This article by Larry Wilson appeared in the April 2006 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.   In the quest to treat everybody fairly, quite often we forget the wisdom contained in the expression “different strokes for different folks.” Although I have been on site to some 500 workplaces in Canada, the United States, Mexico,…

By Larry Wilson   Hopefully by the title, you realize we must be talking about acute injuries as it’s very difficult to kill yourself from doing too many key strokes or mouse clicks per day. Or, if you think of the highway—where there are 10–20 times more accidental fatalities than in workplaces or factories—it’s easy…

This article by Larry Wilson is reprinted with permission from the June 2000 Issue Occupational Health & Safety Magazine.   Employees need a motivational component and an environment that gives them the opportunity to think about their own experiences on and off the job. Thousands of companies worldwide have successfully implemented a behavior based safety…

This article by Larry Wilson is reprinted with permission from the January/February 2001 Issue of OHS Canada Magazine   Driving to work, we call it “defensive driving”. It’s basically, “never mind who or what’s at fault, I’m here to protect myself from getting hurt.” That same philosophy can apply at work. Why is it that…

This article by Larry Wilson appeared in the November 2012 issue of PSJ Magazine.   The title for this article came during a lunch meeting with the Director of Training and Development for a very large construction company. He was talking about making a training program specifically for reducing human error in the construction industry.…

This article by Ray Prest was published in the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Safety Decisions   If you wanted to summarize the safety profession for a layperson, you would do well to start with lockout/tagout (LOTO) as a great example of the contemporary approach to workplace safety. It combines an engineering solution and a behavioral…

This article by Don Wilson was published in the ASSP’s April 2016 issue of The Compass   Companies increasingly view the accumulated skills and intellectual capital of their workforce as a major resource and, in many cases, as a competitive advantage. If you ask a group of CEOs what their business’s biggest asset is, one…

This article by Ray Prest was published in BLR’s Fall/Winter 2015 issue of Safety Decisions   The seeds for the Global Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS) were sown in 1992 when the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development suggested a “globally harmonized hazard classification and compatible labelling system, including material…

By Tim Page-Bottorff, CSP, CIT   Blah, blah, blah and blah. You know what I am talking about—another mind-numbing, boring regurgitation of uninteresting information presented by a droning monotone voice, “death by PowerPoint” or the dreadful “persistent slide reader.” Have you ever attended this type of lecture, meeting, or conference session before? Of course you…

This article by Larry Wilson was originally published in the September 2013 issue of OH&S Magazine.   The point is, you don’t need to be a fortune teller to predict frustration, and the same thing is true for rushing. When you think about anticipating error, especially your own, it’s an interesting concept because—obviously—if we all knew that we were going to make…

This article by Larry Wilson appeared in the April 2005 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.   We know mistakes will happen. It makes sense to look at the efficiencies that safety technology offers. The statement “All injuries can be prevented” has been bandied around for decades. Some people even have added, “All injuries can…

This article by Cheri Genereaux appeared in the January 2015 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.   When it comes to safety, a lot of attention is dedicated to the biggest or loudest hazards. But if you poll folks in the construction industry on the source of most injuries, you’ll find that they’re rarely caused by the…