May 2021 Volume 3

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

Shifting the Paradigm: Changing Our Approach to Safety in the Forging Industry By Paul Thurber

Safety has been defined through the years in many ways and, as such, I would like to take the liberty for the sake of our common understanding to define it as, “The planned avoidance of loss.” Often, many safety programs approach safety in a reactive manner, using traditional lagging indicators. But recent numbers tell us that reactive approaches don’t work. In 2019, 5,033 workers died on the job. So, how do we shift this thinking around safety and create a safer, smarter and more efficient workplace? Letting Safety Lag Behind Traditionally, causation and prevention data come from incident reviews and reactions. This means that we must experience an incident to identify the unsafe and/or undesired behaviors that either contributed to or caused the incident to occur. Because of its reactionary approach, this type of data is most often referred to as “lagging.” While it can help to prevent the next accident or near miss, it does nothing for an incident that has already occurred. Put simply, it is too late to prevent what has already happened.

Less Risk, More Reward The more risk we allow increases the potential for an incident to occur and for subsequent and associated injuries alike. If you’ve ever experienced the shock associated with a serious workplace injury, you’re familiar with the “what if ” type of thinking that usually follows these incidents. What if we had caught the issue prior to the incident? What if we had recognized the hazard? Hindsight is always 20/20. So how can we do better? It’s simple. We change the way we think about safety. Instead of relying on reactive measures like lagging indicators that only track negative outcomes, we focus on proactive measures – leading indicators. According to OSHA, leading indicators are proactive and preventive measures that can shed light about the effectiveness of safety and health activities and reveal potential problems in a safety and health program. They help safety programs identify problem areas and potential hazards before an accident occurs. By reducing risk, leading indicators help decrease the potential for an incident. If we could observe, analyze, and report, we would be able to systematically reduce the frequency of incidents created or enabled by the causal effects of distractions, complacency, horseplay, contentment, fatigue, and more. This type of data would provide us true predictive and preventative power and allow us to approach safety proactively. And the technology to provide this data exists.

Another source of lagging data is teammate driven and requires peer-to-peer observation and subsequent reporting. Hundreds, thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands of observations go into our “systems” that sort and, if sophisticated enough, might populate a spreadsheet or dashboard designed primarily to count and classify occurrences in hopes of preventing the same or similar recurrence. But again, this data is too late to predict and/or prevent the initial incident.

FIA MAGAZINE | MAY 2021 51