Safety - A Short Quiz

Even though some quotes stick with us, thinking about safety planning as posting a banner on the wall in the shop is a lame attempt at a very serous issue for all green industry business owners. Quote-filled banners are not enough to drive the safety message home. Any real safety initiative requires a written plan and most importantly follow through.

For years the works, "Safety, a benefit you give yourself" greeted me from a banner hung on the wall at the entrance of my employer's work place. I have no idea how long that banner hung on the wall until I read it, or how many times I read it before it registered with me. After awhile, a long while, the phrase sank in as a simple basic truth. If I worked safely, I returned home uninjured, a benefit to me.

As a business owner, I still think safety is a benefit you give yourself. However I am unwilling to hang a banner on the wall and think the job is done. The job is done when the crew knows that there is always a better way to make the job site safer, event if there were not accidents. Lack of accidents does not mean we are walking safely enough.

A common theme for most small companies is musing about how the big companies handle every business issue. My experience is that the small companies handle most issue better than larger ones. The glaring exception is safety and more specifically safety planning. It seems safety planning requires that one more person who is never hired or assigned to create the safety plan, and more importantly make the plan live in the organization. For the past 17 years, Minnesota law had required every company in our industry ot have a safety plan, and yet many of us still do not have an active safety plan.

To address this issue , all MNLA members are invited to join the MNLA Commercial Arborist Committee and the Minnesota Safety Council, , and to attend the AWAIR (A Wordplace Accident and Injury Reductions) program meeting March 6, 2008. In this short half day seminar your company will walk away with an actual written accident policy. Along the way you can comply with Minnesota law passed some 17 years ago requiring companies in our industry to have a written safety plan that addresses accident reduction.

Remember, "Safety First."

(Originally published in the February 2008 issue of The Arborist, the magazine of the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association. View a printable version.)