Cowboy Safety

Safety Manuals

The day of the Mom and Pop business working informally is all but gone. In working with customers, banks and other stakeholders there is a need to be more exact in everything that you do. Done right, it improves your performance dramatically.

The part about how to protect your employees, customers and suppliers is important for many reasons. It is documented with a safety plan and a safety manual.

But your safety plans and manuals do not have to look like the ones in this graphic. In one case a Cowboy Safety program did away with one manual and replaced it with one piece of paper. There was no need for a lengthy training program.

The Cowboy Safety program gives you a fully compliant customized safety manual in a format that works when it is needed where it is needed.

It is not a huge binder with legalese. It is legally compliant but is useable.

It can work because it is understandable by those who need to know.

It can also provide compliance with ISNetworld (RAVS), PEC Premier, SCS (Safety Council Solutions), PICS (Pacific Industrial Contractor Screening) or other requirements you may need for work that you do.

 

Training - Quick and Easy

Years ago we would use a Polaroid camera and quickly make a series of operational photos while someone performed a task. Then we would take the photos, drill a hole in a corner in the wide white margin and tie the photos together with a nut and bolt. The photos could be viewed by flipping them around. One cuold be held out for detailed study. These photos became a simple instruction manual.

With the cheapest of digital cameras it is now possible to make photos of the proper and safe steps for most operations. Then with the use of any of a variety of free on-line albums the photos can be linked and descriptions can be added.

 For distribution they can be emailed to Walgreen's and many other places for immediate color prints at a cheap price.

One Wyoming company makes over 30,000 photos a year. Their photos are also used as promotional pierces for their products and services.

Digital photos are an important tool of your Cowboy Safety program.

Checklists

Years ago while at a client's location our safety designer observed that the office staff was ordering from a certain new sandwich shop. He was curious about what was making this sandwich shop different. The staff could not say. He noticed that they had an order form that had numbered steps for how to place an order. Basically a sandwich is a sandwich. But this checklist gave a certain security and created a certain experience. 
 

20 years ago we set up a checklist system for one company that had a new employee who was being placed at a high level. This employee had no related experience and no college degree. We told the new employee to follow that list exactly and all would be well. That checklist system is still in place and has kept the company in good shape as a result.
 

An article in the January 14, 2009 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reported that with the use of a 19 point checklist the average patient death rate fell 40% and the rate of complications fell by about a third. The study was based on results at eight hospitals that for a year had used the checklists. The checklists have such basic steps as having the doctors and nurses introduce themselves.

 

The behavioral principle behind checklists is not all that new and was in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations published in 1776.

 

Checklists are simple to do but there must be care that they are kept neat and not just posted to a bulletin board in the breakroom or by the time clock. That is the fate of so many of these systems. Often while doing walk-throughs we see this has happened. A constant reselling is needed even though it can be proven that these checklists can show measurable improvements.
 

When flying it is always encouraging to see the flight crew with a clipboard and a clean and neat checklist.
 

Checklists are a part of all Cowboy Safety programs and are an immediate supplement to HACCP and 5 "S" programs.

Behavior Contracts

Behavior contracts are a useful tool in setting up Cowboy Safety programs.

They can be personalized and can be one of a kind. Behavior contracts are a fundamental part of a Cowboy Safety program.

Regulations as tools

Cowboy Safety meets regulations. In the area of worker safety it is primarily from CFR 1910 and CFR 1926. There are some others that are also used including three standards that are unique to Wyoming but which apply in all states under the General Duty clause. Cowboy Safety, because it deals with all areas of potential loss, also meets the IRS code and many other Federal, State and Local regulations. The Cowboy Safety plan meets regulations in a practical and less costly way.

Cowboy Safety deals with fundamental laws. A law is "the way things work." The most easily understood law is the law of gravity. Violate that law and there are immediate results. There are many other laws, maybe not as easy to understand as gravity, that are a part of a Cowboy Safety program.

Regulations are no good if they are not followed. Often injury and fatality reports show that regulations were not followed and the employer is cited. More often than not the employer had followed the regulations but the employee was at fault for not doing what the employer had said to do. Cowboy Safety deals with the employee issues.

Cowboy Safety concentrates on the what rather than the why. An employee has a right to know but does not have the time or the interest to peruse books and shelves full of legalese.

Holistic Thinking

Cowboy Safety uses holistic thinking. What does that mean?

Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.

The general principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." Holistic Thinking allows the safety program to become a profit center because it will produce more outputs with the same or less inputs.

Traditional industrial age safety is based on reductionism that is often viewed as the opposite of holism. Reductionism will see the value of having a four wheel drive vehicle. It does not understand why most of the vehicles off the road and upside down in a snow storm are four-wheel drives.

Cowboy Safety views that holism and reductionism are complementary and so it deals with both viewpoints.

Idea Mapping

Idea mapping is a useful tool. it has been around since at least as early as 1270 A.D. in the works of Ramon Llull who founded Trinity College on Mallorca in 1276. Modern versions began to appear in the 1960s as a result of studies of how the brain functions.

The basics of idea mapping is that the mind works in an associative manner. By using this technique it is possible to do hazard analysis in a more holistic way. In accident investigation we work backwards and often find that the prevention steps were actually quite simple. Traditional hazard analysis misses some of the most simple possibilities.

Cowboy Safety utilizes idea mapping graphically and in an unwritten form.

Click in horse example to enlarge.

Customer Service in Safety

Customer service refers to broad range of activities that a company and its employees undertake so they will continue doing business with the company and speak positively about the company. Because of the holistic nature of Cowboy Safety customer service principles are important in dealing with both internal and external customers.

A customized version is created for each Cowboy Safety program. Interfaces are designed for the company culture, for the work teams that exist, for the communications methods used and for the processes involved.

There are quantitative measurements.

Generational and Cultural Differences

Cowboy Safety recognizes that people are different due to their age and their native culture that could be ethnic or geographic home region even within the United States.

Because people are working longer and because of dramatic societal shifts there are presently can be as many as 4 different generations in the work force at a given company. when there is consideration of cultures clearly one size does not fit all.

The Cowboy Safety program has a customized solution to these issues.

Measurement

It was Tom Peters who said "What get's measured gets done!"

W Edwards Deming said "The most important things cannot be measured." The issues that are most important, long term, cannot be measured in advance. However, they might be among the factors that an organization is measuring, just not understood as most important at the time. Cowboy Safety is oriented to science. Science means organized knowledge.

There are measurements of safety activities, of the operation criteria and there are relevant indexes to both an internal and external environment.

The measurements needed are both prospective and retrospective rather than just after the fact as is done in traditional industrial age safety programs.

Measurements can produce unintended results. So measurements are done in a context that avoids the negatives as much as possible.

In one case productivity was measured not in revenue dollars but in gross margin dollars so as to avoid the incentive to increase production measurements with low revenue products.