Parents Influence With Unsafe Actions

Safety Attitude extends beyond the company walls and far beyond the 8-4 workday. Safety Attitude is what you need to help your people develop so that they can go home and stress the importance of a Safety Attitude amongst their family members.

I followed a car on the highway for about 20 miles last weekend. The car had originally passed me while a 30-something female driver was text messaging on her phone. Once past me, she pulled into the lane in front of me and drove the same speed as I was driving. I watched her SUV sway from side-to-side in the lane, occasionally hitting the shoulder or putting two wheels over the line. After witnessing this stupid behavior for some 20 miles, I pulled alongside (never exceeding the speed limit since in addition to side-to-side driving, her speed was erratic) and finally blew my horn while wagging my finger at her. She finally put her phone down because she knew what she was doing was wrong and she had been caught.

Yep, she's going to be a great mom - showing her children the unsafe way to drive. Any advice she gave to her children to the contrary would be hypocritical.

Please, please, please start an initiative at your workplace to educate your people about the dangers of texting while driving as well as the dangers of talking on the phone while driving. Teenagers don't normally use their phones for talking - unless they're driving. If they need to talk with someone so badly, encourage them to travel with a friend who can text for them. Do something to help the kids understand that they're flirting with disaster.

Suggest to your employees to check their kid's phones and to be diligent about matching up texting times with driving times and to take their phones and car privileges away if they break the rules. 

The last thing your workplace needs is to be attending the funeral of a co-worker whose child was tragically killed while texting or talking on the cell phone in the car.

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Kevin Burns - Corporate Safety Attitude/Culture Strategist
www.safety.kevburns.com
Toll Free 1-877-287-6711
Creator of the 90-Day System To Improve Safety Culture!

Highest Workplace Suicide Professions

Think that dentists have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions? No so fast.

According to a new report from the Institute for Work & Health, heavy equipment operators and truck drivers are taking their lives more now than ever. Also, skilled/technical/supervisory workers along with semi-skilled workers account for two-thirds of all suicides among Canadian men in the workplace.

Men commit suicide four times as often as women.

Several other occupations are associated with “protective effects” against suicide for men (which means occupations to watch for signs of suicidal tendencies). They include:

• management and administration,
• mathematics,
• systems analysis,
• architects,
• engineers,
• community planners,
• elementary school teachers
• commodities traders.

No equivalent occupations for women were identified.

You can read the report yourself. What's your strategy to continue to foster a Culture of Safety at your workplace?

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Kevin Burns - Corporate Safety Attitude/Culture Strategist
www.safety.kevburns.com
Toll Free 1-877-287-6711
Creator of the 90-Day System To Improve Safety Culture!

The Bully Is About To Be Bullied

So what do you think happens when a high-school bully enters the work world and has a bully for a boss? The bully learns how the business world works through the eyes of another bully. In fact, the bully becomes just like his boss - so much so that he becomes almost a mirror of his boss. So when it comes time for succession, guess who gets the nod? The guy just like the last guy.

The province of Ontario is set to pass a bill (Bill 168) making workplace harassment illegal. The new law will come into effect this month. It requires employers to develop and communicate workplace violence prevention policies, assess the risks of workplace violence, and take reasonable precautions to protect workers from domestic violence in the workplace. Ontario will be the third province to legislate against workplace violence and harassment, along with Quebec and Saskatchewan.

New research from Queen's University's School of Business indicates that workplace bullying can be more damaging than racial or gender harassment.

"While ethnic harassment and gender harassment can both be attributed to prejudice, general workplace harassment is a subtle form of mistreatment that masks underlying motives, and is not as easily attributed to bias," say report authors Jana Raver of Queen's School of Business and Lisa Nishii of Cornell University,

Caucasians reported higher levels of general workplace harassment than minorities, and women were not more likely than men to experience either gender harassment or general workplace harassment.

Raver and Nishii also found that general workplace harassment may be especially detrimental because unlike gender and ethnic harassment, it is not illegal in most of North America. A study released by Queen's University in 2008 also found workplace harassment to be more harmful than sexual harassment because of a lack of recourse for victims.

So, even if you're not in one of the three provinces affected by the new legislation, are you ahead of this or will you wait until the very last minute - until your legislated to do something about it? You can help your own Corporate Safety & Wellness Culture by being ahead of the legislation.

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Kevin Burns - Corporate Safety Attitude/Culture Strategist
www.safety.kevburns.com
Toll Free 1-877-287-6711
Creator of the 90-Day System To Improve Safety Culture!