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SO GOOD ON-THE-JOB THAT SAFETY IS A DISTRACTION.....!

Really? Don't you believe it.

I've come across some fellows on-the-job who believe they're so competent they can't afford to be sidetracked by 'all that safety talk'. Such people scare the living daylights out of me for I can't imagine anything more ignorant.

For a start, you can't be good on-the-job if you don't operate by the rules or boundaries of that job. There's no free-for-all standard or job specification anywhere for anyone to play with. Every job is pinned to specifics such as how it should be done, by whom, level of competence required, applicable level of training and certification, the desired performance outcome and measurement. Otherwise productivity wouldn't amount to much in the end.

Breaking down a job into specific steps creates the opportunity for the right operational safety questions to be asked and answered even at the conceptual stages. The more a job task is subjected to critical analysis the safer it'll be in the operation and maintenance phase. That's how come appreciable sums of money is spent training would-be operators from the pre-commissioning stage all the way through to full operation and abandonment.

So being so good on-the-job doesn't happen outside the operational safety envelope or boundary. Indeed, any operator who's worth his/her salt would have been cooked and stewed in the finer points of job safety supervision to earn lasting respect on the shop floor. A ragged operator can only be an unsafe operator from whom not much is expected by way of competence, leadership, capacity and productivity. Efficiency and effectiveness flow together just as incapacity and inefficiency are two sides of the same coin. As a matter of fact, an unsafe operator is soon at out of a job because he/she is often too expensive for the wrong reasons.

Such persons are no doubt in the ranks of those 'so good on-the-job' that safety is a distraction. Well don't be deceived. There's no such thing.

Stay safe. 


"Please do not distract me with all that safety talk"! (Source: WWW)

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