Stick With "Workplace: Mission Zero" and Nobody Gets Hurt

As I was walking out of the building where our safety meeting was held this morning, I caught my high heel on a water hose snaking across the landscaping, and nearly tripped and fell. Driving out of the parking lot a few seconds later, I saw my former boss doing the same thing.

Safety, they keep telling us, comes first. Then they prove incontrovertibly otherwise by their official actions. Yet it is not malice that does this, or shoddy work practices, or cutting corners. It just seems to me that reality keeps rearing its undeniable head and making a neat mess of all the plans, policies, programs, and lofty intentions we keep implementing to deny it.

However, I don't mean this bitterly. Our senior management is deeply serious about the issue of workplace safety, to the point where they happily spend a full day with us in an overcooled classroom, participating with joyless loyalty in roundtables, telling tear-jerking stories, trying to discover... what? Why does the workplace, despite the brightly-colored ideals of unrestrained capitalism, fail to conform to the brightly-colored ideals of a workplace Utopia?

They are genuinely sincere. And we want to be safe... right? I mean, every employee, on a personal level, values his or her own personal ability to go home at the end of the day and do whatever he or she does best - be it hug the kids or go out on a massive happy-hour-instigated bender - to at least the point at which he or she would not, by any means, find it a matter of indifference to determine whether said employee might just as well be wiped out by a stray cement mixer.

Are you with me? (As one of our facilitators kept saying this morning.)

Well, we went through exercises and brainstorming, and determined (over the protests of one of our participants, who I'm sorry to report I thought was not nearly as bright as she should have been) that the most important element in incentivizing* employees to implement safety initiatives was to give them ownership.**

So, while accountability is important, said most of us in our group, the most important element is to personalize and internalize the concept of safety, to where the reason people look out for it is because they want to and believe in it, not because you'll get in trouble if someone gets hurt. Right?

But one woman in my group had a lot of trouble with this concept, and kept arguing it. "I'm sorry, you guys, I'm just not getting it," she said. "You have to have accountability. Why are you all arguing with this? It's got to be the top priority!" Others tried to explain the carrot vs. stick concept to her, all with varying degrees of failure; then time was up, and we submitted our inconclusive results with the rest.

More troubling to me, really, was the beginning of the day's exercises. This is a government agency I work for, and the initiatives we implement today ought to be not merely for the good of employees, but for the general public. So I was deeply troubled when an official representative of the meeting organizer stood up and began our day with an official prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the success of our endeavors today.

Yahweh, Ashtoreth, fickle Fate, lucky chance, or whoever assist us, please, in the preservation of human and animal lives to their full and healthy span. But ordering a roomful of employees, of whatever religion or lack thereof, to bow their heads and participate in a sacred convocation in the name of a particular deity whom many do not observe, upset me a lot. Keeping everyone I work with, including the public, is sacred to me. But invoking a prayer as an opening ceremony which excludes many of us from the get-go is a very bad, bad thing indeed, and I hope to get this addressed by the appropriate, responsible parties.

I've been away for umpteen months, so you shouldn't expect this to be funny. However, if it's any consolation, I'd like to point out that at least we didn't have to watch "Highway to Certain Death," largely concerned with the individual employee's responsibility for avoiding the blind spot of a cement mixer, today or at any threatened point in the immediate future.

Peace, blessings, and workplace safety to all.

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*You will never be able to pay enough to earn what it actually cost me, on a personal level, to get me to use that word... never.
**This also once meant something.

Who's on Crack?

Somebody where I work is on crack, but I don't like to say anything, just in case it turns out to be me.

A few months ago, I was assigned to plan a safety training session for a group that my section belongs to. We all have to attend these things about once a quarter, and they're always dull as dirt. They are, in fact, so dull that sometimes the guest presenters don't bother showing up; and when that happens, we all have to sit through the work-zone safety film "One Step from Death" AGAIN.

After you've seen this film six or seven times, you start rooting for the cement mixer. Kill! Kill! Kill!

"You're creative," my boss told me when the session was assigned to me to plan. "These meetings are always so dull. I know you can do something much better. Let's show 'em!"

If that doesn't translate into "Hire a snake guy," I'd like to know what does.

My boss, as it turns out, is terrified of snakes. Fair enough: she doesn't have to attend. But she seems to have a certain odd hangup about letting other people do something she personally wouldn't enjoy, and she's also very anxious about doing everything as much by the book as she can manage. If there's not a book for her to go by, she'll get somebody to write one. So even though this snake guy has done multiple safety presentations for other groups in our organization, she decided (though I was supposed to be the one planning this) to take initiative and send an email to the Legal folks, and ask if they were okay with us hiring someone to bring a couple dozen venomous snakes to a safety meeting.

Legal wrote back that they were not sure this was such a good idea.

"Well, forward the email to me," I told my boss, "and I'll talk to them, I'll see if I can straighten it out."

So I wrote back to them, and explained the situation in more detail. I sent the snake guy's long and impressive list of references, mentioned that he does this for schoolchildren and birthday parties, for heaven's sake, and assured them that it was completely safe. Not to mention cool as shit; but I didn't think they'd care about that.

Nothing doing. I'm sure they wouldn't have taken any notice of it if they hadn't been outright asked for their written permission. I talked to a woman from one of the groups he's presented to several times in the past, and she said it had simply never occurred to her to clear it with Legal, because she didn't consider there to be any safety issue. "Snakes can't fly, you know," she informed me.

I knew that.

Anyway, while I was on vacation, Legal wrote back to my boss again reiterating that they could not give their blessing, so it's off. My boss came into my cube today and sat down heavily.

"I got in so much trouble with my boss about the snake guy," she sighed, closing her eyes and shaking her head. "She was so mad. We shouldn't have handled it the way we did. I'm not blaming you, but you never should have contacted Legal. We never should have asked. We should have just planned it, and now we can't. You should never have - we should never have emailed them."

She left me with a bit of a dazed look on my face, I guess. Wait a minute. Am I dreaming? Is she on crack? Did she just chew me out for what she did? What the hell kind of Howard Johnson's is this?!?

So I emailed the snake guy, apologized profusely, explained as much of the situation as I could, and regretfully informed him that we'd have to cancel. I did not use the word "dumbasses" at any point, and I'm rather proud of my self-control; aren't you? He wrote back that he was surprised and disappointed, and that in twenty years of doing this he's never had a presentation cancelled for safety reasons. He didn't use the word "dumbasses" either, but he didn't really need to.

Anyway, this is a terribly long lead-up to the two important questions blazing in the forefront of my brain tonight:

1. Am I on crack?
2. Should I be?