Loss Causes That May Be Generated
By Management and Supervision:
Decision Making - Improperly Evaluating a Problem
By Bob Lapidus, CSP, CSMS
In the old days, whenever an employee was injured on the job, the employee was typically blamed for the injury and his or her immediate supervisor was blamed for not training the employee properly. Today such blaming still goes on in some organizations, but many 21st century companies now see the light.
The light illumines the fact that an employee error is, in most cases, the final trigger that causes an injury to occur. There is now a true realization that employees can literally be set up to make that final error.
There are four major categories establishing the parameters around those loss causes that may be generated by management and supervision setting up employees to get hurt on the job. These categories are:
- Decision Making
- Accountability
- Facilities, Equipment, Materials
- Knowledge, Skills, Judgment
Decision making includes those choices managers and supervisors make that negatively affect how an employee performs or how a work environment is managed.
Making an incorrect decision (error or omission) can be based on such things as:
- Improperly evaluating a problem
- Not creating expectations, policies, procedures or rules
- Creating improper expectations, policies, procedures or rules
- Not giving employees authority to take preventive action
- Placing unreasonable pressures or demands on employees
- Not providing an adequate number of employees to do the job, task or activity
- Not following their own expectations, policies, procedures or rules
- Not correcting an already-identified problem
Improperly evaluating a problem often leads to many erroneous decisions. We make thousands of decisions every day. Some decisions are as trivial as turning left versus turning right. Other decisions can deal with life and death situations for us and others.
Most of our decisions are made on the spur of the moment as we go about our day. On the other hand, some decisions should not be made quickly, especially those decisions affecting the safety of our fellow employees.
We should take our time to gather all the facts and details of the situation. What are the ramifications of deciding to do one thing as opposed to another? Evaluating a problem means understanding the root reasons why the situation is the way it is. Knowing the reasons why a certain condition exists will help target the causes for the condition, and therefore help us make the better decision.
In the field of safety, many of our decisions are based upon what standards, codes and regulations require us to do. Remember many times such governmental directives are just the minimum. Often we need to decide to provide a higher level of safety for our employees to ensure they are not hurt.
In future articles, we will further discuss loss causes that may be generated by management and supervision. The ideas for these articles come from Safety Center's course Safety Management for Employees-Who-Supervise, created and conducted by Bob Lapidus, CSP, CSMS, Safety Management Consultant.