improvised explosive devices — IEDs. Rocket-propelled grenades — RPGs. Suicide car bombers. Mortar attacks. Ambushes. Friendly fire and highway accidents.
Charlie Company’s job is to go out every day and provide convoy security for tractor-trailers and tankers moving, among other supplies, cheese, food, soda, paper, fuel and raw sewage.
They ride inside tan Humvees weighing 10,300 pounds each with four-inch thick, 75-pound windows. “On your way out to work, you can roll up to a Burger King drive-through window, with the driveway widened for the Humvees, and get a burger and fries, just like home,” says one soldier.
“It’s ‘sporting chance Tuesday’,” says another, as they roll out one morning. “We like to give the opposition an advantage so we ride with the windows down.” He pauses. “Not true. Not frickin’ safe. We ride with the windows up.”
“It’s our safety before theirs. Unfortunately, you don’t know which civilians might be insurgents.”
Keep out
The dangers of the job are on the minds, in the back of the minds, or never far from the minds of the men of Charlie Company. They simply seldom talk about it. “You almost have to have a false sense of security to do this business,” says one. “You almost have to convince yourself in your head that it won’t happen to me.”
“I shook a man’s hand that wasn’t attached to his arm today,” says Sergeant Pink. “If I play the odds, one of us will die before the tour is over. It’s something I don’t like to think about.”
At one point in the film, Pink’s wife says, “Steve doesn’t really like to let people in. He thinks his problems are his burden, and not anyone else’s.” Something to remember the next time you’re trying to get your employees to open up at a safety meeting and talk about their feelings toward the risks of their jobs.
Chaos on camera
One scene in “The War Tapes” is filmed through the greenish glow of a night vision camera filter. “It’s O-dark thirty and we’re rolling out. Things are hot and heavy out there,” says a soldier. Then all hell breaks loose. Ka-boom. “IED!. IED!” “Are we on fire? Where’s our target?” Rat-ta-tat-tat-tat, metal buckling, explosions, flames, tracers in the night, shouts, machine guns rattling. The camera jerks, rolling upside down at one point. Images are blurred like an earthquake is being filmed. It is the so-called “fog of war.” No one knows what is happening. “Keep your vest on.” “Get to the gate.” “That’s a car bomb. Stay low.”
“We come back to camp,” says a soldier. “A couple hours later it comes down on you like a ton of bricks. How close you came to never seeing your family again. Never seeing my kids again.”
Something to keep in mind the next time at a safety meeting you want to discuss close calls, near-misses. These feelings, this fear of the consequences, it is there inside. Drawing it out is another matter.
“Every time you hear a boom…”
How do soldiers in fire zones, or employees in any kind of dangerous work, deal with the reality of their daily risks? Creeping along on patrol, one soldier recalls “a debate we had this morning over the consistency and texture of a severed limb. It was very real to us. One guy thought it was like ground-up, uncooked hamburger. Another guy said no, it was like pot roast.”
The soldiers in Charlie Company don’t deny their reality, not all the time. “Every single time you go out, there are IEDs, if not hitting you hitting someone,” says one of the men. There’s no way to defend IEDs. It’s unbelievable.” Says another: “Every time you hear a boom, somebody’s going to heaven.”
Dark humor. These guys have coping mechanisms the same as you’d find on a construction site or in a factory:
“If you’re a guy, this whole macho kick-ass thing sounds pretty good. I dare you to shoot. Just once.”
“Mike likes to play macho sometimes like it hasn’t affected him,” says his wife, “but I know it has.”
“You gotta have a thick skin. Everybody rags on everybody.”
“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Everyone bitches.”
“On a practical level, when I’m out there on the road, it’s my guys versus them.” Camaraderie.
“We’re tired. We’re so cynical, man. It’s only a matter of time before our number is up.” Fatalism.
“Going through today’s events in our heads, whether we want to or not,” says one guy. “I really should thank God for saving my sorry ass today.” Faith.
Honesty. “My main fear as a leader is making a mistake that could cost my guys their lives. They’ve given me this responsibility.”
Something to think about at a safety meeting when your audience seems asleep, apathetic, in denial. Maybe so. Maybe no. Know the coping mechanisms. Know the difference between apathy and denial. Charlie Company is absolutely not apathetic about their own safety, about getting home alive.
“I thought of my mom”
A final scene: Charlie Company is on night patrol. “This is crazy, going this fast. It’s pitch black out,” says one soldier. Suddenly a vehicle pulls out and cuts across the road. Then a young woman steps out of the darkness. “We heard the crash of her body hitting the Humvee. The worst thing of my life I saw,” says one of the Charlie Company men. “The Humvee barreling at 50 miles an hour and we never saw her. She’s in pieces now. She ran out in front of us. Unbelievable. I remember looking down and seeing crumbled cookies. She was carrying cookies. I thought of my mom.
“I will remember that for the rest of my life.”
“Daddy’s got to go to work,” a soldier tells his young child in a last phone call home before deployment from Fort Dix, New Jersey to Iraq in 2004.
This is a different kind of work, of course. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count combat injuries and deaths in its annual surveys. If it did, the military would unquestionably qualify as America’s most dangerous job.
No, this dad going to “work” is not a lobsterman who might drown in a storm after getting entangled in nets and being dragged overboard.
He’s not a logger who could get struck in the head and killed by a loose log rolling down a hillside.
He’s not a crop duster, a steel worker, a power line installer, a truck driver, farm laborer, construction worker, a road-weary salesman. He’s not in any of the jobs ranked by the BLS as the ten most dangerous in the U.S.
“If you let the fear get to you…”
Sergeant Steve Pink, 24, was one of three National Guardsman who agreed to use small, hand-held cameras and film their year in Iraq. “An ongoing day-to-day account from the fine eyes of the soldiers of Charlie Company,” says one of them, in the documentary that resulted, “The War Tapes.”
Pink approaches his work with a mental attitude similar to many who confront what might be called “high-hazard risks” on the job. “There are times you’re kind of afraid,” he says. “If you let the fear get to you, you’re really not going to be doing your job.”
Another of the soldier-filmmakers, Specialist Mike Moriarty, ponders at one point, “What motivates a soldier to go into a situation he might not come back from?”
Why would miners in Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine trek 1,500 feet under an unstable “bouncing” mountain as one miner described, day after day? What makes ironworkers scale skeletons of skyscrapers and bridge spans? Motivates fishermen to go out to the seas in ships in some terrible weather conditions, and risk falling overboard and drowning?
For many, it’s more than a paycheck. Pride, for instance.
The morning commute
“For many occupations danger is part of the job description,” reported CNNMoney.com in an article on America’s most dangerous jobs. None more so than soldiering in a war zone. Charlie Company arrives at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. “You are in danger right here, right now,” is the official greeting they receive in a pre-recorded televised briefing.
Among the risks: Improvised explosive devices — IEDs. Rocket-propelled grenades — RPGs. Suicide car bombers. Mortar attacks. Ambushes. Friendly fire and highway accidents.
Charlie Company’s job is to go out every day and provide convoy security for tractor-trailers and tankers moving, among other supplies, cheese, food, soda, paper, fuel and raw sewage.
They ride inside tan Humvees weighing 10,300 pounds each with four-inch thick, 75-pound windows. “On your way out to work, you can roll up to a Burger King drive-through window, with the driveway widened for the Humvees, and get a burger and fries, just like home,” says one soldier.
“It’s ‘sporting chance Tuesday’,” says another, as they roll out one morning. “We like to give the opposition an advantage so we ride with the windows down.” He pauses. “Not true. Not frickin’ safe. We ride with the windows up.”
“It’s our safety before theirs. Unfortunately, you don’t know which civilians might be insurgents.”
Keep out
The dangers of the job are on the minds, in the back of the minds, or never far from the minds of the men of Charlie Company. They simply seldom talk about it. “You almost have to have a false sense of security to do this business,” says one. “You almost have to convince yourself in your head that it won’t happen to me.”
“I shook a man’s hand that wasn’t attached to his arm today,” says Sergeant Pink. “If I play the odds, one of us will die before the tour is over. It’s something I don’t like to think about.”
At one point in the film, Pink’s wife says, “Steve doesn’t really like to let people in. He thinks his problems are his burden, and not anyone else’s.” Something to remember the next time you’re trying to get your employees to open up at a safety meeting and talk about their feelings toward the risks of their jobs.
Chaos on camera
One scene in “The War Tapes” is filmed through the greenish glow of a night vision camera filter. “It’s O-dark thirty and we’re rolling out. Things are hot and heavy out there,” says a soldier. Then all hell breaks loose. Ka-boom. “IED!. IED!” “Are we on fire? Where’s our target?” Rat-ta-tat-tat-tat, metal buckling, explosions, flames, tracers in the night, shouts, machine guns rattling. The camera jerks, rolling upside down at one point. Images are blurred like an earthquake is being filmed. It is the so-called “fog of war.” No one knows what is happening. “Keep your vest on.” “Get to the gate.” “That’s a car bomb. Stay low.”
“We come back to camp,” says a soldier. “A couple hours later it comes down on you like a ton of bricks. How close you came to never seeing your family again. Never seeing my kids again.”
Something to keep in mind the next time at a safety meeting you want to discuss close calls, near-misses. These feelings, this fear of the consequences, it is there inside. Drawing it out is another matter.
“Every time you hear a boom…”
How do soldiers in fire zones, or employees in any kind of dangerous work, deal with the reality of their daily risks? Creeping along on patrol, one soldier recalls “a debate we had this morning over the consistency and texture of a severed limb. It was very real to us. One guy thought it was like ground-up, uncooked hamburger. Another guy said no, it was like pot roast.”
The soldiers in Charlie Company don’t deny their reality, not all the time. “Every single time you go out, there are IEDs, if not hitting you hitting someone,” says one of the men. There’s no way to defend IEDs. It’s unbelievable.” Says another: “Every time you hear a boom, somebody’s going to heaven.”
Dark humor. These guys have coping mechanisms the same as you’d find on a construction site or in a factory:
“If you’re a guy, this whole macho kick-ass thing sounds pretty good. I dare you to shoot. Just once.”
“Mike likes to play macho sometimes like it hasn’t affected him,” says his wife, “but I know it has.”
“You gotta have a thick skin. Everybody rags on everybody.”
“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Everyone bitches.”
“On a practical level, when I’m out there on the road, it’s my guys versus them.” Camaraderie.
“We’re tired. We’re so cynical, man. It’s only a matter of time before our number is up.” Fatalism.
“Going through today’s events in our heads, whether we want to or not,” says one guy. “I really should thank God for saving my sorry ass today.” Faith.
Honesty. “My main fear as a leader is making a mistake that could cost my guys their lives. They’ve given me this responsibility.”
Something to think about at a safety meeting when your audience seems asleep, apathetic, in denial. Maybe so. Maybe no. Know the coping mechanisms. Know the difference between apathy and denial. Charlie Company is absolutely not apathetic about their own safety, about getting home alive.
“I thought of my mom”
A final scene: Charlie Company is on night patrol. “This is crazy, going this fast. It’s pitch black out,” says one soldier. Suddenly a vehicle pulls out and cuts across the road. Then a young woman steps out of the darkness. “We heard the crash of her body hitting the Humvee. The worst thing of my life I saw,” says one of the Charlie Company men. “The Humvee barreling at 50 miles an hour and we never saw her. She’s in pieces now. She ran out in front of us. Unbelievable. I remember looking down and seeing crumbled cookies. She was carrying cookies. I thought of my mom.
“I will remember that for the rest of my life.”
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