Safety & Health Solutions - October edition

Contributed by Star Conrad, Director of Operations, Evergreen Safety Council 
Evergreen Safety Council produces a monthly newsletter covering a variety of safety topics. Each month we will provide a link here to the online PDF.  Check out our new look!

Inside this Issue:
Lead Article – NIOSH: Preventing Work Related Injury
Washington Governor's Industrial Safety & Health Conference at 60
Preventing Eye Injury
Forklift Technology Updates
You can also sign up to receive an electronic copy via email or hard copy via the mail. This link will also take you to a full archive with over four years of past issues.

So pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and read all about what's going on in the world of safety & health.

60TH Governor’s Safety and Health Conference coming to Tacoma

Tunnel boring, refinery investigations, and the impact of Japan’s nuclear reactor accident are among the topics that will be covered at the 60th Governor’s Industrial Safety and Health Conference held this year at the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center on Sept. 28 and 29.

"Even after 60 years, this conference continues to offer safety and health information that is both useful and relevant to modern safety concerns,” said Sharon Ness, president of the Governor’s Industrial Safety and Health Advisory Board. “Our goal is to make it worthwhile for both employers and workers to take time from their busy schedules and attend this important event.”

The conference is sponsored each year by the Advisory Board and the Department of Labor & Industries with support from industry partners. This year’s theme is "Sixty years of investing in tomorrow through safety and health today.”

The keynote speaker is Dr. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). The conference will begin with the presentation of the Lifesaving and Humanitarian Awards, emceed by “Evening Magazine” television host Meeghan Black.

Workshops will include presentations by Norm Nyhuis Safety Trainer / Consultant with Evergreen Safety Council on distracted driving and Matt Pomerinke, a Longview man who lost his arm to a sawmill accident and now participates in L&I’s Injured Young Worker Speakers’ Program.

Other workshops will cover forklift safety, confined space work, crane and rigging safety, tree falling, excavation and workplace violence. The 38th Annual Poletop Rescue Competition and the 14th Annual Forklift Rodeo will both take place on the first day of the conference. The complete program is available at http://www.wagovconf.org/.

Registration for the two-day event is $180 until Sept. 27 or $200 at the door. Groups of six or more get a $50 discount on those prices; registration for students and apprentices is $25.

To register, visit the website or call (206) 972-1961. For conference information, call toll free 1-888-451-2004. TDD users call 1-360-902-5797. Online registration closes Sept. 27.



Safety Career Development

Contributed by Star Conrad, Director of Operations, Evergreen Safety Council 
A career in safety can take you down many different paths, such as Risk Management, Human Resources, Security or Operational Management.  To help prepare you to move forward in your career, ESC has partnered with the Washington Employers' Association to to bring Human Resources and Management training to ESC members and clients.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

8:00am - 12:00pm
Project Management

Increase your project completion rate. Effectively utilize team members and avoid “meeting burnout.”  Did you know that there is a growing trend in many companies to hire people to do project management exclusively? Currently, most companies expect their existing employees and managers to add “projects” to already full plates. But, the results are often spotty due to a lack of project management knowledge. 

The good news is that there are many tools and techniques that make for world-class project management. This class teaches the best practices for project management based upon current empirical research. Participants will apply the management theories and tools to their own projects and will create a complete project plan in the class.
In this course, you’ll use a simple one-page project management planning guide which will walk you through the steps that make the difference between project success and failure.  And, because your project partners are so integral to the success of your project, you’ll practice interviewing stakeholders and negotiating options.
Topics that will be covered include:
• World-class project management tools
• The importance of clear project goals
• How to ensure project support
• Using a Mind Map to capture ideas
• Getting your team on board

After completing this course, participants will be able to:
• Clarify project goals and deliverables
• Quick-start a project using a simple mapping tool
• Capture details of project action items
• Identify and collaborate with project stakeholders regarding their needs/concerns
• Delegate project tasks in a way appropriate to the person assigned the tasks
• Resolve conflicting expectations and project challenges

Cost for ½ day session: Mbr: $95 / Non: $115
Register Today!


Wednesday, October 5, 2011
1:00pm - 5:00pm
Keeping Your Cool Under Pressure
Research today indicates that EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is twice as important as IQ in an individual’s professional success. Your emotional intelligence is your ability to sense, understand and effectively apply power and depth of emotions as a source of energy, information, creativity, trust and connection. When EQ is absent, teamwork suffers and morale drops.

Emotions have never been welcomed in the workplace. We are conditioned to believe that work decision and business strategies should be based upon fact and logic. However, emotions are part of every interaction in your business and personal life. In the workplace, emotions are often unrecognized; but they are always there, and often interfere with organizational effectiveness.

Topics that will be covered include:
• Daniel Goleman’s research into emotional intelligence
• How fear and stress lead to unproductive behavior
• Why EQ matters to your career
• Keys to professional success: self-awareness and empathy
• What to do when your buttons get pushed!

After completing this course, participants will be able to:
• Identify Daniel Goleman’s EQ principles of self-awareness, selfmanagement, social awareness and social skills
• Analyze their own stress related quirks and develop alternatives
• Discuss their own issues more openly to increase their empathy skills
• Support other learners in their quest for greater mastery of interpersonal skills
• Practice new behavior within the safe confines of the classroom
• Learn to anticipate and prepare for challenging situations

Cost for ½ day session: Mbr: $95 / Non: $115
Register Today!

Keeping Cool and Project Management are taught by Susan Goldstein:
Ms. Goldstein is President of Puget Sound Training Associates and has been consulting, training and coaching for over 30 years. She obtained her Bachelor of Science from Portland State University and her Master of Arts from Marylhurst College. Ms. Goldstein has been growing leaders since 1976 and specializes in helping companies with their toughest people problems. She offers courses in communication and supervision for Washington Employers and provides coaching services to Washington Employers’ members upon request.

Apollo Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Contributed by Star Conrad, Director of Operations, Evergreen Safety Council 
Have you attended ESC's safety certification series? Have you ever wondered what's next?
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) can help you gain a new perspective on safety:
• A structured form of problem solving
• Generally used after an undesired event has occurred
• Used to understand and control causes, and to prevent recurrence of the problem

Common RCA Techniques:
• 5 Why’s: a linear form of problem solving. The premise is that by asking why five times, the analyst will end up at the “root cause”. Why it’s ineffective: problems are non-liner, multiple things are happening at the same point in time and space. 5-Why’s is too simplistic to capture the whole picture. A good place to start to brainstorm a few causes, but not thorough enough to create a full understanding of the problem.
• Fishbone/Ishikawa Diagram: sometimes referred to as “cause & effect” diagrams, the Fishbone is a brainstorming tool where users try to come up with causes around a set of categories, usually Methods, Material, Manpower and Machinery or something similar. It too is a good tool to start brainstorming. Why it’s ineffective: does not show how causes relate to one another. You have no way of knowing which causes would be affected by certain solutions. Provides no framework to dig deeper into cause paths or even know where/when to stop. Teams vote on the “root cause”.

Apollo Root Cause Analysis:
• Based on true cause and effect logic. Consists of four simple steps: 1) Define the Problem, 2) Create the Cause & Effect chart, 3) Identify Solutions, and 4) Implement the Best Solutions. Start from the defined problem and look back in time, accounting for how causes relate to each other. All causes are backed by evidence and followed through to logical stopping points.

Benefits of Apollo RCA:
• Prevents analyses from stopping too soon
• Removes the “singular root cause” mentality by focusing on controlling numerous causes. This approach more greatly reduces the risk of the problem recurring.
• Highly marketable skill
• Provides quick return on training investment (ROI) – most students can more than pay for their entire on-site class of 25 students (~$12k) with the $ they save the company on their first RCA after class
• Comes with powerful software (RealityCharting) that helps students create better analyses and enables them to easily share results.
• Useful in any industry or discipline (safety, quality, IT, reliability etc.)
• Instructors also lead high-profile investigations in the field – bring these learnings into the classroom.

Register Today!
Root Cause Analysis for Practitioners
October 11-12, 2011
At the Evergreen Safety Training Center in Seattle

Safety & Health Solutions - September edition

Contributed by Star Conrad, Director of Operations, Evergreen Safety Council 
Evergreen Safety Council produces a monthly newsletter covering a variety of safety topics. Each month we will provide a link here to the online PDF.

Inside this Issue:
Lead/Guest Article – Farm Safety Culture: What Would a Thriving Safety Culture Feel Like?
People In Safety - Al Filmore, Trainer / Consultant, Evergreen Safety Council
Two Students Awarded ESC Scholarship
Portable Ladders: Is it the Right Size?
Aerial Lifts Offer Mobility, Flexibility and Unique Hazards
Safely Operating an Aerial Lift
The Tiger in Your Tool Shed
Are You Required to Wear PPE?

You can also sign up to receive an electronic copy via email or hard copy via the mail. This link will also take you to a full archive with over four years of past issues.

So pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit back and read all about what's going on in the world of safety & health.

We Need to Change Course

ASSE's President: We Need to Change Course

"For far too long, occupational safety and health has been dominated by a politically charged yes and no conversation about occupational safety and health that, as these statistics demonstrate, is not advancing worker protections," Terrie Norris said in response to the BLS preliminary fatality data from 2010.

August 31, 2011
The preliminary 2010 fatality numbers released Aug. 25 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a call for action and a clear sign that a "new paradigm" is needed to advance U.S. employers' safety, Terrie Norris, president of the American Society of Safety Engineers, said Aug. 30. The BLS report said 4,547 workers died from occupational injuries in 2010 compared with 4,551 in 2009. ASSE extended its condolences to the families of the 4,547 people who died last year.

"ASSE urges everyone concerned with worker safety not to accept as reasonable the preliminary results of this report that show little change in the number of workplace fatalities between 2009 and 2010," said Norris, CSP, ARM, CPSI. "Despite the dedicated efforts of ASSE's members, employers, workers, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the fact that this nation's fatalities are not significantly decreasing should be a call for action, not complacency, especially at an economically challenging time when some of the most dangerous industries are not at full employment. A statistical plateau of worker fatalities is not an achievement, but evidence that this nation's effort to protect workers is stalled. These statistics call for nothing less than a new paradigm in the way this nation protects workers."

"For far too long, occupational safety and health has been dominated by a politically charged yes and no conversation about occupational safety and health that, as these statistics demonstrate, is not advancing worker protections. This oppositional approach leaves too many of this nation's workplaces mired in efforts that do not achieve better safety but merely meet the most minimal standards for safety. That needs to change. Instead of a tug of war over compliance to prescriptive standards that cannot address each workplace, this nation's approach to workplace safety must encourage a specific dialogue about the most important risks in each workplace that engages employers, workers, and OSHA in a cooperative effort to address those risks, supported not only [by] enforcement but by NIOSH research and education resources."

"ASSE and its members are engaged in helping move this nation towards that goal. ASSE has supported the idea of an OSHA injury and illness prevention program (I2P2) standard with the knowledge that this standard, if done well, can begin to move OSHA's focus from prescriptive approaches to safety to risk-based and more cooperative efforts. We have established a Risk Assessment Task Force of members and others who will work to engage the occupational safety and health community in moving towards more risk-based approaches to managing safety in all workplaces. ASSE's Sustainability Task Force is intent on making sure the quickly growing voluntary fervor among employers to address sustainability encompasses worker safety and health now. Our federal occupational safety and health reform bill seeks to be a platform for compromise and addresses ways the 40-year-old OSH Act fails to advance workplace safety, including helping make the standard-setting process work, allowing the adoption of updated permissible exposure limits, and better defining who is qualified to do safety, among a variety of measures."

"The time has come for all stakeholders in occupational safety and health to come down off the plateau of acceptance and work together to find conciliatory ways that help make sure our economy, our jobs and corporate bottom lines can benefit from a safe and healthy workforce."

Reprinted from Occupational Safety & Health

Job Opening: Compliance Coordinator – Seattle, WA

Responsibilities:
• Promotes the maintenance of a safe, accident free, and healthy work environment at all work locations (2 Bakeries, 16 depots, 16 outlet stores, 2 satellite truck repair shops) in Western Washington.
• Ensures safety policies and procedures are followed by all bakery personnel in compliance with company, state and Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules and regulations.
• Support corporate Safe Work Methods (SWM) in all aspects of employment and increased use of and adherence to Smith Safe Driving System by Sales and Transportation teams.
• Lead injury/accident investigation and procedural adherence and train specific Safe Work Methods on return-to-work.
• Participate in development of the Annual Safety Program and manage/coordinate Safety Programs and incentive celebrations for all locations.
• Coordinate administrative and operational departments within bakeries to ensure Safe Quality Food (SQF) standards and compliance; SQF Code specialist and regulatory (HACCP and MSDS, etc.) expert.
• Direct site certification processes, internal audits and compliance standards/certification direction.
• Assist with Corporate policy, manuals and work with outside agencies.
• Obtain regulatory/policy certification.

Desired Skills:
• BSc degree in safety is preferred; valid driver’s license and insurance.
• Previous safety experience, food manufacturing experience is a plus.
• Ability to read and interpret documents and write routine reports and correspondence.
• Speak effectively before groups and regulatory agencies.
• Solve practical problems and deal with a variety of variables in situations where only limited standardization may exist.
• Ability to interpret a variety of instruction furnished in oral, diagram or schedule form.

Email resumes or fax to: 206-726-7546

Franz Family Bakery is an AAP/EEO employer. All qualified applicants will be considered regardless of race, sex, age, religion, nationality, disability, veteran status. Visit US Bakery for company details and depot locations.

Labor Day Weekend Traffic Safety Alert

Labor Day Weekend is one of the most deadly holidays for fatal alcohol-related traffic crashes. Nationally, it is estimated that hundreds of people will die in traffic crashes during the holiday period. As we approach one of the deadliest travel weekends of the year, the Evergreen Safety Council is issuing a Holiday Traffic Safety Alert.

“Chances are you will be sharing the road with intoxicated drivers during the Labor Day holiday,” said Tom Odegaard, Executive Director, Evergreen Safety Council. “We encourage the use of designated drivers and common sense to make sure everyone has a safe and fun holiday.”

Law enforcement officers from across the country will be cracking down on drunk driving over the Labor Day holiday and days leading up to it. The nation-wide crackdown, "Driver Sober or Get Pulled Over” involves concentrated sobriety checkpoints and other high-visibility enforcement efforts to keep impaired drivers off the roads.

“Even if you beat the odds and manage to walk away from an impaired-driving crash alive, the trauma and financial costs of a crash or an arrest for driving while impaired can still destroy your life,” said Tom Odegaard.  Violators face jail time, loss of their driver licenses, or are often sentenced to use ignition interlocks or alcohol monitoring devices. Their insurance rates go up. Other financial hits include attorney fees, court costs, lost time at work, and the potential loss of job or job prospects. When family, friends and co-workers find out, violators can also face tremendous personal embarrassment and humiliation.

“Driving impaired is simply not worth all the consequences. So don’t take the chance. Remember, “Driver Sober or Get Pulled Over,” said Tom Odegaard.

The Evergreen Safety Council offers these tips for remaining safe on the road:

Wear your seat belt:
• Buckle up! Seat belts reduce your risk of fatality by 45% in a traffic accident, but must be used to work.
• Use both lap and shoulder belts whenever possible.
• Insure a proper fit for your seat belt.

Never Drink and Drive:
• Alcohol is the single largest factor involved in motor vehicle deaths.
• Have a responsible designated driver when you head out for Labor Day activities.

Be aware of drunk drivers (here are some signs):
• Drivers who turn with a wide radius.
• Drivers at speeds 10 miles below the speed limit or speeding excessively.
• Drivers who are following too closely.
• Drivers who have a slow response to traffic signals.

Use defensive driving:
• Maintain a proper following distance from other vehicles. The rule of thumb is three seconds following distance plus one additional second for each hazard, such as rain or heavy traffic.
• Scan the road environment ten to fifteen seconds ahead of your vehicle.
• Check your mirrors and your surroundings often.
• Watch for tailgaters. If someone is tailgating, slow down to increase following distance and encourage the tailgater to pass.