Safety Knights

In my facility we have a near miss reporting system. While many employees think its stupid to write down a near miss report, since "nothing happened". Its important to stress that a near miss isn't meant to reprimand (although it can), its more so for the safety pros and management to gauge the effectiveness of our programs. Its is ultimately up to the employees to show us whats effective and whats not. If they dont report the small things, we have no way to prevent the big things.

The best thing is, the report can be done anonymous; however, a majority of people just don't want to fill it out. This is something that should be pushed hard to prevent workplace injuries. Our whole job is based around the premise of mitigation. We cant mitigate if we cant see the issues.

Behavior Based Safety is my response which goes along with Near Misses but doing some observations on other employees including supervisors and carrying a conversation with them. If they are doing what they are supposed to be doing and have all the right PPE on then you have to accentuate the positive.
You can use all the information from the observation cards that need to be turned in by every employee weekly and it’s your discretion as to how many an employee needs to perform for the week. All that data that is collected you can track and trend what the employees are finding as well as the conversations they are having with the employees.

I do a fatigue-specific training prior to busy season. As David mentioned, stress, life/home issues, health issues can all add to fatigue. Here's a link to my fatigue powerpoint - please feel free to edit and make it work for your situation. This should give you access, but if not, DM me for access.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v8cPhWodRqS67pdOYD8O4QO2t-PbSnAW/view?usp=sharing

I like the outlook of worker fatigue. I suffer from SLE and understand fatigue more than most. This is one item I typically keep an eye on.

Another big one for me is personal relationships with employees. I like to develop a relationship with my workers to help instill trust with one another. Some safety managers I feel don't place enough empathizes on this.

As a Human Factors Professional who specializes in fatigue management, I'm happy to see that more and more, organizations are beginning to recognize their role in both the contribution to worker fatigue (work schedule designs, workloads, etc.) and the mitigation of fatigue-related risk. It's not just an employee issue, but a shared responsibility. Prescriptive rules are not the answer and have shown they don't work to eliminate worker fatigue. Fatigue happens to all of us. It's how we manage the risk attached to fatigued workers that we will begin to see an impact. There's so much we, as safety professionals, can do to drive this conversation forward with out leadership teams.