At some workplaces, incidents occur and there’s no thought given to incident investigations. This is a no-no.

At others, probably most, incidents occur and are followed by an incident investigation that attempts to identify a single root cause and then put in a corrective action to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. This is probably the most common response to incidents at organizations.

But there are criticisms of that second, common method, which might be considered the traditional safety approach to incidents and incident investigations. One criticism is that it’s overly simplistic, with its emphasis on identifying a single root cause instead of noting the interplay of interrelated systemic issues. Another criticism is that the explanation often–too often–claims that a worker made a poor decision, often the result of not following procedures. And a third is that the corrective action often boils down to simply providing training and perhaps enforcing discipline on the worker who’s thought to be the cause of the problem.

In his book Pre-Accident Investigations: Better Questions–An Applied Approach to Operational Learning, Dr. Todd Conklin makes the points above about some of the problems with a traditional safety incident investigation approach at work and makes a recommendation for a different approach: learning teams.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Conklin’s book and recommendations. As always, we recommend that in addition to reading the article, you get the information straight from the expert as well, so please buy Dr. Conklin’s book (all three of them, really) and/or listen to the video of Dr. Conklin speaking at the ASSE Safety 2017 national conference, which we’ve included at the bottom of this article.

For those of you who have been reading along as I’ve been reading Dr. Conklin’s works, you’ll know this is the third such treatment we’ve done here at the Convergence Training blog. The other articles include:

• 9 Things You Should Know About Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), based on Dr. Conklin’s book Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety
• Preventing Workplace Fatalities, based on Dr. Conklin’s book Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict

So with all that said, let’s get to learning about learning teams for building the safety capacity of your organization.

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The number of workers in the US who speak Spanish as a primary or even a sole language is large and is growing.

As a result, trainers who don’t speak, write, or understand Spanish often struggle to communicate with those workers. And that inability to communicate can have serious negative consequences for organizations, trainers, and employees, including creating serious safety risks.

And don’t forget that it’s an OSHA requirement that safety training be provided in a language the employee can understand.

Although there’s no one simple solution to this issue, one way to address it is to use online safety training at work that’s multi-language, allowing the worker to select the language they’d prefer to complete the training in.

In the article below, we’ll talk you through that a little more.

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Did you know that as recently as 2016, the construction industry had the highest number of deaths by suicide amongst all industries, and that it had the second highest rate of suicide?

Sadly, both are true. Mental health issues, including depression and suicide, are a very serious problem in the construction industry.

Here at Convergence Training, we’ve been friends with Cal Beyer for quite some time. Cal’s the Director of Risk Management at Lakeside Industries in Issaquah, WA, but more to the point he’s a tireless advocate on the issue of suicide in the construction industry. If you’ve attended safety conferences in the Pacific Northwest, you may have seen Cal out speaking on the topic.

Cal was nice enough to participate in the interview below in which he explains the scope of the problem and gives us all some tips for trying to deal more productively with it to help save lives and reduce suffering. Thanks to Cal for all of his efforts and for taking the time to share what he knows with us here.

In addition to reading this interview with Cal, you may also want to check out our online health and wellness training courses.

Also, watch and listen to this more recent recorded discussion with Cal Beyer discussing COVID-19 and Mental Health in Construction and other High-Risk Industries.

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We’ve been studying up on Safety Differently, Safety 2, New Safety, and Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) lately, and in particular have recently been looking at books by Dr. Todd Conklin about Human and Organizational Performance (HOP).

In two earlier articles, we took a look at some key lessons from Conklin’s book Pre-Accident Investigations and his book about learning teams. And in this article, we’re going to look at some key lessons from his book Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict (buy a copy at the link you just passed).

We hope you enjoy this look at an important, influential, and somewhat controversial thinker in safety, and we tip our hat to the good work Dr. Conklin is doing. And by the way, we’ve included a video recording of Dr. Conklin’s appearance in the plenary session of the ASSE Safety 2017 conference near the bottom of this article for you.

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OSHA’s standard for the control of hazardous energy, also known as lockout-tagout or LOTO, is 1910.147. As the regulation explains in 1910.147(a)(1)(i), “This standard covers the servicing and maintenance of machines and equipment in which the unexpected energization or start up of the machines or equipment, or release of stored energy, could harm employees. This standard establishes minimum performance requirements for the control of such hazardous energy.”

In 1910.147(c)(1), the regulation explains that “the employer shall establish a [energy control] program consisting of energy control procedures, employee training and periodic inspections to ensure that before any employee performs any servicing or maintenance on a machine or equipment where the unexpected energizing, startup or release of stored energy could occur and cause injury, the machine or equipment shall be isolated from the energy source and rendered inoperative.”

So the energy control program required by OSHA’s Control of Hazardous Energy/Lockout-Tagout regulation requires the employer’s program to have three parts: (1) energy control procedures; (2) employee training; and (3) periodic inspections.

We’ll look at each of those three required parts of an energy control program more closely in this article.

As we do, we’ll draw some materials from two of our online safety training courses related to lockout-tagout:

• Lockout-Tagout for Authorized Employees
• Lockout-Tagout for Affected Employees

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