I realized that this was a great opportunity to spread the safety message.
The main reason why you have to aim for target zero incidents/accidents is quite simple. Can you go to your co-workers and say "I hope that only five of you get injured this year"? Can you face your children, neighbors and say "I hope that only a couple of you get hurt"?
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I think this article does a great laying out so many different aspects to safety. To start, everything the author says at the beginning about aiming for no accidents or incidents is one hundred percent true. We should always be aiming for no accidents or incidents in every workplace. I know that when I am working in a shop, whether at home, in the professional world or at CMU, I try to always be thinking about safety. On top of this, I try to be safe in every workplace that I'm involved with. This ranges from working in a studio to working in an office, to running a call with EMS. A huge part of what he said that I thought was super important is the idea of safety from the top down. If your superiors aren't trying to make sure you are safe it is hard to expect you to be safe. This includes providing/making sure you have the right equipment to supervising your use of said equipment.
I agree that no accidents should be the goal, and I think there aren’t many people who need convincing of that. I also think all of the strategies described are important ways to decrease the likelihood of accidents. Everyone involved has to be fully committed to safety being a priority. If anyone from management to employees sees it as not very important, people will make unsafe choices. That being said, I don’t think no accidents is an attainable goal. I think it isn’t unrealistic in the sense that a given workplace could potentially go a very long time, even as long as it is in business, never having an accident. But in the end, as long as there are humans involved, mistakes will be made. Someone will always not notice something, forget to do something, not realize there is something they need to account for, and if one of those mistakes happens to occur in the wrong situation, the results could be dangerous. I think one thing this article is missing is looking into ways to reduce the odds of or impact of human error. Things like SawStops, readily available e-stops, machines that deliver only a limited amount of torque so if a person is in the way it will stop, fall prevention, guarding, and similar.
For most people, a zero-incident workplace is just a utopia type attitude. Accidents happen but very rarely, if ever, is an accident unavoidable. For me, what constitutes an accident when I am working is sometimes a grey area. A cut on the finger or a bruise on my leg never seems like something I need to report to higher ups but I guess they are accidents that could be prevented. This article did a very good job of breaking down the subheadings of shop preparedness and accident prevention. The idea of “near miss” I think are some of the most important accounts recorded. My idea of a near miss means that a person got very lucky and if it were to happen again, it may not turn out the same way. Planning and adapting to a changing environment with the new workforce and tools always allows for additional training and preparation that could save peoples lives.
The example given by the article is truly vital, we can’t afford to endanger someone’s body even if we can’t foresee its happening, let alone if we can actually do something to prevent it. Just like the article said, the goal of incident-free working environment is a must in nowadays. No matter how hard it is to keep everyone in line on safety issues, we can’t let things this important to slip away. As far as I know, the shops in school of drama have already addressed most of the points in the article, and more of them are on the list-to-do. Many policies also helped us to achieve safety working space, such as egress regulations and two-man protocol. However, there are still inspiring arguments in the article that I think we can take advantage from. Near-miss reporting system- This is the most interesting part of the article to me. Personally, I often found facts that I was actually depending on being lucky to avoid certain incidents. It is so vague to define how careful one should be while doing all these daily basis of carrying things through hall ways, retrieving things from racks and unloading goods from trucks. In my opinion it should be brought up more frequently between us, thus improving the common experience toward actions that might be dangerous. Furthermore, senior workers should always keep eyes on the less experienced to assure the safety.
Why would you not aim for a zero accident work environment if you could? I think this article brings up a lot of simple and effective strategies that any organization can put in place in order to prevent incidents and help evaluate and revise the processes when accidents do happen. My favorite part of this article was the moment in which it mentions that we should stop using the word accident because it implies that the accident was unpreventable. I know working in the Carnegie Mellon environment, some people have difficulty following the safety rules because they don't see the importance. I think a simple thing a manager can do to nip this in the butt from the start is to mention this simple difference and explain that we will be enforcing all safety rules because we can and will try to prevent all incidents. Overall, I think this article had some helpful tips that can be applied in a team setting to help keep each other accountable.
This is a good thing to see but also sad that it is worded in the way that it is. The fact that some people don't think that we should care about a safe work environment is a major thing wrong with a lot of industry. Which I find extremely sad and disheartening to hear about. I thought that the days of people getting routinely hurt in large manufacturing jobs was at an end years ago. Are these things that OSHA should already be enforcing in these places? Why are these things not already considered a standard in all workplaces? At this day in age, I am truly surprised that things like this have been said. In the article, it only really talks about things that I think are no-brainers and should just be understood as facts. I don't know if it is my experience of being a manager and having these concerns placed at the forefront of my mind that it feels this way, but it feels odd that it has to be said.
I like the way the writer of this article thinks, many accidents are avoidable with the proper training and mindset. This directly affects our industry because we are constantly faced with safety vs. time, and money. For instance you can totally reach that light to focus it if you stand on top of the ladder, or you can wait for scenic to be finished with the lift in an hour. There is such a strong desire to climb the ladder, influenced by a culture and industry promoting fast paced work. From what I have seen so far, this school approaches the topic well, they have never seemed so behind that they are pushed closer and closer to an unsafe, yet fast solution. Personally I attribute this to good management and coordination of all aspects of the production. Overall I think most safety issues aren’t the problem of knowledgeable workers, but a fast paced- the show must go on, mindset, which is much harder to change, although it can be very well managed with good leadership and time management.
I find the authors take on the perception of safety very interesting. How they started the article with the difference in perceptions between ‘accident’ and ‘incident’. I agree with his point of view, if companies aimed to go be an ‘accident free zone’ instead of meeting safety standards and just marking accidents as things that could not be prevented, the companies accident rate would significantly drop by simply changing the safety focus. This is a very detailed it covers a lot of ground on how to create an accident free culture. It includes communication and constant training. Most of the places I’ve worked with, I’ve been trained just once, at the top of my engagement, and never again has my safety knowledge been revised or updated. But I really appreciate the suggestion of an improvement plan. Just because the company meets safety standards doesn’t mean there isn’t room to improve and grow.
Having an accident free workplace is something we should all strive for in a genuine way. Not in the ways that I’ve unfortunately seen which includes a good amount of under reporting from those who has been injured in some way. I think that even if the injury isn’t one that is consider severe enough to warrant a trip to the hospital if it happens it should be reported. I think this is an important step to take and has importance in the same vain as reporting near-miss accident reports something that I have almost never seen reported. The importance of reporting these sorts of events is an ability to see any sort of trends in incidents where people are getting injured or almost getting injured. Having access to this sort of information allows for trends to be seen and improvements to be made in the most necessary areas, documentation is particularly important in shops like ours that have a constant circulation of people coming through.
I really really resonated with the point this article is making regarding the language we use around safety. The idea of calling something an ‘accident’ vs an ‘incident’ was something I hadn’t really thought about before, but makes a lot of sense. The idea that accidents are unavoidable can play into one’s subconscious thoughts about how safety should be addressed. I like the idea of calling them incidents instead, as it gives everyone in the room to not only take the situation seriously, but also ask whether it was preventable. I hope every workplace strives toward zero incidents. It would feel very strange to say that one incident is acceptable. A lot of the strategies outlined in the article are things I’ve heard of before, but it seems like often workplaces will only implement a handful of them, not all of them. Thus making their system less comprehensive. Ideally, one would flesh out their safety training to incorporate all of these strategies.
Accidents seems to be somewhat inevitable. No matter how hard we try and how many precautions we put in place, there is always the chance that someone can get hurt in the workplace doing something totally normal. I personally was something of an accident-prone person when I was younger- I once sprained my ankle getting into a bounce house and later broke the same foot by stubbing my toe really hard at gymnastics practice. This article contains many great strategies for minimizing workplace injury, especially regarding communication. I think the section about near-misses was the most important- we often neglect to report things like that simply because we don’t think about it, and I feel like near-miss reporting is something we should be reminded of so that potentially dangerous situations can be fixed before they happen. I agree that this article has great strategies for minimizing workplace injuries due to equipment usage and shop safety, although personally I’m not sure I agree with the author that a totally accident-free is possible. People can manage to hurt themselves in totally innocuous ways that are impossible to foresee or prevent. But I do think it’s a good goal to strive for- we should be trying to achieve 0 injury, rather than “an acceptable amount of injury”.
I think striving for an accident free workplace is certainly a lofty goal an done that any carpenter or shop foreman should want in their scene shop regardless of whether it seems to affect productivity or not. As students, I think we are taught the best and safest way to use the myriad tools present in the shops that we use, but, as a population, we seem to be generally aloof about relative safety when our timelines or shows are on the line. Perhaps part of this is based on the temerity of youth, a feeling that we couldn't possibly die, but this is too facile an argument, as we are well-versed in the consequences of workplace accidents. I think our problem is a problem common with workers in any other field, which is shortsightedness. What people don't understand when they abandon safety practices for the weak justification of "I need to go faster" is that if they injure themselves, things are going to be going so much slower that whatever gains they thought they were making are going to be thrown in the trash.
I think that an accident-free workplace is something that CMU Drama has been working a lot harder to achieve, especially since the Rover incident of 2k16. A lot of the things on this list are things I have seen implemented in the School of Drama structure over the course of my time at this school. Things like the near miss reporting system and commitment from management are two that particularly stand out. The near miss reporting system is very important in order to analyze trends in the way that we do things and how we can improve to reduce accidents. In reality, we do not have that many actual incidents that result in injury, but we have near misses out the ass. By identifying the near misses and the causes of those, we are able to nip things in the bud before they turn into larger accidents with major repercussions. Commitment from management is something I've seen with the new use of harnesses and other safety measures that slow down certain aspects of work, but overall make a safer working environment.
Injuries in the workplace are an interesting topic. This summer the question of safety only came up only after we had an injury on the site. An accident-free workplace is always going to be difficult when you have a constant turnover of employees and corporations don’t want to invest the money in proper training programs. TV and film is also a whole other ball game when it comes to safety. Often the tools in the kit rentals are old and are not up to date on the latest tech. Table saws injuries, in particular, occurred most frequently due to the lack of company training and out of date machines.
I would, however, argue that technological advances across the board have made machinery in the workplace more compliant to current regulations and as these safety features continue to roll out as standard I can image the number of injuries will only continue to go down. One concern that I would have is people getting more careless while working and becoming too reliant on safety mechanisms that are merely meant to act as a fail-safe.
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