• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safety Risk .net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

Discover More on this Site

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE RESOURCES
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • PSYCHOLOGY OF SAFETY & RISK
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Covid-19
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Covid-19 Returning to Work Inductions, Transitioning, Safety Start Up and Re Entry Plans
    • Covid-19 Work from Home Safety Checklists and Risk Assessments
    • The Hierarchy of Control and Covid-19
    • Why Safety Loves Covid-19
    • Covid-19, Cricket and Lessons in Safety
    • The Covid-19 Lesson
    • Safety has this Covid-19 thing sorted
    • The Heart of Wisdom at Covid Time
    • How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?
    • The Semiotics of COVID-19 and the Social Amplification of Risk
    • Working From Home Health and Safety Tips – Covid-19
    • Covid-19 and the Hierarchy of Control
  • Dr Rob Long Posts
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no HIERARCHY of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • Quotes & Slogans
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
    • When Slogans Don’t Work
    • 77 OF THE MOST CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
    • 500 BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2020
    • 167 CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Safety Acronyms
    • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
    • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
    • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
    • Safety Slogans List
    • Road Safety Slogans
    • How to write your own safety slogans
    • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
    • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
    • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
    • Safety Slogans for Work

The Safety Checklist Manifested

April 20, 2014 by Dr Rob Long Leave a Comment

 
Interesting article re the use of safety checklists by Tim Ludwig on his blog safety-doc.com – see it here The Checklist Manifested

 

Safety Checklists should be used with caution. In many of his ARTICLES, Dr Rob Long cautions against developing a checklist mentality – rather you should be focusing on people rather than objects.  You do this by talking to them! Read :Focus on People Not Objects and TEN CAUTIONS ABOUT USING SAFETY CHECKLISTS

Other related articles:

Free Safety Checklists

 

Making Objects Safe or People Safe – Dr Rob Long

imageI often ask people in risk and safety training as my first question, ‘When you walk on site, what are you looking for?’ It was no different this week and I got the usual answer ‘hazards!’ A number of people in the group had many years as inspectors, auditors and investigators and are usually zealous about the authority of safety over everything else, even people’s freedom to make a wrong choice. In recent discussions, I have been astounded by safety people who have no expertise in several arenas who clearly believe that safety gives them a mandate to ride roughshod over what others do in schooling, health, community and homes.

Tips on How to Develop a Safety Checklist

Safety checklists vary in size, format and purpose. They can be used on a daily or weekly basis to identify hazards, ensure hazard controls are in place or prior to a safety committee meeting to gather items for discussion. They can ensure that important items are checked regularly and consistently but care should be taken that things not on the checklist are not overlooked. They are a good tool for creating hazard awareness and provide documented proof that the site takes a proactive approach to hazard identification. Here are few useful tips if you are trying to develop your own checklist. This list is not exhaustive!

Let my checklists go!

Safety ChecklistThis is a guest post by JonathanBrun of Nimonik.ca, a company that helps you audit and verify more efficiently.   Checklists are a key part of any audit, verification or inspection. Even the most experienced auditors need them to help them stay on top of things and make sure they don’t […]

The Checklist Manifested – by Tim Ludwig

Extract:

safety checklistBuild them Curiously Strong If checklists are to be effective as behavior-management tools, you must manage the behavior of using checklists! Today is the day our family vacation is to begin.  We have so much to remember: Take the pets to their hotel; go to the bank; take out the trash; pack power cords, prescriptions, underwear;  turn down the heat; make sure my 18 year-old brings his ID to the airport this time… the list continues.  We know that once we’re on the road we’ll realize we forgot something.  Wondering what we’re forgetting while we’re forgetting can be maddening.  Recently, before taking any trip, I’ve adopted a good habit of making a list on my iPhone and checking off each item as soon as it is accomplished.  When I am disciplined enough to do this, I tend to be a happier and more successful traveler. The simple checklist has gotten a lot of press recently.  A couple years back, Atul Gawande put out his popular Checklist Manifesto that described the use of checklists in the operating room and arguing that this marvellous tool can be used to reduce injuries, quality errors, and perhaps even travel forgetfulness.  On the wave of checklist mania also rides a group of former military pilots who call themselves Check Six.  They make a strong case for preparing very precise checklists that allow for quite amazing, yet safe gravity defying feats.  I’d be willing to wager that there are a dozen more groups marketing their particular take on checklists. I personally am very much a supporter of the checklist.  My behavioural science colleagues and I have been studying checklists for decades now.  We have been publishing research investigating the checklist’s efficacy in improving quality, sales, sanitation, and, of course, as a tool for promoting safety.  It is no accident that we made the checklist the primary tool of Behavior-Based Safety.    From our behavioral science perspective, the checklist is the Altoids Mint of behavior change techniques… it’s curiously strong … when done right. Checklists offer a nice mix of antecedents that clarify for users which of their specific behaviors require prompting at the moment.  Progressing through and completing to satisfaction each of the items on the checklist can provide some mildly reinforcing feedback in the form of a job well done.  To heighten their impact, checklists also can be designed to be associated with other more powerful consequences.  Pilots, for example, cannot gain clearance to take off until they complete their checklists.  In other cases employees are required to submit their checklists so supervisors can verify their use. Creating checklists, however, isn’t necessarily a ticket to success.  In fact sometimes they can prove counterproductive. You see, while checklists can be used effectively to manage behavior, we must remain mindful of the fact that the act of using checklists is itself a behaviour.  If checklists are to be effectively used as tools for managing behavior, the behavior of using checklists themselves must be managed and reinforced.

ANOTHER CASE OF PENCIL WHIPPING

Once I was engaged in an oil field, attempting to identify and manage critical behaviors that lead to losses such as injury, process safety incidents, or service delivery interruptions.   By reviewing records, we found that a particular piece of equipment was contributing to the greatest loss.  Most of the incidents could have been avoided by using common preventative maintenance procedures.  But that wasn’t happening.

Operators were supposed to conduct the preventative maintenance (PM) routine within a 60-minute interval when the machine was idle between cycles of operation.  Managers had been assuming this PM was ongoing because all operators turned in the required checklist to their support engineers to verify they did the PM.  Piles of these completed checklists could be found on every site.

I asked to look at them and was handed a stack that had just been turned in.  As I paged through them, I noted that they were all the same… exactly the same.  They literally had been photocopied!  The person who submitted them had been so brash as to mark out the photocopied date and write in a new one!

Read the rest of the article here: see it here The Checklist Manifested

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Rob
Dr Rob Long

Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Dr Rob Long

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

  • The Voodoo of The Hoodoo - April 9, 2021
  • The Heinrich Hoodoo - April 8, 2021
  • Deconstruction and Reconstruction for Safety - April 4, 2021
  • The Politics of Safety Legitimization - April 3, 2021
  • An Ethic in Error for Safety - April 2, 2021
Dr Rob Long
PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Workplace Safety Tagged With: Safe Behaviour, safety checklists

Reader Interactions

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below Cancel reply

Primary Sidebar

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

Visit Count – Started Jan 2015

  • 22,002,994 Visitors

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join over 30,000 other discerning safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Admin on The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Admin on The Gemba Safety Walk
  • Sean Walker on The Gemba Safety Walk
  • Wynand on The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Admin on The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Wynand on The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Bernard Corden on The Voodoo of The Hoodoo
  • Bernard Corden on The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Rob long on The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Rob long on The Heinrich Hoodoo

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Featured Downloads

  • EPS Procedure (18 downloads)
  • Deck_and_balcony_safety_guide.pdf (2811 downloads)
  • Too-Much-Safety-eBook-Rev-01.pdf (1486 downloads)
  • Vehicle Visual Inspection (7845 downloads)
  • Covid-19 Construction Protocols (246 downloads)
  • Low-Bridges.pps (2226 downloads)
  • WHO Risk Assessment (591 downloads)
  • Field Activity Risk Assessment Form (714 downloads)
  • Europe-SPoR-Workshop-Flyer.pdf (203 downloads)
  • Public-Event-Risk-Management-Checklist-HD.doc (2497 downloads)
  • Due-Diligence-Workshop-Nov-2018.pdf (302 downloads)
  • Risk-Life-Poster-SPoR.pdf (380 downloads)
  • Manual-Handling-Checklist.doc (5115 downloads)
  • Accident-Incident-Investigation-eBook-Rev1.pdf (7553 downloads)
  • Supervisor-Induction-Checklist.docx (386 downloads)

Recent Posts

  • The Voodoo of The Hoodoo
  • The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • CLLR Newsletter–April 2021
  • Deconstruction and Reconstruction for Safety
  • The Politics of Safety Legitimization
  • An Ethic in Error for Safety
  • Blinded by the Light
  • A Typical Safety eBulletin
  • Understanding Safety Myths
  • Professional Conferences Are A Sleazy Con

Footer

AUTHORS

  • Alan Quilley
    • Heinrich–Industrial Accident Prevention
    • The Problem With ZERO Goals and Results
  • Bernard Corden
    • Blinded by the Light
    • Covid 1984 – The Shake Hands Maskerade and Vial Diplomacy
  • Bill Sims
    • Employee Engagement: Chocolate, Vanilla, or Strawberry?
    • Injury Hiding-How do you stop it?
  • Craig Clancy
    • Task Based vs Activity Based Safe Work Method Statements
    • Safety And Tender Submissions
  • Daniel Kirk
    • It’s easy being wise after the event.
    • A Positive Safety Story
  • Dave Whitefield
    • Safety is about…
    • Safety and Compliance
  • Dennis Millard
    • Are You Risk Intelligent?
    • Honey they get me! They get me at work!
  • Drewie
    • Downturn Doin’ Your Head In? Let’s Chat….
    • How was your break?
  • Gabrielle Carlton
    • All Care and No Care!
    • You Are Not Alone!
  • George Robotham
    • How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
    • How To Write a Safety Report
  • Goran Prvulovic
    • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat
    • HSE Performance – Back to Basics
  • James Ellis
    • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery
    • What and how should we measure to support recovery from injury?
  • James Parkinson
    • To laugh or not to laugh
    • People and Safety
  • John Toomey
    • Who is Responsible for This?
    • Who Are Your People?
  • Karl Cameron
    • Abby Normal Safety
    • The Right Thing
  • Ken Roberts
    • Safety Legislation Is Our Biggest Accident?
    • HSE Trip Down Memory Lane
  • Mark Perrett
    • Psychology of Persuasion: Top 5 influencing skills for getting what you want
  • Mark Taylor
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • Enculturing Safety
  • Max Geyer
    • WHS Legislation is NOT about Safety it’s about Culture
    • Due Diligence Is Not Just Ticking Boxes!
  • Matt Thorne
    • It was the SIA until someone wanted to swing from the Chandelier
    • Common Sense is Remarkably Uncommon
  • Peter Ribbe
    • Is there “Common Sense” in safety?
    • Who wants to be a safety professional?
  • Phil LaDuke
    • Professional Conferences Are A Sleazy Con
    • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things
  • Admin
    • CLLR Newsletter–April 2021
    • Zero is not a Target or Vision, it’s a Language/Discourse
  • Dr Rob Long
    • The Voodoo of The Hoodoo
    • The Heinrich Hoodoo
  • Rob Sams
    • I’m just not that into safety anymore
    • Social ‘Resiliencing’
  • Barry Spud
    • Barry Spud’s Hazard Control Tips
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
  • Sheri Suckling
    • How Can I Get the Boss to Listen?
  • Safety Nerd
    • The Block isn’t portraying safety as it should be
    • Toolbox Talk Show–PPE
  • Wynand Serfontein
    • Why The Problem With Learning Is Unlearning
    • I DON’T KNOW
  • Zoe Koskinas
    • Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

FEATURED POSTS

Adverse Events: Eliminate or Anticipate?

There is no way I would do that!

Why Safety Isn’t a Choice You Make

Deconstruction and Reconstruction for Safety

Developing Our Inner Introversion

Models From Social Sensemaking

C. G. Jung on Risk and Safety

Online Inductions and Safety Effectiveness

Think Different, Act Differently in Risk

The Binary Barnacle

What is Your Risk iCue?

How do we mourn?

Envisioning and Creativity in Safety

Don’t Let Evidence Get in the Way of Safety

Post Graduate Studies in the Social Psychology of Risk

Safety and the Spin of Disruption

Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple

When Art Speaks to Harm

safety myths

Understanding Safety Myths

Framing Your World

More Posts from this Category

Paperwork

https://vimeo.com/162034157?loop=0

Due Diligence

https://vimeo.com/162493843?loop=0

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.