In recent years, OSHA created some recommended practices for safety and health management programs or systems. One of those, OSHA 3886, is titled Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs in Construction.

We wanted to make sure you know about this OSHA document on construction safety and health programs. And we also wanted to call out some of the highlights of the OSHA document for you here in this article.

So definitely download the OSHA document so you can read it completely and use it to improve the safety and health of your construction work areas (and stay more compliant, as well). But please do feel free to review our article for some helpful construction safety tips also.

And be sure to let us know if you need help with construction safety training, safety management software for your construction company, construction project management continuing education, or other stuff related to construction.

(more…)

Read More

Welcome, video fans! This is the fourth and last in a four-recording series of discussions with Jennifer Serne, Assistant Professor at Central Washington University, on topics related to decision-making, heuristics, cognitive biases, incidents, and incident investigations.

To make the four-recording series easier to process mentally, we broke it up into two parts, with two discussions per part. Those parts are:

Part 1: Decision-Making, Heuristics, and & Cognitive Biases from the Safety Professionals Perspective During Incident Investigations (this part includes a discussion titled Incident Investigations & Cognitive Biases and a second discussion titled Guarding Against Bias in Incident Investigations).

Part 2: The same general topics–decision making, heuristics, cognitive biases–but from the perspective of employees on the job (this includes a discussion titled Why Human Decisions Sometimes Contribute to Incidents and the discussion immediately below).

We hope you enjoy this fourth and final discussion on these issues and invite you to check out the earlier ones if you missed those. We also invite you to join with us in waiting for future recorded discussions with Jennifer–we’ve got some planned.

Before you take off, please feel free to download the guide below. 

Read More

If you’ve been following us lately, you know we’re in the middle of a four-discussion series with Jennifer Serne, an Assistant Professor at Central Washington University’s Safety and Health Management Program, about issues related to decision-making, heuristics, cognitive bias, incidents, and safety at work.

If you’re missed the first two discussions, walk don’t run to check them out: Cognitive Biases and Incident Investigations and Guarding Against Cognitive Biases in Incident Investigations.

Are you back? OK, then go ahead and check out this recorded discussion. It’s the first of two discussion in which we “flip the coin” and look at heuristics, cognitive biases, and decision-making not by the safety professional but rather by the employees the safety professional works with.

In this discussion, we’ll start by talking about heuristics, biases, and decision-making. In the fourth and final conversation, we’ll discuss how safety professionals can help set employees up to make better (or safer, or more successful, or more optimal, or whatever word want you to use here) decisions at work.

As before, many thanks to Jennifer.

We hope you enjoyed this discussion of human factors at work, that you went  back and checked out the earlier discussions, and that you stay tuned for the fourth and final discussion in this series.

Before you go, feel free to download the guide below as well.

Read More

In a recent recorded discussion with Jennifer Serne of Central Washington University’s Safety and Health Management program, Jennifer told us how we use heuristics in our life and during incident investigations and how we also fail prey to applying cognitive biases in our incident investigations.

In this continuation of the discussion, Jennifer continues discussing cognitive biases in incident investigations and gives us some tips for trying to be wary of their influence and to try to minimize their influence.

In future conversations, we’ll talk with Jennifer about how employees use heuristics and how they also suffer from cognitive biases when they’re making decisions on the job. Stay tuned for that!

Many thanks to Jennifer Serne for sharing her insights and experience on these issues with us.

Let us know if you have any questions, stay tuned for more from Jennifer, and have a great day.

Feel free to download the free guide below, too. 

Read More

Performing an incident investigation is an important role within the job responsibilities of a safety manager or safety professional.

The reason we conduct incident investigations is because we want to learn what caused the incident and hopefully prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.

But that well-intended effort can be led astray and misdirected by cognitive biases that the incident investigator may hold and that may influence his or her decisions, judgments, and decisions during the incident investigation.

In this recorded discussion, Assistant Professor Jennifer Serne from Central Washington University’s Safety and Health Management Program tells us about heuristics, cognitive biases, and incident investigations. In a second recorded discussion, she tells us how to guard against these cognitive biases during incident investigations. And in a third and fourth recorded discussion (upcoming), we’ll discuss how heuristics and cognitive biases affect the decisions that employees make at work.

Here’s the video. Enjoy and be sure to check out the other recorded discussions with Jennifer as well.

Here are some links to stuff that came up in this discussion with Jennifer:

• Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Thinking Fast and Slow at Work 
• List of cognitive biases at Wikipedia
• Cognitive biases infographic
• Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational 
• An article about Daniel Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality 
• Availability bias 
• Hindsight bias 
• Actor/observer bias and/or fundamental attribution error 
• Dunning-Krueger bias 
• Anchoring effect 
• Richard Nisbett, Mindware 
• lesswrong.com 
• DanAriely.com 
• GeekWrapped.com and their Cognitive Bias Survival Guide 

We’d like to thank Jennifer for sharing her thoughts on cognitive biases during incident investigations as performed by safety professionals and we hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned for the second recorded discussion, in which we talk about things that safety professionals can do to try to minimize the harmful and misleading effects of cognitive biases during incident investigations.

Before you go, please feel free to download the free guide below.

Read More

As a safety professional, you want to know about the world around you. But that begs the question–what DO you know about the world around you, how do you know that, and how can you apply all of this to helping create safer, healthier workplaces for everyone in your organization.

• We recently met Nick Travaglini while listening to him discussing the intersections between philosophy and occupational safety at one of the GREAT online learning experiences that Ron Gantt has been hosting since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In three consecutive talks, he discussed a chronology of knowledge, if you will, in western civilization by discussing three works:

  Rene Descartes, The Discourse on the Method, a seminal work that helped set up the Enlightenment and the Newtonian mechanistic world view

• Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society & The Rising Culture, anTod in particular a chapter on Einstein and physics since Einstein
• Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (a book about a French post-structuralist philosopher who sought to take lessons from post-Einsteinian physics and apply them to our lives and thought

Give the video below a listen and see what you think. We talk about lots of stuff of interest to safety professionals, including root-cause analysis and how to use diversity to get better opinions and ideas.

We’ve also included some links below to things that came up during the discussion.

Todd Conklin, Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast Series 

Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure 

 

Read More