Avoiding the Safety Sandtrap Courtesy of Caddyshack

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I know what you’re thinking, how can Caddyshack teach me a thing or two about safety? You’d be surprised what you can learn from Carl, Ty, and Al…. even if it’s what not to do.

Employee Injuries means time in the rough!

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According to the National Safety Council, a worker is injured on the job every 7 seconds. That is about how often Al heckles Judge as he tees off. If you remember the movie, in a moment of lapsed focus, Judge is infuriated for losing a bet and throws his putter which strikes and injures an elderly woman.
In the movie, this injury only slightly holds up the pace of play at Rolling Hills Golf Club. However, an incident in a real workplace is much less comical. It can impact production and can cost an organization dearly. Creating a culture with a focus on operating safely, efficiently and working toward continuous improvement can have significant and lasting positive effects. Illustrative data and in-depth reporting technology like Sospes can help you get there. FORE!!

How do employees break so much stuff?

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Hopefully your employees are not like Carl Spackler, intentionally damaging property, or assets. Nevertheless, damages can happen when deadlines and projects are involved.
If your incident reporting process is a mixture of excel and paper, your system is outdated. If a forklift running into racking causes as much administrative work to fall on your desk as it does products onto the warehouse floor, your process is inefficient.
You should be using your handy dandy mobile device to quickly type the information into Sospes and stop skipping lunch breaks just to get organized.

Ignoring hazards, just to get the job done

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Of course you want to finish 18 holes, but there’s one million volts of electricity shooting through the sky as you hold your 5 iron. Self-awareness is key when it comes to creating a safe workplace and unfortunately Carl Spackler has very little of it.
As an EHS professional, often you are managing a lot of people in a lot of places which forces you to rely on your employees to report close calls or substandard conditions. When hazards are not reported, nothing is done about them and work continues despite the increasing risk of an incident. Even if you are taking preventative actions, imagine how much more targeted and impactful they could be with information backing your decisions.
W. Edwards Deming put it, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
Driving your safety program off of opinions is the equivalent of having Carl as your caddy, at some point you’re going to get burned and left out in the rain.

IS YOUR EHS PRACTICE IN THE SAND TRAP?

If when you tee up your safety program and it continues to land in the sand trap, our Sospes sandwedge may be the solution for you. You’ll be a scratch safety professional in no time!