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Taking Charge of Exposure

Dec 21, 2020 2:37:05 PM / by DEKRA

Employees face hundreds of exposures every day. These exposures can be as seemingly innocuous and commonplace as an uneven floor or a dimly lit workstation. They can be in the way people are encouraged to work by an organizational culture that hurries them to complete a job or turns a blind eye to shortcuts that keep production flowing. They can be remarkable for their lack of protective measures: machinery with faulty or missing guards, elevated tasks with no handholds or tie-offs, jobs with no clear procedure for working around chemicals or hazardous material.

Over the course of a week, the hundreds of exposures roll into the thousands, with hundreds of thousands turning into millions by year’s end.

With so many exposures, even the most attentive and careful among us will eventually stumble—or simply run out of luck—and fall, cut a finger, break a bone, lose a life.

In his latest white paper Autopsy of an Injury – Uncovering 18 Million Exposures in One Activity, DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability Senior Vice President Don Groover describes the sum of an organization’s exposures as a state of vulnerability where employees avoid injury or succumb to it according to the whims of fortune.

“When a person is exposed,” he says, “the outcome is out of their control,” and they must rely on luck to stay safe.

But good luck is not their only recourse.

“Organizations good at safety find ways to bring the exposure under control,” he states. “They implement procedures or apply engineering solutions that shrink the pool of exposure and minimize dependency on employee behavior.”

Read the full white paper and learn how just thinking about workplace safety differently can give you tools to reduce exposures, limit injuries, and save lives.

Topics: Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Crisis, Workplace safety, Driver Safety, Road Safety

DEKRA

Written by DEKRA

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