Ihab Saad – Theories of accident causation
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The human factors and accident/incident laws require attention and risk management. Safety guidelines and monitoring employee behavior are crucial for preventing accidents and improving safety. The importance of following safety guidelines and creating a positive environment for employees is emphasized. Safety guidelines and monitoring employee behavior are recommended to motivate employees and improve behavior.
AI: Summary ©
Boots with steel toe, for example, and you ignore these instructions
that will result in an accident.
The third one is inappropriate activities. Examples include
performing tasks without the requisite training. Again, if
you're not trained, do not do it or misjudging the degree of risk
involved with a given task. And This especially happens to people
who have done this tasks. This that so many times in the past,
they would say, Well, I done this task 100 times in the past, it's
not going to happen to me. It happens to other people. So in
fact, this is a problem that happens to happens to people with
a high level of experience when they let their guards down and
they do not pay attention to the routine steps to be followed to
have a safe work environment. So this is the human factors theory.
Another theory is called the accident slash incident theory. So
the accident slash incident theory says that, again, some reasons
could be because of overload, pressure, fatigue. By the end of
the day, you're tired, motivation, you are motivated, if you do it in
a shorter time, or you if you achieve more, if you have a higher
productivity, you're going to be rewarded. So again, you try to
achieve more at the expense of safety, drugs alcohol or worry,
drugs and alcohol, definitely there's no tolerance, zero
tolerance of drugs and alcohol on construction sites because of the
direct correlation between these and accidents. So we try to avoid
them from the very first place. So all of these are one of the
reasons that cause accidents and incidents. Another one is
ergonomic traps, incompatible workstation tools. There are some
injuries that occur to certain vocational workers on site due to
a bad analysis of the operation itself, you're gonna carry
something, for example, you're gonna carry something heavy and
you're not carrying it properly, or you do not wear a belt or
something to support that weight. Or it should be carried by two
people. They try to carry it by itself. So this is an ergonomic
trap through incompatible workstation tools, even people who
are doing office jobs, you notice that if they type too much during
the day, they might be get the carpal tunnel syndrome, and they
might need surgery to fix that. So again, with the proper posture,
with the proper location of the different pieces of equipment you
can have, you can avoid these accidents, incompatible
expectations, again, the example that I just gave about something
to be carried by more than one person and one person only
stepping forward to carry it is going to result, usually, in an
injury.
The third one is a decision to air. Does anyone make a an
educated decision to err, to make a mistake? Not necessarily
educated decision, but it might, in some cases, be an intentional
decision to do something that's dangerous, thinking that I'm too
good for that accident to happen to me. I know better. I
experienced it. I've done it in the past, so the accident will not
happen to me, and that can result either from misjudgment of the
risk, by thinking that, Oh, I know how to deal with that risk,
unconscious decision to err. I'm hasty. I try to do it faster than
usual. Logical decision based on the situation. Actually, it should
be even an illogical decision, because if you applied logic and
if you thought sorry about it, you would say, No, I shouldn't do
that.
An example of the decision to err is to remove your safety harness
while working on a high platform. For example, what's going to
happen? In this case, you might be subject or you might subject to
falling and getting a severe injury.
All of these lead to human errors, going back to the human error
theory,
or system failure, another reason causing the accident incident
theory is the system failure, either the policy is defective,
the safety policy is defective, or responsibilities you are not
assigning the proper responsibility. You do not have a
competent person on site. You do not have a safety officer to
enforce all of these policies, training, lack of training. For
example, you introduce a new piece of equipment, and you ask your
employees, your labor to work with it immediately, without giving
them the proper training that usually results in accidents.
Inspection.
The fire extinguishers have to be inspected on a regular basis. You
did not inspect them properly. They were used previously without
refill or without replacement. So in this.
In accidents happening.
In the systems theory of causation, the root cause could be
a person, a machine, environment, any of these, the interaction
between these can cause a problem. So you need to collect information
to try to avoid this problem from happening. What would happen if we
operate this man lift close to power lines? Is this power line
activated or not? What if we use that scaffold and we move the
scaffold which has wheels while someone is standing on top of it
and so on. So collect information about what you can do and what you
can't do. Weigh risks again. There's no project without risks.
There's no activity that's risk free. All we're trying to do is
reduce the amount of risk and its likelihood and its impact as much
as possible, but we are never gonna have a risk free
environment. It's just a matter of knowing what the risks are,
calculating them and knowing how to deal with them. So waive the
risks, make decision based on the information that was collected and
based on that risk prioritization and its weight and its impact and
its probability of happening. And finally, define the task to be
performed, or design the task to be performed based on this
educated process.
Information to be collected includes job requirements, workers
abilities and limitations. So for example, if you are if you have
asthma, for example, you should not work in an environment that's
that where you might be subject to
toxic fumes or lack of oxygen or something like that. What would be
the gain if the task is successfully completed, and what
would be the loss if the task is attempted by fail, but fails loss
in human life or injuries or in property damage as well. And what
is the loss if the task is not attempted at all? So all of this
kind of information needs to be collected before designing the
task to be performed.
Finally, behavior theory, the BBs, there are seven basic principles
to the behavior based safety theory, use intervention that's
based on employee behavior. So you're going to monitor your
employees and see what are the pitfalls? What are the common
mistakes and failure your program to take care of these mistakes so
they don't have
identify external factors that aid in understanding and improving
employee behavior. So how can you motivate them? How can you
encourage them? How can you, in some cases, the carrot and the
sticks so. So in some cases, the carrot might work. In some other
cases, the stick might work, might work
direct behavior with activators or events antecedent or prior to the
desired behavior, and motivate employees to behave as desired
with incentives and rewards that follow the desired behavior. So
we're gonna say, for example, we're gonna have a meeting, safety
meeting on site. We need to finish this project with zero accidents,
so everyone is going to be paying attention to that. We want to have
a an accident free site,
and if we managed to do the so. So this is the antecedent to the
action. And then you would say, if we manage to have a an accident,
free project, every employee is going to get a reward of such and
such type, whether it's going to be free days, whether it's going
to be extra payment, whether it's going to be extra benefits,
whatever it might be, something to encourage them to have that
accident free project,
focus on the positive consequences that result from the desired
behavior as a way to motivate employees. You can say, for
example, if we manage to finish this project on site. First of
all, top management is going to look at us very favorably. That's
going to improve the profitability of the company. It's going to
improve the competitiveness of the company. Is going to reduce the
cost to insurance for the company, which is going to reflect on the
employees of that company, giving them better opportunities and so
on. So this is a positive enforcement of a good behavior
that might result in less accidents.
Apply scientific methods to improve attempts at behavioral
intervention. So again, when should encouragement work and one
should a.
Penalties work and on which people again, in some cases you want to
set an example so that a bad behavior would not be repeated.
Use theory to integrate information rather than to limit
possibilities. Again, remember in the previous slide we thought
about one of the questions to be asked, what would we lose if the
task is not done at all? Sometimes you have to do the task. It's part
of the scope of the project. Therefore, the idea of the test
not being done is not acceptable. So we're going to use the theory.
Okay, since we're going to be doing it, how can we do it in the
most safe fashion, following all of these precautions and following
all of these steps at trying to change the behavior of the
performance of this task so that we can finish it without any
accidents,
and finally, plan interventions with the feelings and attitudes of
the individual employee in mind. So if you have an employee who is
down today, for example, due to
job related stresses or domestic stresses or whatever, try to
encourage them, try to talk to them, try to get them out of that
mood of depression, because that might result, again, in absent
mindedness, which usually leads to accidents and injuries on site.
So we're going to have activators
that lead to behavior. You activate people through
encouragement, through incentives, etc, that leads to a better
behavior, that leads to better consequences, which is basically
not having
any accidents which might lead to outcomes. The outcome is the
project is accident free. Everyone gets a reward, and the company
performs better and gets better recognition,
hazardous operation management. Basically, we're going to think
about how to select a method and then apply that method that's
safe, monitor and observe while the action is taking place, to
make sure that what the method that you selected was effective in
reducing the probability of accidents happening, and assess
that effectiveness, we were successful by 95%
or 98% of the time. This results in no accidents. So what about the
2% should there be any corrective action for this extra 2% and
finally, adjust as necessary, maybe this 2% was primarily
personal issues. These people should not have been there in the
first place. So next time we plan this, this operation again, we're
going to avoid having people of that type who did not properly
have the training, or have prior health problem problems or
something like that. We're going to avoid having them on on this
operation so that we can finish it with 100%
risk free or accident free fashion.
So this basically is our lecture about accident,
the theories, the different theories of accident causation,
you should learn about these, because these are going to have an
impact on how to motivate, encourage and delegate to people
on site so that you can have minimum amount of incidents or
accidents resulting in bodily damage or in property, property
damage. I will see you in another safety lecture. You