TOOLBOX TALK

  First word: Dealing with contractors can be tricky in that there can be many a slip twit the operational cup and the lips by way of whose or which safety rule should apply, given that both parties have their own rulebooks on how safety is to be managed in their respective businesses. Such that if the two sides do not move to agree on a common front ahead of time they’re likely to end up with gaps and conflicts potentially harmful to the common interest as a situation of ‘one rule for them and one for us’ can rapidly take shape which can in turn, translate to different safety rules, different standards, different approaches, different interpretations and different philosophies within same work enclosure. Nothing leads to chaos and confusion faster than that, seeing how The Right to Choose is not exactly compatible with good workplace safety management. It places a serious and conspicuous question mark on the overall safety of the site. So if contractor employees feel that...

Managing safely is synonymous to safe and efficient production. Yet not many businesses make that connection until it’s too late. All too often they suffer a death blow before sitting down to examine what went wrong. Experience shows that Managers who pay little attention to safety only end up paying a big time price attending to all kinds of post-incident business loss activities. Issues like absenteeism, lost workdays, spiraling medical bills, sagging public image, poor workforce morale, increase insurance premiums, dwindling production and a shrinking bottom line. It follows that poor safety performance directly translates to poor returns on investment and you don’t have to look too far to see it or why. It’s clearly signposted all over the workplace place; in the employees’ body language, asset use and misuse, mounting unresolved environmental issues, etc. Like they say, you can run but you can’t hide because safety issues are like a pack of dominoes, one falls and they all...

Personal Responsibility Responsibility is not just a word. It isn’t supposed to be but in workplaces around the globe, quite a number of people don’t seem to want to know any different. Or how do you explain the recurrence of avoidable errors in most industrial premises, factories, construction and other work sites?   Little things It is the little things that people overlook which account for the greater losses at the end of the day. Oftentimes, we expect that the ‘BIG’ problems are it, and we expect they are meant for someone else further up the line to take care of. We forget to reckon with the fact that put together, the everyday routine, ‘insignificant’ errors and violations are by far heavier in reach and impact than that one big bang’ of an occurrence which may never happen. These so-called insignificant events are responsible for most of business losses even though most business owners may not know it because they, more often than not, are looking in the wrong pla...