HSE Professionals Actions & Workers' Behaviors Toward Safety

 

Human beings’ behaviors, attitudes, and the level of consciousness are differing from someone to another. Dealing with workers who came from all different parts of this world with unsimilar characters, in the first place requires respect, understanding, and patient to enable HSE professionals to easily identify workers behaviors at workplaces. However, analyzing the real factors or indicators that contribute in making workers to behave either positively or negatively require HSE professional to get a full understanding of the safety culture for that organization prior to making any judgment or taking action. Based on my humble experience in HSE filed I could classify workers into three categories; workers who are behaving positively, workers who are behaving 50/50 positively, and workers who are behaving negatively.

workers who are behaving positively toward safety are those who strongly believe that, there’s nothing most important than preserving lives. These people do not believe in shortcut works and they do not accept any type of tolerance once it comes to their safety or others safety. They truly have solid thought about the importunacy of occupational safety and they do not simply say the common phrase “THINK SAFELY”, but they take it seriously by practically implement it in their day-to-day operations. Therefore, these workers are the role models because they set up a good example once it comes to safety compliance.

Workers who are behaving 50/50 positively toward safety ONLY whenever they see HSE Representatives. You could say these people are following and implementing HSE regulations temporarily or occasionally (e.g., top management visit) for show only. Before these workers are being caught and as you are heading to them you can easily see how quickly they are attempting to rectify whatever they can in the spot pretending nothing wrong is going on. Unfortunately, they will just wait for you to leave, and once you left, they will continue or resume their tasks unsafely.

Workers who are behaving negatively toward safety are those who do not really believe in safety as they always think that, safety is a waste of time and road block for the work progress. These people have common phrase “WE HAVE BEEN DOING IT FOR SEVERL YEARS AND NOTHING WENT WRONG”. This is what they are going to say every time you talk with them about safety aspects. In reality, they cannot count the number of times they have survived and they cannot realize that, it just takes seconds to severely injured or in most worst-case scenario died.

Changing workers’ behaviors in the workplaces is one of the biggest challenges that HSE Professionals are facing on a daily basis. In the real business world changing someone’s mindset about something can only be done by either training or disciplinary action. Thus, one of HSE Professional responsibilities is to ensure that all workers are aware of all hazards associated with tasks they preform and they have been trained in accordance with HSE Training Matrix. However, if the worker found that he/she is still violating HSE rules of the workplace, then disciplinary action shall be strictly applied (e.g., verbal warning, 3 times/ warning letters and then fired from company). Therefore, as HSE Professional, we must guide, advice, train, and protect all workers by all means. Once we have done our parts after that, the worker has two choices and he/she can pick his/her choice accordingly.