Despite ongoing efforts to promote work safety practices, workplace fatalities continue to be prevalent. In the United States, an average of 15 work-related deaths occur daily, a significant figure given the country's strong emphasis on workplace safety. In contrast, the statistics are even more alarming in other regions, particularly in developing countries.
The top five issues are:
1. Lack of Training
Despite the rigorous guidelines and safety measures adopted by many companies safety policies are not adequately communicated to the employees. If it does, there are too many variables to prevent disasters that are ignored. Not spotting a potential accident from happening, failure to identify potential hazards, ignoring safety rules, ignorance, and sometimes, plain indifference is among the largest contributors. Pressures and deadlines further complicate this where supposedly minor risks are taken.
2. Poor Communication
Training is about informing people on methods of doing a task effectively, efficiently, and safely. The link is weakened though when the supervisor is not an effective communicator. Complicating this is the trend today to hire temporary workers even when there is a language barrier. For example, foreign workers are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal workplace accident than those who are native to the area.
3. Insufficient Supervision
A number of accidents are caused by assigning an employee to perform a task for which the employee is not trained to do or has a poor understanding of the risks involved in doing the job.
4. Poor Safety Policies
While safety policies are in place, they do not address poor and insufficient staffing and scheduling issues aside from policies that are impractical and unworkable. Add to this is the practice of hiring or allowing the elderly to work in areas that are hazardous even to younger employees.
5. Poor Worksite Organization
Many times, the accidents happening in the workplace are not the fault of a single person but a combination of factors: Poor organization, unsafe work practices, unsafe work environment, and the desire to reach the quota, target, or meet the schedule.
There are grey areas in workplace safety. The fault could sometimes be due to managerial practices, sometimes it is the fault of the worker, and sometimes both. No matter, it is always the responsibility of the top management to ensure that workplace safety procedures are ensured, implemented, and understood.
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