I want you to try something: Read this story with absolutely no attitudes or preconceived ideas. Form no opinions about what you read. Shut down all of your emotions and be completely neutral. When you’re finished, discuss the story with someone else without allowing your attitude to influence what you say.

Of course, I’m asking for the impossible. Nobody moves through life in a “neutral” state. Our environment influences our attitudes. And because the environment changes by the moment, our attitudes are in a constant state of flux. This dynamic of changing environment and attitudes is what guides our decisions and behaviors. But despite the dramatic role that attitudes play in our daily life, they’re often neglected in the development and implementation of injury prevention processes.

Of Attitudes and Injuries

I often begin a management discussion about attitude with the following three questions:

1. If two of your employees get hurt and one of the injured employees loves his job and the other hates it, who do you think is going to recover faster, come back to work quicker and cost the company less money?
2. You can hire one of two groups. One is a group of unmotivated, disgruntled and depressed individuals; the individuals in the other group are all motivated, satisfied and happy. Which group do you think will be more productive and experience fewer injuries?
3. Why did you answer these two questions the way that you did?

All too often, people believe that attitude is unrelated to safety. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you don’t believe, consider this question: Why is it that medically similar back injuries take significantly longer to recover from and cost more to treat when the injury is covered by workers’ compensation? Is it because the medical community knows more about treating injuries that aren’t work-related? Is it because patients who suffer non-work related back injuries go to less expensive clinics?

Of course not. The reality is that the workers’ compensation system has an undeniable impact on the attitudes of business owners, injured workers and the legal and medical communities. The effects of the workers’ comp attitude are often manifested in the form of higher medical bills, longer recovery times and overall less favorable case outcomes.

How Attitudes Affect Injury Prevention

If attitudes weren’t so important to behavior and decision making, injury prevention would be much simpler. After all, we have enough technical information to make the workplace safe. Thus, we know enough about body mechanics to teach everyone a better way to perform material handling. We know enough about human physiology to give everyone appropriate stretches to perform throughout the workday. We also know enough to identify the most appropriate equipment for a job.

So if we know all these things, the problem must lie elsewhere. That problem is attitudes. Most companies are well versed in the “what to do” and pay less attention to the “how to do it.” This disconnect between the technical and attitudinal impairs injury prevention.

For example, many companies conduct classes for employees on how to work in neutral postures before they have any idea whether employees have a desire to work in neutral postures, whether the job is conducive to neutral postures or whether the company will reinforce these behaviors until they become habit. Failing to address these questions can have a negative impact on attitudes. And negative attitudes make the injury prevention strategy less effective.

Conclusion

So how can a company get everyone “on board” with an injury prevention process? One of the best places to start is to find out what has kept employees from getting on board in the past. This requires some self-examination. Next week, we’ll look at 10 attitude influencers that may be sabotaging the success of your injury prevention program.

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