There’s “Obamacare” (healthcare reform) and then there’s “OSHAscare.” I received yet another OSHAscare email this morning from a company trying to foment fear of inspections, penalties, jail time, yadda, yadda, yadda. Businesses from newsletters to consultants to attorneys have profited from OSHA scare tactics since the day the agency went into business. But in 2011, language like this from this morning’s email seems to be beamed from another planet:
“The Obama administration has identified OSHA compliance as a top enforcement priority and has promised to aggressively monitor businesses for compliance with workplace safety requirements. Employers and their counsel should prepare now for increased OSHA inspections, closer scrutiny of injury recordkeeping and reporting, a stronger focus on investigations of employee whistleblower claims, and tougher negotiations with OSHA regarding penalties and citations.”
How does that jive with the GOP’s assault on all things OSHA? For example, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently commented: “Since 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been charged with enforcing federal safety and health standards in America’s workplaces. With nearly 14 million individuals out of work, (it is time to) examine OSHA’s current policies and priorities and how they affect job growth.
President Obama’s FY12 budget, unveiled last week and immediately dubbed “Dead on Arrival” by Washington pundits, includes a wish list for OSHA that would definitely add fuel to the fire of the OSHAscare crowd. A couple of million bucks to research the much vaunted Injury and Illness Prevention Program (I2P2), more inspectors, more whistleblower investigators, standard proposals for silica, beryllium, confined spaces in construction, infectious diseases. Inspection targeting of smaller employers.
Forget about it. Ain’t gonna happen, no way, no how. Word in Washington is that House Republicans are already thinking about dragging OSHA officials up the Hill to explain I2P2. That rule, OSHA boss Dr. David Michaels’ numero uno priority, should have been the baseline standard OSHA set in 1970. Should have been its first regulation. Now in 2011 it appears to be a dead reg walking. Some critics, of which there are many, call it a backdoor entrance to ergonomics regulation. That comes close to a death blow.
Sure, you’ll keep reading press releases from national OSHA about five- and six-figure fines. And naturally those penalties will be played up by the OSHAscare crowd. But how about a little context, some perspective here. Out of millions of workplaces OSHA inspects a tiny fraction. Most often something seriously wrong has to occur in a shop for the agency to levy a heavy fine.
The OSHAscare stuff has always seemed cynical to me. Perversely humorous. But given the current climate, it seems even more out of touch.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Heated regulatory rhetoric: Sound and fury signifying… not much
Even during times when the White House has been the residence of a Republican President have we not heard such rhetoric over the little agency called OSHA. Its budget, after all, is roughly $500 million. Big reg brother EPA runs with a budget of more than $7 billion.
The new generation of House Republicans, inspired if not threatened by the national Tea Party movement, are acting like teenagers, hormones at a fever pitch, who’ve just been given the keys to the car. Their rhetoric is all “take no prisoners.” It plays well with voters back home who want to see less government, less spending, less regulation, and many more jobs.
So the House, thanks to its GOP majority and frenetic freshmen representatives, passed a funding bill to get the federal government through the current fiscal year, ending October 31, 2011, that slashes $60 billion from the fed budget.
OSHA would lose about one-fifth of its budget, or about $100 million.
EPA would stand to lose almost half of its budget, a cut of $3 billion, that’s with a B, out of its $7.3 billion in funding.
So what happens next? Eventually the wailing and nashing of teeth over supposed job-killing regs will die down, likely around the time in early March when differences between the House and Senate budget plans will require loud talk to take a back seat to backroom deal-making.
And when it comes to cutting deals, it’s the Senate that will act like the adults who take the keys away from the kids. OSHA and MSHA and NIOSH and EPA will all stand to lose dollars, but nothing of the magnitude now being shouted about by the GOP and decried by organized labor and safety advocacy groups.
Washington is more Hollywood than Hollywood in some respects. Elected representatives must play to the crowd, the voters who put them in office. So they follow a script sure to please constituents back home. But it’s theatre. Hearings are scripted theatre. Bellicose speeches are theatre. In Hollywood, power brokers seldom cross each other in public exchanges. Rabble rousers in Tinseltown often end up blacklisted and searching for work in Europe.
So take all the current chatter about 8,000 fewer OSHA inspections, OSHA’s website going dark, and national air pollution rivaling China’s with the proverbial grain of cynicism. It’s simply the way Washington works, or doesn’t work.
The new generation of House Republicans, inspired if not threatened by the national Tea Party movement, are acting like teenagers, hormones at a fever pitch, who’ve just been given the keys to the car. Their rhetoric is all “take no prisoners.” It plays well with voters back home who want to see less government, less spending, less regulation, and many more jobs.
So the House, thanks to its GOP majority and frenetic freshmen representatives, passed a funding bill to get the federal government through the current fiscal year, ending October 31, 2011, that slashes $60 billion from the fed budget.
OSHA would lose about one-fifth of its budget, or about $100 million.
EPA would stand to lose almost half of its budget, a cut of $3 billion, that’s with a B, out of its $7.3 billion in funding.
So what happens next? Eventually the wailing and nashing of teeth over supposed job-killing regs will die down, likely around the time in early March when differences between the House and Senate budget plans will require loud talk to take a back seat to backroom deal-making.
And when it comes to cutting deals, it’s the Senate that will act like the adults who take the keys away from the kids. OSHA and MSHA and NIOSH and EPA will all stand to lose dollars, but nothing of the magnitude now being shouted about by the GOP and decried by organized labor and safety advocacy groups.
Washington is more Hollywood than Hollywood in some respects. Elected representatives must play to the crowd, the voters who put them in office. So they follow a script sure to please constituents back home. But it’s theatre. Hearings are scripted theatre. Bellicose speeches are theatre. In Hollywood, power brokers seldom cross each other in public exchanges. Rabble rousers in Tinseltown often end up blacklisted and searching for work in Europe.
So take all the current chatter about 8,000 fewer OSHA inspections, OSHA’s website going dark, and national air pollution rivaling China’s with the proverbial grain of cynicism. It’s simply the way Washington works, or doesn’t work.
Monday, February 14, 2011
The second half of your life
How much fight do you have in you?
Almost half — 47 percent — of ISHN readers are between ages 50-59, according to our 27th annual “White Paper” reader research conducted in September, 2010. Hello, AARP® benefits. You know, there’s a reason the organization no longer goes by the American Association of Retired Persons — who retires anymore? Especially in their 50s? Hedge fund managers, Silicon Valley inventors, Alex Rodriquez, OK maybe.
Another 16 percent of readers are over age 60, meaning almost two-thirds (63 percent) of you reading this magazine are age 50+ and have 30 to 40 years experience.
What do to with all that savvy, all those war wounds.
Says one good old boy from Louisiana: “Over the years I've been hired, fired, left a job because of bosses who were clueless, went to jobs with a strong safety program only to find that half of those were hiding some problems. I've been involved with safety since about 1961. I'm one of those who, years ago, decided this was my life, my career, and my calling. There's damned few of us around nowadays that are willing to fight the good fight.”
This old boy’s still got some fight left in him. “I'm still working part-time. I do the technical writing for the fellow I turned my consultancy over to. I do the work in my home office, take my time and generally get it right.”
Faded finish line
Knowledge workers such as safety professionals are never really “finished,” as physically and mentally exhausting blue collar work will retire a man after 40 years, wrote management genius and self-described “social ecologist” Peter Drucker in his book, “The Essential Drucker.”
But Drucker added this caveat: “Forty or fifty years in the same kind of work (say safety management) is much too long for most people. They deteriorate (from all the fighting), get bored (by all the recordkeeping and compliance chores), lose all joy in their work (44 percent of readers say work hours will increase in 2011; 50 percent say job-related stress will increase), “retire on the job” (NIOSH calls it presentism: the lights are on but no one is home) and become a burden to themselves (depressed) and to everyone around them (coworkers, family, fishing buddies, golf partners).”
Now you might call some of these symptoms your stereotypical midlife crisis. Drucker, though, isn’t buying that. “It is mostly boredom,” he wrote. “At age forty-five most executives have reached the peak of their business career and know it. They are good at their jobs. But few are learning anything anymore, few are contributing anything anymore, and few expect the job again to become a challenge and a satisfaction.”
This is borne out in our reader research. Of pros age 50-59, 54 percent say the level of satisfaction with their work will remain the same in 2011. Fifty-six percent say the level of their effectiveness will stay the same. Can you say “maintenance mode”? Job satisfaction and effectiveness in 2011 will increase for about a third of pros, and decrease for one in ten.
“A deadly bore”
Most mid-life pros, also known as baby boomer pros, I think can relate to Drucker’s words: “…the original work that was so challenging when the knowledge worker was thirty has become a deadly bore when the knowledge worker is fifty — and still he or she is likely to face another fifteen if not another twenty years of work.”
Maybe this explains pros clock-watching while accompanying OSHA inspectors on an audit, or yawning over another recordkeeping interpretation, or restlessly toe-tapping at their 127th hazcom refresher class.
Drucker (1909 – 2005) might have been the original proponent of taking personal responsibility for branding oneself, “You, Inc.” Of course much goes into this career-long branding process, said Drucker: “The knowledge worker, first of all, is expected to get the right things done. Éffectiveness is a habit built on a complex of practices. The effective person focuses on contributions. Knowledge workers who do not ask themselves, ‘What can I contribute?’ are not only likely to aim too low, they are likely to aim at the wrong thing.”
And so we have the legacy of OSHA compliance cops, contributing nothing but compliance to the organization. Their aim is low, misplaced, and their “brand” suffers for it.
Branding yourself calls for managing yourself. Drucker was emphatic about the necessity to manage oneself. He advised: Know your strengths, improve your strengths. Where is arrogance (“I can recite OSHA rules in my sleep”) causing disabling ignorance (“My company’s strategic plan, what strategic plan?”) What are your values? (Drucker as a young and successful investment banker in London in the mid-1930s did not see himself making a contribution. So he quit. “People, I realized, were my values,” he wrote.
Drucker sounds like many safety pros I know. It’s not about the bucks. Forty-three percent of our readers will have an income of between $50,000 to $80,000 in 2011, according to our research.
If you fit our reader research demographic profile, what are you going to do with the second half of your life?
Concluding chapters
Drucker offered three alternatives when you reach the point that your house is empty, your kids are gone, you need income and you need something challenging. 1) Start a second and different career. 2) Develop a parallel career. Keep working, full or part-time, at your old job, and create a parallel job: consulting is an obvious avenue. 3) Be a social entrepreneur and channel your knowledge into a new start-up.
People who want to make something (that contribution thing again) of the second half of their life will be the few and the bold, to paraphrase Drucker. Most, he said, will “retire on the job, continue being bored, keeping on with their routine, and counting the years to the move to Vegas, Sedona, or Sanibel Island. (Full disclosure: I do know some professionals on Sanibel Island who haven’t cashed it in.)
Drucker the social ecologist was spot on when he said, “In a knowledge society we expect everyone to be a ‘success’.” Say hello to “American Idol,” “Survivor,” youth sports and SAT scores. If that’s the case, Drucker said it’s all the more important to cultivate your second half in a way that allows you “to continue to make a contribution, make a difference, and seize opportunities to be a leader, to be respected, to be a success.”
Of course Drucker was an outlier, very much in the minority in this regard. No Arizona sunsets or 19th watering hole for him. He wrote 39 books, including 9 in the last decade of his life, taught his last class at 92, and consulted well into his mid-90s.
So for the many of you staring at the second half of your life, in or out of safety, how do you define success?
Almost half — 47 percent — of ISHN readers are between ages 50-59, according to our 27th annual “White Paper” reader research conducted in September, 2010. Hello, AARP® benefits. You know, there’s a reason the organization no longer goes by the American Association of Retired Persons — who retires anymore? Especially in their 50s? Hedge fund managers, Silicon Valley inventors, Alex Rodriquez, OK maybe.
Another 16 percent of readers are over age 60, meaning almost two-thirds (63 percent) of you reading this magazine are age 50+ and have 30 to 40 years experience.
What do to with all that savvy, all those war wounds.
Says one good old boy from Louisiana: “Over the years I've been hired, fired, left a job because of bosses who were clueless, went to jobs with a strong safety program only to find that half of those were hiding some problems. I've been involved with safety since about 1961. I'm one of those who, years ago, decided this was my life, my career, and my calling. There's damned few of us around nowadays that are willing to fight the good fight.”
This old boy’s still got some fight left in him. “I'm still working part-time. I do the technical writing for the fellow I turned my consultancy over to. I do the work in my home office, take my time and generally get it right.”
Faded finish line
Knowledge workers such as safety professionals are never really “finished,” as physically and mentally exhausting blue collar work will retire a man after 40 years, wrote management genius and self-described “social ecologist” Peter Drucker in his book, “The Essential Drucker.”
But Drucker added this caveat: “Forty or fifty years in the same kind of work (say safety management) is much too long for most people. They deteriorate (from all the fighting), get bored (by all the recordkeeping and compliance chores), lose all joy in their work (44 percent of readers say work hours will increase in 2011; 50 percent say job-related stress will increase), “retire on the job” (NIOSH calls it presentism: the lights are on but no one is home) and become a burden to themselves (depressed) and to everyone around them (coworkers, family, fishing buddies, golf partners).”
Now you might call some of these symptoms your stereotypical midlife crisis. Drucker, though, isn’t buying that. “It is mostly boredom,” he wrote. “At age forty-five most executives have reached the peak of their business career and know it. They are good at their jobs. But few are learning anything anymore, few are contributing anything anymore, and few expect the job again to become a challenge and a satisfaction.”
This is borne out in our reader research. Of pros age 50-59, 54 percent say the level of satisfaction with their work will remain the same in 2011. Fifty-six percent say the level of their effectiveness will stay the same. Can you say “maintenance mode”? Job satisfaction and effectiveness in 2011 will increase for about a third of pros, and decrease for one in ten.
“A deadly bore”
Most mid-life pros, also known as baby boomer pros, I think can relate to Drucker’s words: “…the original work that was so challenging when the knowledge worker was thirty has become a deadly bore when the knowledge worker is fifty — and still he or she is likely to face another fifteen if not another twenty years of work.”
Maybe this explains pros clock-watching while accompanying OSHA inspectors on an audit, or yawning over another recordkeeping interpretation, or restlessly toe-tapping at their 127th hazcom refresher class.
Drucker (1909 – 2005) might have been the original proponent of taking personal responsibility for branding oneself, “You, Inc.” Of course much goes into this career-long branding process, said Drucker: “The knowledge worker, first of all, is expected to get the right things done. Éffectiveness is a habit built on a complex of practices. The effective person focuses on contributions. Knowledge workers who do not ask themselves, ‘What can I contribute?’ are not only likely to aim too low, they are likely to aim at the wrong thing.”
And so we have the legacy of OSHA compliance cops, contributing nothing but compliance to the organization. Their aim is low, misplaced, and their “brand” suffers for it.
Branding yourself calls for managing yourself. Drucker was emphatic about the necessity to manage oneself. He advised: Know your strengths, improve your strengths. Where is arrogance (“I can recite OSHA rules in my sleep”) causing disabling ignorance (“My company’s strategic plan, what strategic plan?”) What are your values? (Drucker as a young and successful investment banker in London in the mid-1930s did not see himself making a contribution. So he quit. “People, I realized, were my values,” he wrote.
Drucker sounds like many safety pros I know. It’s not about the bucks. Forty-three percent of our readers will have an income of between $50,000 to $80,000 in 2011, according to our research.
If you fit our reader research demographic profile, what are you going to do with the second half of your life?
Concluding chapters
Drucker offered three alternatives when you reach the point that your house is empty, your kids are gone, you need income and you need something challenging. 1) Start a second and different career. 2) Develop a parallel career. Keep working, full or part-time, at your old job, and create a parallel job: consulting is an obvious avenue. 3) Be a social entrepreneur and channel your knowledge into a new start-up.
People who want to make something (that contribution thing again) of the second half of their life will be the few and the bold, to paraphrase Drucker. Most, he said, will “retire on the job, continue being bored, keeping on with their routine, and counting the years to the move to Vegas, Sedona, or Sanibel Island. (Full disclosure: I do know some professionals on Sanibel Island who haven’t cashed it in.)
Drucker the social ecologist was spot on when he said, “In a knowledge society we expect everyone to be a ‘success’.” Say hello to “American Idol,” “Survivor,” youth sports and SAT scores. If that’s the case, Drucker said it’s all the more important to cultivate your second half in a way that allows you “to continue to make a contribution, make a difference, and seize opportunities to be a leader, to be respected, to be a success.”
Of course Drucker was an outlier, very much in the minority in this regard. No Arizona sunsets or 19th watering hole for him. He wrote 39 books, including 9 in the last decade of his life, taught his last class at 92, and consulted well into his mid-90s.
So for the many of you staring at the second half of your life, in or out of safety, how do you define success?
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Time: The great enemy of safety
“Effective people know that time is the limiting factor,” said management guru Peter Drucker. “Time is always in exceedingly short supply.” It’s irreplaceable, totally inelastic — you cannot buy, hire, rent, replicate or outsource time.
OSHA is under Republican guns this winter for what critics consider its job-killing regulations. They are job killers because they are time killers.
It takes time to put on personal protective equipment. It takes time to decipher OSHA’s injury recordkeeping rules. Lockout-tagout and confined space entry procedures, per OSHA requirements, take time. Process safety audits take time. Just ask BP.
An OSHA ergonomics rule, as any overburdened businessman would tell you, would have been the mother of all time-killing workplace regs. Think of how production lines would have slowed. All these assessments, job rotations, job redesigns… tick, tick, tick, the clock ticks away. Products must get out the door. Just in time. Quotas for production and sales must be met. Bonuses hinge on early completion of projects. The worse that can happen: time stops. The line stops. Downtime.
Too many workers in meat plants and other assembly jobs cannot get the time off to go to the bathroom. Rest breaks have to be bargained for or legislated. Time is money.
Observation and feedback sessions take time. Job safety analyses take time. Safety meetings way too frequently go into overtime. Training takes time and employees away from their work. So does a serious incident investigation. A wall-to-wall inspection. Or filling out a perception survey. Owning up to employee perceptions about safety, or the lack thereof, takes even more time.
Often when execs reject a safety professional’s proposal, they’re looking at their watches, so to speak. Doing the mental math. You want to bring in a speaker? Play games? Practice with the fire department? Have an evacuation drill? How long will it take?
Why aren’t safety issues on the agenda for board meetings? These are busy, harried, burdened people. Time is precious.
Time is the enemy of safety, but safety as traditionally practiced often wastes more time. One of Drucker’s four major time-wasters is lack of foresight. In safety it’s called fire-fighting, the recurrent crisis. Management by frenzied reactions.
“Malorganization” is another of Drucker’s time-wasters. Also known as death by meetings. “Meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule,” said Drucker. In safety, meetings are the norm. They are entirely expected. You have safety committee meetings, safety steering committee meetings, safety circles, safety rallies, safety contests, safety training sessions, safety champions meetings, team meetings.
An executive who knows little or nothing about safety judges by appearances, and it appears safety involves one meeting after the other.
Miscommunication wastes way too much time. And safety, which relies so heavily on communication, is very vulnerable to time wasted by employees and supervisors trying to figure out the latest procedure, posting, labeling, warning, protocol, compliance directive, letters of interpretation.
How to slay the great enemy of safety?
Be conscious of your requests for time, in all their many forms, and how they affect organizational behavior and priorities. Better to leave ‘em wanting more, said the comedian, cutting short his act. Apply that to your speeches. Avoid techno babble, long stories, bad jokes, unprepared presentations, bitch sessions and compound sentences. Omit unnecessary words. KISS. But do take the time to ask an employee how he’s doing. The rapport-building is worth your time.
OSHA is under Republican guns this winter for what critics consider its job-killing regulations. They are job killers because they are time killers.
It takes time to put on personal protective equipment. It takes time to decipher OSHA’s injury recordkeeping rules. Lockout-tagout and confined space entry procedures, per OSHA requirements, take time. Process safety audits take time. Just ask BP.
An OSHA ergonomics rule, as any overburdened businessman would tell you, would have been the mother of all time-killing workplace regs. Think of how production lines would have slowed. All these assessments, job rotations, job redesigns… tick, tick, tick, the clock ticks away. Products must get out the door. Just in time. Quotas for production and sales must be met. Bonuses hinge on early completion of projects. The worse that can happen: time stops. The line stops. Downtime.
Too many workers in meat plants and other assembly jobs cannot get the time off to go to the bathroom. Rest breaks have to be bargained for or legislated. Time is money.
Observation and feedback sessions take time. Job safety analyses take time. Safety meetings way too frequently go into overtime. Training takes time and employees away from their work. So does a serious incident investigation. A wall-to-wall inspection. Or filling out a perception survey. Owning up to employee perceptions about safety, or the lack thereof, takes even more time.
Often when execs reject a safety professional’s proposal, they’re looking at their watches, so to speak. Doing the mental math. You want to bring in a speaker? Play games? Practice with the fire department? Have an evacuation drill? How long will it take?
Why aren’t safety issues on the agenda for board meetings? These are busy, harried, burdened people. Time is precious.
Time is the enemy of safety, but safety as traditionally practiced often wastes more time. One of Drucker’s four major time-wasters is lack of foresight. In safety it’s called fire-fighting, the recurrent crisis. Management by frenzied reactions.
“Malorganization” is another of Drucker’s time-wasters. Also known as death by meetings. “Meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule,” said Drucker. In safety, meetings are the norm. They are entirely expected. You have safety committee meetings, safety steering committee meetings, safety circles, safety rallies, safety contests, safety training sessions, safety champions meetings, team meetings.
An executive who knows little or nothing about safety judges by appearances, and it appears safety involves one meeting after the other.
Miscommunication wastes way too much time. And safety, which relies so heavily on communication, is very vulnerable to time wasted by employees and supervisors trying to figure out the latest procedure, posting, labeling, warning, protocol, compliance directive, letters of interpretation.
How to slay the great enemy of safety?
Be conscious of your requests for time, in all their many forms, and how they affect organizational behavior and priorities. Better to leave ‘em wanting more, said the comedian, cutting short his act. Apply that to your speeches. Avoid techno babble, long stories, bad jokes, unprepared presentations, bitch sessions and compound sentences. Omit unnecessary words. KISS. But do take the time to ask an employee how he’s doing. The rapport-building is worth your time.
OSHA’s longest winter
“Effective people know that time is the limiting factor,” said management guru Peter Drucker. “Time is always in exceedingly short supply.” It’s irreplaceable, totally inelastic — you cannot buy, hire, rent, replicate or outsource time.
OSHA is under Republican guns this winter for what critics consider its job-killing regulations. They are job killers because they are time killers.
It takes time to put on personal protective equipment. It takes time to decipher OSHA’s injury recordkeeping rules. Lockout-tagout and confined space entry procedures, per OSHA requirements, take time. Process safety audits take time. Just ask BP.
An OSHA ergonomics rule, as any overburdened businessman would tell you, would have been the mother of all time-killing workplace regs. Think of how production lines would have slowed. All these assessments, job rotations, job redesigns… tick, tick, tick, the clock ticks away. Products must get out the door. Just in time. Quotas for production and sales must be met. Bonuses hinge on early completion of projects. The worse that can happen: time stops. The line stops. Downtime.
Too many workers in meat plants and other assembly jobs cannot get the time off to go to the bathroom. Rest breaks have to be bargained for or legislated. Time is money.
Observation and feedback sessions take time. Job safety analyses take time. Safety meetings way too frequently go into overtime. Training takes time and employees away from their work. So does a serious incident investigation. A wall-to-wall inspection. Or filling out a perception survey. Owning up to employee perceptions about safety, or the lack thereof, takes even more time.
Often when execs reject a safety professional’s proposal, they’re looking at their watches, so to speak. Doing the mental math. You want to bring in a speaker? Play games? Practice with the fire department? Have an evacuation drill? How long will it take?
Why aren’t safety issues on the agenda for board meetings? These are busy, harried, burdened people. Time is precious.
Time is the enemy of safety, but safety as traditionally practiced often wastes more time. One of Drucker’s four major time-wasters is lack of foresight. In safety it’s called fire-fighting, the recurrent crisis. Management by frenzied reactions.
“Malorganization” is another of Drucker’s time-wasters. Also known as death by meetings. “Meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule,” said Drucker. In safety, meetings are the norm. They are entirely expected. You have safety committee meetings, safety steering committee meetings, safety circles, safety rallies, safety contests, safety training sessions, safety champions meetings, team meetings.
An executive who knows little or nothing about safety judges by appearances, and it appears safety involves one meeting after the other.
Miscommunication wastes way too much time. And safety, which relies so heavily on communication, is very vulnerable to time wasted by employees and supervisors trying to figure out the latest procedure, posting, labeling, warning, protocol, compliance directive, letters of interpretation.
How to slay the great enemy of safety?
Be conscious of your requests for time, in all their many forms, and how they affect organizational behavior and priorities. Better to leave ‘em wanting more, said the comedian, cutting short his act. Apply that to your speeches. Avoid techno babble, long stories, bad jokes, unprepared presentations, bitch sessions and compound sentences. Omit unnecessary words. KISS. But do take the time to ask an employee how he’s doing. The rapport-building is worth your time.
OSHA is under Republican guns this winter for what critics consider its job-killing regulations. They are job killers because they are time killers.
It takes time to put on personal protective equipment. It takes time to decipher OSHA’s injury recordkeeping rules. Lockout-tagout and confined space entry procedures, per OSHA requirements, take time. Process safety audits take time. Just ask BP.
An OSHA ergonomics rule, as any overburdened businessman would tell you, would have been the mother of all time-killing workplace regs. Think of how production lines would have slowed. All these assessments, job rotations, job redesigns… tick, tick, tick, the clock ticks away. Products must get out the door. Just in time. Quotas for production and sales must be met. Bonuses hinge on early completion of projects. The worse that can happen: time stops. The line stops. Downtime.
Too many workers in meat plants and other assembly jobs cannot get the time off to go to the bathroom. Rest breaks have to be bargained for or legislated. Time is money.
Observation and feedback sessions take time. Job safety analyses take time. Safety meetings way too frequently go into overtime. Training takes time and employees away from their work. So does a serious incident investigation. A wall-to-wall inspection. Or filling out a perception survey. Owning up to employee perceptions about safety, or the lack thereof, takes even more time.
Often when execs reject a safety professional’s proposal, they’re looking at their watches, so to speak. Doing the mental math. You want to bring in a speaker? Play games? Practice with the fire department? Have an evacuation drill? How long will it take?
Why aren’t safety issues on the agenda for board meetings? These are busy, harried, burdened people. Time is precious.
Time is the enemy of safety, but safety as traditionally practiced often wastes more time. One of Drucker’s four major time-wasters is lack of foresight. In safety it’s called fire-fighting, the recurrent crisis. Management by frenzied reactions.
“Malorganization” is another of Drucker’s time-wasters. Also known as death by meetings. “Meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule,” said Drucker. In safety, meetings are the norm. They are entirely expected. You have safety committee meetings, safety steering committee meetings, safety circles, safety rallies, safety contests, safety training sessions, safety champions meetings, team meetings.
An executive who knows little or nothing about safety judges by appearances, and it appears safety involves one meeting after the other.
Miscommunication wastes way too much time. And safety, which relies so heavily on communication, is very vulnerable to time wasted by employees and supervisors trying to figure out the latest procedure, posting, labeling, warning, protocol, compliance directive, letters of interpretation.
How to slay the great enemy of safety?
Be conscious of your requests for time, in all their many forms, and how they affect organizational behavior and priorities. Better to leave ‘em wanting more, said the comedian, cutting short his act. Apply that to your speeches. Avoid techno babble, long stories, bad jokes, unprepared presentations, bitch sessions and compound sentences. Omit unnecessary words. KISS. But do take the time to ask an employee how he’s doing. The rapport-building is worth your time.
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