By Rob Roloson, AGC Safety Management Consultant/Industrial Hygienist
One of the biggest “aha moments” I had as a safety professional came from trying to define what safety is. How can I determine whether a job site is safe, track safety improvements across a company, or ask an employee to work safely without a concrete definition of what safety actually is? How can we answer the question: are we lucky or are we good?
Many think that safety is the absence of injury. This isn’t an accident; the total recordable injury rate (TRIR) is a metric that safety professionals have used to measure safety for nearly 50 years. We use it to compare companies and industries, benchmark against peers, and even pre-qualify subcontractors. We have been conditioned to believe that a low TRIR means that a company is safe. But TRIR is a lagging (backward-facing) indicator that records events that have already happened. Just as the last flip of a coin has no bearing on the next, TRIR doesn’t predict future performance, and it doesn’t answer whether you have been lucky or good.
Similarly, many of you may have heard of a “zero-injury” safety philosophy. This concept holds that every injury is preventable, and no level of injury, illness, or harm is acceptable. Zero harm is an aspirational goal we should all strive for, but zero injuries doesn’t always mean we have been working safely. For example, if someone drives home drunk one night and there is no accident, none of us would describe that as a safe act.
Instead of defining safety as the absence of injury, we should focus on hazard recognition and adequate controls. Research by the Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) indicates that construction workers relying on instinct and traditional hazard assessments identify only about 45% of workplace hazards. But with training and use of a pneumonic tool called the energy wheel, employees increased their hazard recognition by nearly 30%. This shows that training can improve employees’ hazard identification skills. Oregon OSHA offers an online Hazard Identification course to help employees get started. Pre-job briefings, job hazard analysis (JHAs), and quarterly hazard assessments are also effective tools that can increase employees’ awareness of hazards on the jobsite.
Once a hazard is identified, it must have a corresponding control in place to effectively mitigate exposure, even if someone makes a mistake. These can be physical barriers that prevent an employee from entering a dangerous area, fall protection systems that are designed to prevent or arrest a fall, guarding machinery, ventilation, and isolation from electrical contact.
With improved hazard identification and controls on our job sites, we can more accurately assess whether the job is safe. Were the hazards correctly identified? Were there controls in place for the identified hazards? This concept is at the root of what the Edison Energy Institute (EEI) calls High Energy Control Assessments (HECA), a new method of measuring performance by assessing how well front-line employees are protected from life-threatening hazards.
The next time someone asks if a job site is safe, stop looking for the absence of injuries, and start looking for the presence of controls.