It's great when everyone feels comfortable in their jobs, knowing what's expected of them and knowing how to do it. But when workers and management start feeling too comfortable, it's time to watch for signs of complacency, one of the greatest detractors from workplace safety. If your company is battling a complacent workforce, your ace in the hole is your frontline supervisor. Here are three ways a supervisor can help.

Complacency Knows No Bounds

Complacency can affect all levels of a company. On the floor, workers may become overly comfortable in their positions. This can lead to inattention and to injuries.

Management can also become complacent, especially if too much emphasis is placed on the company safety record. When the safety record is good, it's easy to shift focus to other areas such as productivity, quality, sales or customer service. In turn, this shift in management focus may be noticed by workers, further swinging their attention away from safety in favor of other company objectives.

As a supervisor, it's easy to become complacent as well. We are often bombarded with high priority tasks, so we expect our workers to perform as they have been trained.

To counter the effects of complacency, there are three things a frontline supervisor can do.

1. Observe Behaviors

It is extremely important for supervisors to monitor their workforce for signs of complacency. Supervisors know their staff better than anyone and should be able to identify when workers become too comfortable or overconfident. Telltale signs of complacency are:

If your workers are displaying these signs, you need to introduce methods that will challenge workers regularly to remain safe on the job. These can be:

You must keep safety at the forefront of worker consciousness, and remind your workers that safety needn't be compromised to meet other company objectives.

2. Supplement Group Training With Individual Assistance

Most companies have training programs that comply with OSHA safety training mandates. These training programs are often held for groups in conference or training rooms. But believing too much in the effectiveness of group training is one way that companies display their complacency.

A supervisor's job is to ensure that the group training is reflected in individual on-the-job situations. You must make the training immediately relevant to the workers. Workers can sit through the training sessions and then go to work and circumvent a guard to prevent a jam or work on a piece of equipment without first locking it out.

Any time a worker is found to be performing a task contrary to the safety training, the supervisor must address it on the spot. Individual work instructions are very effective when delivered immediately in response to an unsafe work practice.

3. Communicate Upwards

Supervisors are accustomed to receiving instruction from higher level management and disseminating the information among the workers. However, communicating safety needs from workers to managers is a great way to fight complacency as well.

Whether it's a safety concern raised by a worker or a vigilant supervisor's observation of frequent unsafe behavior in the same area of the workplace, communicate it. Notifying management of unsafe conditions keeps everyone focused on safety.

Just remember to follow up with both the management and the worker(s) involved. Workers want to know that their supervisors truly are concerned with their individual well-being, and managers are people, too; they may forget or get sidetracked.

Keep in mind that the goal is to get results when we become aware of any unsafe conditions or areas in need of improvement.

Conclusion

Anyone can become complacent at work. Frontline supervisors are in an excellent position to provide the individual attention needed to keep workers and management focused on workplace safety, while working together to achieve other profitable company objectives.

TOP 10 TRAINING TOOLS

In Safety Smart! Online in January 2008

By Aileen McHugh

Last week, SafetyXChange shared the results of its survey on how access to the Internet has affected your jobs as safety professionals. Of course, I was thrilled to read that those of you who have an online component in your safety program ranked Safety Smart! Online as your top resource. (For those of you who were not familiar with the options, Safety Smart! Online is a comprehensive database of 15,000 tools for safety meetings published by Bongarde Media.)

I thought it might interest you to know how your colleagues use Safety Smart! Online. So here's a list of the top 10 safety talks downloaded in January 2008. All but one are One-Click Safety Meetings, which include an audio-PowerPoint Safety Talk, along with relevant regulations and legal analysis, an illustrated training poster, a Fatality Report, an announcement poster, printable certificate for attendees and tips for the trainer.

Look through the list and see whether you would have chosen the same safety topics in January 2008.

Top 10 Safety Training Downloads

Aileen McHugh is the Product Manager for Safety Smart! Online. She can be reached at aileenm@bongarde.com. For more information on Safety Smart! Online or to take a free trial, go to www.safetysmart.com/online-training.

I LEARNED ABOUT SAFETY FROM THAT

Young, Unsupervised, Armed - And Very Lucky!

I am a safety coordinator with a large hydro generation facility and have worked in safety in forestry, telecommunications and municipal safety for 24 years.

My first industrial summer job was with an auto parts manufacturer in a small town near my parent's farm. There were 23 students hired as summer relief that year and every morning we met as a group and a supervisor would send us off to various production lines and jobs. I was pretty bored standing all day at big punch presses and similar equipment.

The supervisor asked one morning if anyone had used a table saw and air nailer. I had used a table saw in grade 9 shop class and this sounded way better than the assembly line type jobs.

He took me over to a back part of the plant where there was a huge radial arm saw and showed me about 12 drawings of various sized pallets and shipping boxes that the parts would be sent out in.

My job was to wait for supervisors from the various departments to come and request a specific sized pallet or box. I was to pull out the drawing and make it from the pile of lumber outside the shop using the radial arm saw and hydraulic nailer. I had no idea how the nailer worked except that I had to depress the nose of the gun and squeeze the trigger.

The employee who normally did this job was very senior and basically had the whole summer off for vacation. The other part of his job was to deliver parts around town and to other plants. They did not want me driving so I basically had a half-time job. I did not want to go back to the line so I got really good at building the boxes quickly for the various departments. I found an empty warehouse out back and started building units ahead of the requests. That meant I also got to drive the forklift.

By the end of the summer I had filled the warehouse with about a year's supply of boxes and pallets. Every time the supervisor came by, I was busy at work. During that time I found out I could manually depress the safety switch and fire 3-inch nails up to 50 feet across the room. Only once did I nail my work boot to the concrete floor.

That was how I got started with a huge interest in young worker safety and continue teaching and mentoring to this day.

Bill Dickerson, CRSP
NW Fossil Health & Safety Resource Officer
Thunder Bay GS

What experiences propelled you into the field of safety? Share your stories with SafetyXChange members. Send them to catherinej@bongarde.com.

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