Running any business profitably requires balancing priorities, and has been compared to the difficulty of balancing on a three-legged stool. Product acceptance and sales; production management and costs; and workforce and management talent have to be balanced, positive and growing to sustain the organization. In one type of business, the warehousing and fulfillment task of online, high volume retailers, the balance has shifted to the detriment of the health and safety of warehouse workers.

Identifying potential safety leaders by involving workers who already have the skills and traits discussed above has proven more successful than selecting employees by seniority (long term or short!) and putting them through safety training or advanced communications classes. Since much of the motivation for leadership comes from within an individual, safety leaders, like other leaders who shape organizations, are born not made.

A client recently contacted me to ask for a straightforward yet effective method of post-incident root cause analysis. Like many companies, their process had devolved into a blame-game in which the "root causes" in various incidents all came back to employee behavior or "not paying attention". Consequently, the corrective actions "retraining" and "presenting lessons learned" were not preventing similar incidents from happening. No surprise there... On the other hand, the company is small and they didn't want an over-complicated process that would require alot of up-front training to deploy. This process is based on the "Hazard-Barrier-Target Analysis" method, plus 2 of the famous "5-Whys".

Although the most serious and potentially fatal incidents involve trench cave-ins and engulfment by loose material, there are numerous other hazards that can cause injury. Falls in and around trenches and excavations can cause broken bones and impalement. Falling debris or overhead loads, atmospheric hazards and adjacent mobile equipment can also injure construction workers and tradesmen.