What is your first reaction when you find a hazard? In a quick poll, we found the most common answer to be "it depends."

Depends on what? The answers to that question were quite varied:

"It depends how serious the hazard is."
"It depends if I can fix it or not."
"It depends on my manager or supervisor – what I think they'll do about it."

Far too often when we do site walk-throughs at the invitation of our clients or as part of our Hazard Recognition and Control Workshop, we find that people often do not see the hazards in the workplace and even more frequently do not know what to do about a hazard. Why is that?

We've found a few reasons for the problem of not knowing what to do about hazards. One is the lack of training. The other is that workers are led by leaders who do not have a specific approach to hazard recognition and mitigation -- they develop a "ho-hum" attitude about hazards.

A Ho-Hum Approach to Hazards
Think back to the last time you found a hazard. What did you do? An all-too-frequent scenario is that the leader of a safety meeting asks a question about any recent findings, incidents, or near-misses. Someone will bring up an issue, let's say a hole in the parking lot. A lot of discussion follows with different folks jumping in to say they've noticed that as a problem and wish someone would do something about it. Then the note taker for the meeting makes a note of the issue and nothing happens until the next meeting when the minutes are read, and someone says something like, "Yeah, they never do anything about this stuff. Why bother." And it's on to the next item on the agenda.

The scenario gets repeated the next month, when more remarks are made about nobody in management caring to take care of anything. Then someone says, "They just give it lip service around here! Why should we bother turning anything in?"

In the next few meetings, no hazards are discussed or brought up. No one says anything when the meeting leader gets to that item on the agenda.

Then it happens: Someone trips in the hole, breaks an ankle, and it becomes an OSHA recordable. Then it all breaks loose! The site manager is all over it. The facilities manager calls the asphalt company and suddenly you have a brand new parking lot.

The scenario may be different in your company, yet we've all seen it played out in some form or another.

Several issues exist here:
-- lack of clear ownership of the problem
-- the nonexistence of follow-up with the person who reported the hazard
-- an absence of follow-through to complete mitigation

These issues, when left unchecked, go far beyond "ho-hum" -- they lead to a dangerous culture in which safety gets a low priority.

If this seems all too familiar, consider the following process to help you make a necessary correction.

Implement a Hazard Tracking Process
Recognizing and mitigating hazards is the hallmark of any exceptional safety management process. The premise is this: if you find a hazard in your workplace, you should know precisely how to handle the situation regardless if you know how to mitigate the hazard.

Establishing and supporting a hazard tracking process is one of the things that any company of any size can implement to get immediate results. Here are the basic steps:

1. Develop a tracking mechanism.
This can be as simple as a list on a white board or a spreadsheet that is posted and accessible. Certainly more elaborate systems are available. The primary elements are: hazard description, person reporting, date reported, person assigned as responsible, action taken and date, date of completion.

2. Establish an employee and management joint ownership of the list.
This list of "open" hazards provides a tool that can be jointly owned by employees and their leaders. Agree that this list will be kept in front of the safety committee, the employees, and site management and updated frequently.

3. Hold each other accountable for the timely resolution of reported hazards.
Certainly, it goes without saying, all hazards must be dealt with as soon as they are discovered. They must be guarded and reported. The purpose of the "list" is to document the intermediate steps taken to resolve the issue and to ensure that longer term solutions are applied. While you hold each other accountable also work to understand that some things take time and are part of broader decisions. Ensure that everyone who works in and around the noted situation knows how to protect themselves -- that is the first order of business.

The Bottom Line: Find and Fix
The purpose of identifying hazards and tracking them until they are resolved is to keep everyone's awareness high. This is what OSHA refers to as "find and fix."

Declare war on the ho-hum attitude. Make good faith efforts and discuss the situations that are potentially harmful in your workplace. After all, the goal is this: Nobody Gets Hurt.

© 2011 Potter and Associates International, Inc. Carl Potter, CSP, CMC and Deb Potter, PhD, CMC work with organizations that want to create an environment where nobody gets hurt. As advocates of a zero-injury workplace, they are speakers, authors, and consultants to industry. As a general aviation pilot and certified flight instructor, Carl enjoys infusing aviation safety principles into his workplace programs. For information about bringing Carl and Deb to your company or your next conference, contact them at Potter and Associates International, Inc. 800.259.6209 or www.carlpotter.com.

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