Is Safety Third?
I have made several recent visits to a construction project where one of the activities included a second tier subcontractor using pneumatic nail guns to nail down the roof deck. While my most recent visit included positive safety observations, the two previous inspections noted a common trend and that was all of the nail gun operators had disabled their safety springs. Removing this device can lead to serious safety problems such as unintended discharge. Statistics show that nail gun injuries have resulted in paralysis, blindness, brain damage, bone fractures, and death. This led me to issuing the company a safety notice, not an individual reprimand. I know why workers tamper with the safety spring, but I was curious to know their response so I engaged in several conversations to understand their sense making.
As aforementioned, both workers had safety springs in their nail guns on my most recent visit so I gave them positive feedback. Putting people at ease and offering positive feedback will typically get people to be more outspoken because they feel more psychologically safe. The workers said they remove the safety springs because they can nail faster without it, and it is less strain on the shoulder/arm (ergonomics issue) because they have to put less force down on the tool to make contact with the surface. I also learned that this trade partner gets paid by the square foot (peace work). So naturally there are goal conflicts (production and money) competing with safety here (safety didn’t prevail). One of the workers said they got reprimanded due to my previous company safety notice. So I asked him, when you leave this project, are you going to remove the safety spring from the nail gun? He said probably and then smiled at me.
I believe that a company’s culture drives values, behaviors and results. Maybe safety is not a value for this subcontractor. Their pattern of behavior would indicate that. When Mike Rowe, guest host of Dirty Jobs, recently said “safety is third”, it got me thinking. Perhaps a general contractor cannot permanently change the subcontractor workers’ safety behavior; only the person doing the work can. In other words, a worker has to care about their own well-being. There are plenty of safety platitudes in companies today like safety first, zero incidents, zero harm, zero at-risk behavior, etc. This sounds like a nice target but the majority of workers don’t believe zero is possible. I have conducted plenty of safety surveys that support this claim. Based on his experience, Mike Rowe further indicated that constant messages of “Safety First” in the workplace makes workers complacent. James Reason said, “You cannot change the human condition, but you can change the conditions under which people work”. In other words, I cannot permanently change subcontractor safety behavior, but I can put controls in place so they can have the capacity to fail safely on any of my projects. We have great safety systems in place, but at the end of the day, maybe safety is third to a lot of workers. What do you think?