Episiode 205: Visible Safety

In this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast, host Dr. Mark French explores the nuances of organizational risk management and seasonal workplace dangers .

Balancing Public vs. Employee Safety

Dr. French begins by discussing two uncommon, nearly identical workplace fatalities occurring within the same week at typical lumber and home goods stores across the United States, where employees were crushed by unstable lumber stacks . He notes that while these stores present highly visible, strict safety protocols to the public—such as using flaggers and gating off active forklift areas—this standard does not always extend to employees . He suggests that large organizations often heavily focus on public safety and loss control to mitigate uncapped financial liabilities, while employee safety can be minimized because financial risks are legally capped by workers' compensation laws . This can create a false sense of security for workers who mistakenly believe a robust public safety program translates to their own protection .

Summer Hazards and Distracted Driving

The second half of the podcast addresses the inherent, heightened safety risks that arise during the summer, specifically for roadside construction workers . Dr. French emphasizes that despite company training, flashing lights, and protective trucks, workers are frequently injured or killed due to distracted driving and motorists blowing through work zones .

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast, talk about a few incidents in the news this time, and look at what are some of the inherent risks that come along with summer. This is the time of year where a lot of workers are out, and we've got to be more aware. This and more on the podcast, I

Unknown: 0:22

Welcome to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now, here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:32

Welcome to this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. I am so happy you join me. Always a pleasure to have you listening in, joining me for this. Always excited to be part of your podcast rotation. Thank you. This week, some news stories caught my attention, some that were kind of new to me and provoked a lot of thought. The other is unfortunately way too common, so let's start with the one that was kind of uncommon, and why it caught my attention. So, as I'm reading through the news, I'm looking for stories, and I have some help out there with some other people who blog about this, about fatalities in the workplace, and what caught me, my attention was there was one week in particular where there were two fatalities that looked extremely similar, similar, but they were completely across the United States, not even close to each other. I thought it was maybe a typo, and it wasn't. It's actually two news stories where two things happened at nearly very close to the same at the same time within the same week, and this is at your typical like lumber home goods store. So imagine one of those, the places where you go to buy some some lumber at a smaller scale, not a contractor place, but somewhere that has stacks of lumber, and in both cases, someone was, was an employee, was getting lumber, and the stack became unstable and fell apart and crushed the person. This created a new thought for me, and it rang true to me because of just other experiences, but it made me think of like when I am at one of these stores, when I'm at one of these places that sell these home goods and lumber and other such things, it always feels like there's like all kinds of overcompensating safety things going on, like when there's a fork truck, they have two flaggers walking around, they gate off the area, and they're always super careful and moving around very slowly, and in most cases, when I see it now, I am sure that there are some amazing stories out there of other people who have seen the opposite, but in a lot of cases, what I have seen is a lot of caution and protection when working, and when I am shopping there, and seeing the workers in the area, and watching all the safety protocols they follow, and so I follow that train of thought back, and I think, okay, if I see that much safety, what is going on? And then, of course, I palm myself in the forehead and go, Mark, you've seen this before, where the duty of safety is, yeah, to protect people, but what the real concern is, is protecting the public, because the most expensive injuries the most expensive things that are going to happen could happen to the public, so the safety protocols are very out front in the face of the public and not necessarily always with the employees when the focus is is. To the public, there can be a discrepancy there. Now, not saying I'm not making any judgment whatsoever, I am following a thread that this thought process that I call my podcast, that's half the fun, as what in if we can imagine it, if we can follow a logical train, there's probably some truth there, and some, there's some truth that we can overcome as safety people, as leaders who care about people. So, when the front-facing, when the real, the real focus of the loss control, to control the money, to control the risk, when you look at the biggest risk and you look at the highest, what is the loss of risk? And now, risk can be quantified in a lot of ways. It can also be quantified in terms of money. A lot of companies will say, hey, we don't want to take on more risk than one to 3% of our total income. That is a marker of where they want to be in their risk profile, let's say they say that. Well, where would you go to make sure that you reduce the highest amount of that risk? Well, of course, it's the public, because it's the highest outcome for a bad, bad situation. But does it create some sort of false security for the employees that, oh yeah, we're doing all these safety things. We do a lot of things with safety, but is it for the worker safety or is it for the public safety, the person who's shopping. And so I go back to these two incidents that happened back to back within a, in a week's time period, two very similar fatality incidents where stacks of lumber fall down and crush someone, and I wonder, what is the training for stacking lumber? Is the lumber that's available for the public versus the lumber that's probably gathered by an employee for bulk purchasing, is it stacked different, is it treated different, is it handled different, is there more care put behind it? Because when I look at some lumber, I mean, those are stacked lumber, you look at on the shelving, and I'll use air quotes, there, shelving for for lumber at some of these stores, they're on like very, if like racking, they're held up. There's only so much on each one, like it's very particular in the way that it's organized for the public safety. Now, you go to the back side of it. What about the employee safety? And when I think about the organizational culture, is the focus so much on the public safety that we lose sight of what do the employees need for safety. Now I'll take a lead a little deeper, because this is an interesting statement. Is this goes back to like early training and some other research that has been done by other people in the field years ago that looked at what is safety training, and how is it perceived? And a lot of people will go, "Oh, yeah, we talk about safety all the time, therefore we have safety, or the word "safety" comes up, or we have all these safety protocols that we follow. Or I had on-the-job training, and they mentioned safety at some point. Yeah, we're a very safe organization, because that word in these these practices that may not be in place for the employee safety, but have that word safety in it, because we've started grouping to, I say we as the royal we, but I see industry really playing a little bit of a game at times, and this has been going on for a long time, where they loop in public safety, they loop in employee safety, even sometimes loop in loss control as safety features. So, when an employee hears about all these safety features that are available to them all the time, they begin to believe that they are in a functioning safety program. When really that safety program may just be for the public, may be lost control, it may be minimized to the employee, and I hate to say this, but in my personal experience, in my personal ventures through safety and talking to people, I kind of see that as being the truth with a lot of very large organizations is that the public safety is because of the financial risk, also the loss control safety because of the financial risk is much more heavily focused than the human safety of their employees, because the financial risk is capped thanks to workers comp laws, and so they see that as, oh, well, we can control that loss a lot easier rather than the other losses that may not be as easily controlled or capped by certain laws. Not to say that's always the truth, of course not. There's some really amazing. Companies that really do care and try to do the full gamut, they do it all, they're working hard to get there, and it's always a journey. And one thing I love about safety and leadership, it's truly about really learning and continuous improvement. You're never going to be at the destination, it's never going to be good enough, because there's always a way to get better, but it's that desire, that heartfelt desire to make sure that we're doing the right thing every day, where we can, and pushing for that, and and moving forward. Let's continue the conversation on the second half of the Leading and Learning through Safety Podcast:

Unknown: 10:43

Humanizing the Workplace. It is the Leading and Learning Through Safety Podcast, TSda Consulting. Learn you, lead others. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr. Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more. Individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great for more information, visit us on the web at TSDA consulting.com

Mark French: 11:28

And welcome back to the second half of the Leading and Learning through Safety podcast. So we started off talking about the two lumber incidents that happened within a week's time, and in a very short amount of time between each other, and the idea of where is risk and where is loss, and there's a very this time of year there is a significant, significant higher risk out there that I feel like should be controlled better, and it's workers on the side of the road, and I think a lot of companies, I feel like a lot of companies do a lot of really good work to protect people on the side of the road, lights, trucks, training, all the things, and yet, unfortunately, unfortunately, we find the public finds a way to still run over a lot of people on the side of the road, and it's apparent when reading through, there's so many accidents, so many hit workers, so many, a lot of people losing their life on the job on the roadway or on the side of the roadway, and it's devastating to think about how preventable and how visual some of that is when they're working, and you, and you see that, and I think where I want, I've talked about this before, some is just raising awareness. How do we raise awareness about people who were on the side of the road to put down the phone to be to be the leaders in not picking up that phone, not driving distracted, staying focused when we're in work zones, being the ones that slow down in the work zone. I remember one year there were some, there was a group giving away bumper stickers that says I speak I slow down in work zones because it is so common for people just to blow right through them regardless of whatever is set up there, as long as the police isn't there with the blue lights flashing, they're going to breeze right on through, trying to encourage people to recognize I'm going speed, if I'm going really slow, and I'm in your way in this work zone, there's a reason for that. I'm going the speed limit here. I'm below the speed limit, because there's people here that could be killed. And I wonder out loud to myself frequently, like, why do we not have more? Why is this not something that we're just constantly talking about, and I go back to the media, and I go back to the news, and I know there is a lot going on in this world right now. It is a crazy place, in the news is all over the place, and there is so much going on, and there's so many talking heads throwing information at us, you know. What could we not spend maybe five minutes of that every day, rather than whatever else we're shouting about on the news? Could we not talk about, hey, people are dying on the side of the roads? I just wonder, if would that make a difference? Could that make a difference? Should that make a difference, but at least it would make me want to turn on the news again, because I'll be honest, I, I, there's some news things I follow, there's not a lot, because I cannot stand when the facts, once we give the facts, the facts are the facts, but then. We kind of churn them, and we keep on going, and we ride them, and if it seems to sell advertising, if it seems to bring in viewers, so that we can get more advertising, then we just keep beating the same topics again and again, and it gets old to me, and I get bored, to be frank about it, I'm just like, wow, we've taken a crisis, or we've taken a bad situation, and we've just, just, it's, we just can't escalate it any further. Could we do that with workers' safety? Five minutes a day, five minutes a day, just dedicate, maybe it's from 8am to 8:05am every morning, we talk about there's a lot of people dying on the side of the roads, don't, when you're going out to your morning commute, put the phone down, be focused, don't hit a worker, watch out for them, but what I do hear on the radio more than anything else is like traffic reports. Hey, there's construction on this, or here's gonna be a slowdown, maybe use this area. Yeah, it's more.. it's like it's it. Yes, I get it. Construction is an inconvenience when it's working, but it should not be an opportunity for another human being to get seriously hurt or killed, so it does slow things down. It should slow things down. It should hopefully create progress, but it's not the workers that are doing that on purpose. They're doing their job, they're doing it as safe as they can, they're trying to get the work done the best they can while really navigating the road, and I have spent some time with those who work on the side of the road, who work on things around the roads, and it is very intimidating when you're trying to focus on something you're doing, and at the same time, there's just cars just screaming by, and loud, and semi trucks, and motorcycles, and there's so much noise, and so much clutter, and so much stuff going on around you that it feels intimidating. It, it has to be, because it overwhelmed me very quickly. I feel like it could be overwhelming to anyone that's out there, and you have to adjust to it to be able to focus and do your job well. I would love to hear more. Just taking one topic, we take one piece, because we're not going to solve it all at once. Even though we are, we are the United States, we should be able to find ways to keep people safe at work. Let's focus on that during the summer, put some effort behind it, put some time behind it. That would be interesting to me. I would listen to that news, that that way that we could be able to talk about it, to be able to solve it, to be able to find a way to just reduce some human suffering through being a little bit more attentive in what we do every single day, and again, this is this is us as Lee. How do we do that now? How do we as leaders convey that, that there's things going on, we have an opportunity to make change, maybe a small change, but it's still change, and that's the cool part. We have the ability to do that. Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. So happy you've joined me. It's always, always a pleasure to be part of the podcast rotation. Until next time we chat, stay safe.

Unknown: 18:42

Bye. Thanks. Thank you for listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. More content is available online@www.tsdaconsulting.com All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training, or legal advice. I This has been the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast.