Safety Perspective
Looking for some help. I had everyone do a safety survey as part of National Safety Month. The survey was simple. It was one question that asked "Why is safety important to you?" So far, I have been impressed with the answers. The goal of it was to help people gain perspective on how important working safely every single day is. Now my goal is to take some of the answers or combine a common theme of answers to display where employees will see it every day as a reminder. Anyone do something similar? Like maybe a word wall or wall of safety motivation? Idk but if you already do something or did something in the past I would love to hear about it!
Comments (4)
You can use a word cloud generator that will stress the most used words. You can tweak it to really look nice for putting on the wall.
We had a contest at our facility where people would put in a safety slogan to be picked for some paid time off. It was an incentive program to build safety awareness. I compiled the slogans together and presented them to leadership at my monthly safety meeting. They would choose.... It was anonymous so they couldn't pick their favorite employee. Once chosen that person got company wide recognition, paid time off, and a banner with their slogan which was hung up in a common area of the facility for everyone to see. It was fun seeing what people would come up with. Either way those people who entered a slogan in got points towards the incentive program so they could get the bonus. It was a win win situation.
What a simple but outstanding question! I thought about it all afternoon and I think two that shaped my safety philosophy at the beginning of my career!
First, In June of 1972 I started a summer job in an auto parts factory. It was the day after high school graduation. I felt comfortable there as my mother also worked there, and my dad worked at another plant down the street. I grew up with stories about factory work. Somehow, I knew even though I was going off to college I had a feeling eventually my career would be in another plant, at the time I thought it would be as an engineer.
My foreman sat me down in front of a mechanical press and told me not to touch anything until his most experienced setup man came and set up my guarding and instructed me on what to do. The press had pull-back guards and since I was tall the cables would need to be adjusted for my thirty-eight” arms.
The setup guy came by a few minutes later and started to adjust the guards and straps on me. As he worked I could not help but notice he was missing two fingers on each hand! I kept thinking to myself, “This is the most experienced guy they have? He is missing four fingers!”
He must have noticed my staring at his hands and suddenly stopped working and held his hands up near my face. He said, “So, you noticed my missing fingers. Let me give you your first lesson on mechanical power presses. These things are the most dangerous machines in industry! You take these machines for granted for even an instant this could happen to you! Never ever forget that! The first lesson I learned was that working around machines is dangerous!!
Second, a little over 4 years later I found myself in a large automotive foundry! I was not an engineer, but a supervisor. I had just graduated from college a couple of weeks earlier. It was hot, dangerous, high-paced, and extremely exciting. The very first thing I was given was a DuPont STOP Workbook, I had learned BBS in 1976!