Weed Out Safety Risks Before You Hire

“How you do one thing is how you do everything!”

You are a creature of habit. You make the same kinds of decisions each day, like the same kinds of clothes, prefer one type of music over another and you have favourite flavours. You lean one way politically, favour certain car brands over others, have a favourite restaurant and probably buy your gas from the same gas stations.

You make your decisions based on your values. Your values don’t change from one day to the next.

So if you’re a manager, if you’re in Human Resources or if you’re a safety supervisor, why aren’t you exploiting this knowledge?

Here’s just one example: a messy car usually means a messy desk. I’m not saying that a messy desk is bad. I’m just pointing out that it is very unlikely that someone who uses the back seat of their vehicle as a trash receptacle isn’t likely to have a pristine, orderly desk.

Same goes for a person who displays unsafe behaviours off the job (speeding, drinking and driving, recreational drugs, skiing in high-risk avalanche areas, etc). That person is likely to not have a deep-rooted safety attitude on the job. If they don’t believe in personal safety off the job, will they believe in personal safety on the job?

That knowledge could be a potential life-saver in your organization.

If you want to find evidence, walk through the employee’s parking lot making note of the vehicles with cracked/broken windshields, balding tires, worn wiper blades, broken lights, etc. Then match the owners of offending vehicles with past workplace safety incidents. You should see a pattern start to emerge.

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

So here’s one way to weed out the safety risks before you hire them. At the end of the interview, walk each candidate to their car and observe. Wait until they drive away watching for use of mirrors, seat belts and state of the vehicle. If there is no car (they may have taken the bus), ask why. You may discover something that wasn’t part of the interview but speaks to the character of the candidate – both good and bad.

Fully-engaged workers amount to less than 30% of the workforce. That means that over 70% of selecting, interviewing, hiring and managing is not weeding out these disengaged, risky-behaviour people. So get aggressive and do something different. Do whatever is necessary to rid your workplace of safety risks and Make It Work!

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