Latin America. Haste, frustration, fatigue and complacency cause 90 to 95 percent of accidents inside and outside companies. To avoid these accidents, it is necessary to change habits and risky behaviors that endanger workers, said Nelson Gutiérrez Bogotá, Consultant and Master Trainer of the company SafeStart.
Unfortunately, in Latin America, workplace accidents are common, "but it depends a lot on the maturity of the safety culture of each company. In a highly reactive culture, the lack of supervision will probably be a very relevant factor in the analysis of an accident or injury, since safety is not the responsibility of the supervisor, but of the safety area. In a dependent culture, as the name implies, it depends on the control exercised by supervision, but, if supervision is not effective in security, but police, it is probably not the best style of supervision and people once the supervisor leaves the work area, does what their free will dictates and perhaps does not follow safety standards because they do not have the "security police" next to them. the specialist highlighted.
To avoid accidents in companies, leadership and a clear methodology for the development of safe skills and, of course, will on the part of people is required, which is why the SafeStart method is created, which focuses on reducing human errors and strengthening, improving or acquiring habits related to safety. SafeStart's Critical Error Reduction (TREC) techniques contribute to the improvement of the daily decision-making process which, in turn, is influenced by haste, frustration, fatigue and complacency (overconfidence).
He said that companies, not only in Latin America, but anywhere in the world, must advance their efforts to generate an interdependent culture, where safety is everyone's responsibility, where we take care of each other under an environment of respect.
"Not only companies must have supervisors, but leaders who motivate staff and carry out influence activities to generate safe behaviors in employees."
He recalled that in the traditional approach to safety, there is already a tool that is very valuable for this purpose, this tool is called the report of incidents or almost accidents. "But this tool is useless if people or the company only fill out these forms as a simple formalism and nothing is done about it with the information collected."
"In other words, this report is useless, if we have fallen into complacency or overconfidence in the management system and only do it to comply. If so, this tool will not do much good in the culture. It is suggested to reinforce the importance of the tool and its usefulness in preventing injuries in the future. This is achieved, if the company clearly socializes the why, the why and the how of this report, as well as its benefits and, the most important and vital thing, is to generate an environment of trust so that everyone feels comfortable reporting and that a search for culprits is not perceived, "concluded Nelson Gutiérrez.
