Abstract

Swim, J. 1986. Getting your employees involved in safety. Arbor Age 6 (2): 12-14, 16, 18.

Our approach over the years has been to hire or appoint a safety director who would be told to “make those people work safely.” The director, of course, would write a new safety manual, new safety rules, and new slogans, set up safety meetings and come up with penalties for not working safely, the longstanding frustration in this approach was that it did not work. Accidents continued to happen, claim costs continued to escalate and many safety directors would leave the company in frustration. Judging from poor work records up to that point, the experts were obviously neither a safety director nor the upper-management person writing rules and regulations from the corporate office. The answer is obvious. The person performing the work has the most knowledge of and the most control over the task being performed. The field employee is the expert who can solve the problem. You need to ask the expert. On the surface this seems simple, and basically it is. The first task for either a large or small operation is to get ideas and information from the field employees. Then it must categorize the information into specific job tasks. It must formalize its findings into a usable safety and training manual authored by the experts who do the work it covers—the field personnel. The experts must be involved and stay involved.

• © 1987, International Society of Arboriculture. All rights reserved.