Picture a house where the owner has just fitted three locks on the front door. Good ones. He’ll show you them with real pride. Ask him about security and you get the grand tour of the front step. Nobody has looked at the back window since about 2014, and it doesn’t shut properly.
That’s most safety programmes I get asked to look at. One or two things are done really well and everything else is left to chance.
Everybody has a front door
Every firm has the thing it’s good at, and it’s nearly always the thing that hurt somebody once. A finger gets trapped, so from then on every guard is checked weekly and there’s a laminated poster to prove it. Someone comes off a ladder, so working at height gets more attention than anything else on site. Fair enough. That’s a sensible reaction to a bad day.
The trouble is that it becomes the only reaction. The programme grows around the last accident, and the places where nothing has happened yet get nothing at all.
Why the attention lands where it does
It follows whatever is easiest to see and easiest to show. Guards, signs and hi-vis checks can be photographed and put in front of a customer. Meanwhile the stuff that does the quiet damage never makes it into the photo. Lifting and carrying across a full shift. Noise. Dust. Somebody working on their own at the back of the building. The contractor who turns up on a Friday afternoon and gets waved through.
Customer questionnaires and insurers ask about particular things too, so those get done properly. None of that is the same as following the risk. Hardly anybody has sat down and asked where a person is most likely to be hurt here, and how badly.
How to find the back window
Ask the question that way round. If somebody got badly hurt on this site next month, how would it most likely happen? Put it to the operators first, because they’ll tell you in two minutes flat and it’s rarely the thing on the poster. They know which job makes everyone hold their breath.
Then set that list against where the time and money are actually going. Where the gap is biggest, that’s your work for the next few months. A competent person who can walk the site with you speeds that up no end, because they’ll spot the things you’ve stopped seeing. A risk assessment helps too, as long as it covers every task and not only the headline hazards.
Keep the locks
Nobody needs to rip out the three locks. They’re doing a job. You just need a latch on the window, and then a look at the other doors while you’re at it. A safety programme that’s even is far stronger than one that’s brilliant in two places.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on where your own gaps might be, book a stress-free chat and we’ll have a proper look at the site together.