The following infographic was provided by LabSafety.com, a provider of lab equipment and supplies.
Welcome, Fast Company readers. Please check out my main page to learn more about the Lean management methodology for business, healthcare, startups, and other industries.
The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. We're about to come up on the 100th birthday of safety glasses and the hard hat… it's interesting to see how many lives are estimated to be saved by each innovation. One thing that jumps out at me about the timeline is that it focuses on physical safety measures and government action, not so much on changes in management mindsets, like those advocated by Paul O'Neill (check out my recent podcast interview with him).
You can click on the image for a larger view.
What's your reaction? Are there still additional things we can do for employee safety? We have a lot of rules and regulations, but it's tough, if not impossible, to legislate safety problems away. What can we do in terms of management mindsets and philosophies?
What do you think? Please scroll down (or click) to post a comment. Or please share the post with your thoughts on LinkedIn.
Don't want to miss a post or podcast? Subscribe to get notified about posts via email daily or weekly.
Mark's new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
He is also the author of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, and the anthology Practicing Lean.
Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.
You’re right, we can’t regulate hazards away. But we can try to minimize them as much as possible. Safety gear and improved standards have saved so many lives. But we still have a long way to go.
welding gloves…
The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. The graphic represents…
hard hats…
The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. The graphic represents…
hard hats…
The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. The graphic represents many of the horrible workplace tragedies of the last 120 year, including a few recent ones. The graphic represents…
As time goes on and as technology advances, it seems to me that there will always be safety guidelines to reevaluate and improve upon. Just look at the mining disasters of the last 2 years. Seems to me there are still improvements to safety procedures that can be made to improve the working conditions of many US workers. This infographic does a great job of showing how far we’ve come, but in my opinion there are still ways to improve working conditions of today’s manual laborers.
Sadly, we have less than perfect safety… still a long way to go and a lot of the disasters are really the effect of management problems (look at BP and other cases where there wasn’t a “culture of safety” in place). It’s more than a technological issue for sure.