Every day we make decisions we hope will make the job faster and more efficient.  But do time savers ever risk your own safety, or the safety of other team members?  Unsafe acts cause four times as many accidents & injuries as unsafe conditions.

A Shortcut that reduces your safety on the job is not a shortcut but a sure path to accidents and injury.

Consider these scenarios:

An electrician is up on a ladder finishing up a job.  He needs to connect a wire that’s about four feet to his right before he’s done for the day.  Instead of climbing down, moving the ladder to the spot where he needs to work and then climbing back up, he decides to take a shortcut to save some time.  He reaches as far as he can to grab onto the wire, and as he does, he loses his balance.  He falls to the deck below, and the ladder falls on top of him.

A welder boss has one last weld to make.  As she finishes the weld, she needs to chip the last bit of slag off before she’s done for the day.  Earlier, she took off her safety glasses because she was sweating and the glasses were fogging up.  Now she can’t find them and she knows the job will only take her 2 minutes, so instead of continuing to look, she begins to chip.  As she’s chipping away, a piece of slag flies through the air, hits her in the eye, and scratches her cornea.

Every time you take a shortcut to save time, you’re rolling the dice, AND… if you keep taking these gambles, sooner or later you’re going to lose.

What can you do to prevent this?