Safety+Health

Safety+Health presents the National Safety Council’s annual recognition of CEOs who demonstrate a personal commitment to worker safety and health.

How can a photo of a leopard help workers spot on-the-job hazards? A concept known as visual literacy aims to help people overcome inattention blindness. “It’s usually the most obvious things that you miss. The things you walk past a thousand times and never realized they’re an issue,” one expert says.

“When you don’t know what to do, you tend to do nothing,” notes veteran safety pro turned professional speaker Richard Hawk, who shares his own experience and offers practical advice for being more decisive.

“Confirmation, overconfidence, sunk cost and optimism biases all are the results of the pleasure we feel when we’re right and the pain we feel when we’re wrong,” says Michael Mangan of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability. So what can leaders do to overcome them?

Shift work is a way of life for nearly 15 million Americans, spurring numerous studies that link the practice to health problems and chronic conditions. “It’s really important to recognize these risks, and we need to understand them and we need to treat them,” a leading researcher says.

"When improving safety for the merit of just having a safer workplace is not enough, it's often a very powerful argument with leadership to help explain the cost of safety by showing the economic benefits of safety," one expert says. The challenge: lack of a universal formula.

Advances in technology are expected to turn a stream of data into “a giant flash flood.” That future is arriving sooner than you think, but what might it mean for the world of occupational safety? Five experts weigh in.

“What if the human vision system itself is a hazard within the workforce?” asks DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability’s Rajni Walia, who says that “despite the fact that so much of our brains are devoted to seeing, there’s no guarantee that we see correctly.”

OSHA needs better methods to prevent and detect underreporting of worker fatalities and certain injuries, while the Mine Safety and Health Administration "lacks a consistent approach to logging, assessing and responding to complaints of hazardous mine conditions," the Department of Labor Office of Inspector General concludes in its recently released semiannual report to Congress.

Veteran safety pro turned professional speaker Richard Hawk offers ways to keep your "inspiration flame" lit even when personal events divert your plans.