In every big piece of machinery and equipment, there is always a kill-switch or an emergency switch to stop them from causing serious incidents and accidents during abnormal operations that would have also caused serious injuries if not stopped on time. In many engineering and manufacturing processes, it’s often not so straight-forward. While many industrial accidents were resulted from a combination of factors or a series of events that had happened at the same time, really, whose responsibility is it to prevent workplace accidents or scams?
ISO45001:2018 Standard states that: An organization is responsible for the occupational health and safety of workers and others who can be affected by its activities. This responsibility includes promoting and protecting their physical and mental health.
This management’s responsibility is not new!
Every workers are to be trained to perform the various tasks and made aware of hazards, OHS risks and actions that have potential implications and consequences. That’s what are documented inside organizations’ risk assessments in ‘ideal stage: weather, environment, co-workers, equipment, etc.). More often than not, what’s on papers never tally with actual situations on the ground.
It is imperative that Organization’s management must therefore ensure that their workers are a thinking workforce, equipped with risk management tools and methods who can stop to think and to assess the situation and make judgment call before the next course of actions.
The key to preventing workplace accidents are:
STOP-THINK-DO.
However, two key contraries to this is:
time-starved and a disrupted mind!
When someone is hard-pressed for time or in a panic-mode or the mind is constantly interrupted, nobody could remember to think before action. There is a very old Chinese wisdom: 三思而后行，meaning to think thrice before any action is still very relevant today to prevent workplace accidents and scams. Contrary to this is of course human behaviour that comes into the picture. This psychological aspect is again another complex issue that affects everybody’s mindset in our constantly-connected society.