Despite your best efforts to make the workplace safe, human nature in the form of impulsive risk-taking behavior can undo a lot of your hard work. The question is, what can you do about it?
Some years back, researchers working for NIOSH published an article in The Behavior Analyst entitled "Impulsive Choice and Workplace Safety." The researchers, Brady Reynolds and Ryan M. Schiffbauer, had this comment about how impulsive behavior by workers can affect their safety and health on the job:
"One of the more subtle dangers to safety is not endemic to any particular facet of the workplace itself. Rather, it originates from human choice and can manifest with particularly disastrous consequences in many workplaces.
"The problem is that workers often behave in ways that are inconsistent with their long-term best interests. That is, workers sometimes choose far smaller but immediately rewarding options like convenience over larger, ultimately more beneficial options like increased safety and health. In such instances, workers fail to tolerate an immediate small cost required to avoid a larger more serious loss that is delayed or uncertain.
"These types of worker choices may take the form of risk taking or they may involve the failure to take known preventive safety measures, but in both cases they can compromise the long-term health-related interests of the individual.
EXAMPES:
- A worker hitches ride on the forks of a co-worker’s lift truck even though it’s against the rules and obviously unsafe. Why? Because it’s easier than walking across the plant. And nothing’s going to happen, anyway—or at least that’s what the worker thinks.
- A worker ignores safety training and the warning label on a ladder and perches precariously on the top step of a folding ladder instead of taking the time to do the safe thing find a taller ladder.
"Such choices appear to be based on avoiding immediate small costs involving effort or more time (i.e., walking or taking the time to find a ladder) and discounting delayed or uncertain health consequences," say the researchers.
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This conflict between long-term and short-term interests—and ultimately between safety and risk—can defeat your best efforts to improve worker safety and health.
"Many of the threats posed by dangers ranging from pathogens to repetitive stress injury," the researchers point out, "can indeed be mitigated by existing interventions. Yet none of these technologies can afford the worker a safe environment unless he or she actually uses them. Even the best respirator, for example, cannot improve a worker’s safety if he or she consistently fails to put it on."
What’s the Solution?
The researchers suggest several ways to help minimize impulsive behavior on the job.
CASE IN POINT: "Consider the hypothetical case of a construction worker who is working on the partially completed roof of a three-story building," suggest the researchers. "On the morning that he first starts to work on the roof, he recognizes that the particular job he will be doing is potentially dangerous and that he needs to take special care not to fall.
"Later in the morning, though, he realizes that he did not bring enough nails to his location. Unfortunately, the rest of the roofing nails are located on the roof at the opposite end of the building. When he does run out of nails, he can either try to get across the partially constructed roof and back with the nails from the other side without falling (Option A) or expend more time and effort to go all the way down to the ground and back up on the other side to get the nails, then back down to the ground again, and back up to where he was originally working (Option B)."
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Best Approach: In this example, the researchers say that safety management intervention efforts should target one or both circumstances (that is, the perceived low probability of negative consequences of Option A and the effort and time requirements of Option B) that could lead to the worker to discount the safety benefits of Option B and impulsively make the unsafe choice.
What would be the best way to address the problem? The researchers suggest that an imagery exercise might be effective in changing the worker’s perception about the low probability of falling if he chooses the unsafe option.
The worker could be guided through imagery exercises in which he is asked to imagine himself attempting to get across the hazardous roof and falling.
"Highly detailed imagery exercises may serve to make the negative consequences (i.e., loss of health or life) of high-risk behaviors more salient and therefore more compelling as behavioral determinants."
Other suggestions from the researchers for minimizing impulsive risk taking include:
- Feedback on safety performance (praise for safe behavior and immediate correction of unsafe behavior)
- Training that targets the consequences of not choosing safe options
- Incentives for safe behavior and negative consequences for unsafe behavior
- More frequent rest breaks and reasonable production goals (the researchers found evidence that fatigue and stress may contribute to impulsive behavior)
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