Safety is caring
When I take my child to day care in the morning, I assume that the instructors will take good care of them during the day and that they will be unharmed and in good health when I come to pick them up. I also make a promise to my child when leaving them at day care in the morning: “See you in the afternoon!” My child also expects me to come back unharmed and in good health, as I promised to take good care of myself. In order to keep my promise, I wear my seatbelt in the car and protective eyewear on the construction site.
Safety must be ensured every day. Last week was Safety Week, and many important considerations were addressed. For example, on Thursday, special attention was paid to the risk of falling, which is associated with work on work platforms, scaffolding, ladders and personnel lifts, among other equipment. Themed weeks and days are important to address specific considerations. In reality, however, every day is Safety Day.
People usually start planning their summer holidays in the spring: a trip to the amusement park, fishing in the archipelago or a motorcycle trip to Finnish Lakeland, perhaps. These plans are also based on the assumption that we will come back unharmed and in good health. To come home from work unharmed and in good health, we must pay attention to risks at all times. This also means that we do not condone risk-taking.
For this reason, we must regularly ask ourselves what risks we are exposed to in our work. When we identify these risks, we can take measures to manage them. On construction sites, the risks change on a weekly basis or even more frequently. We must also identify risks in our free time. For example, it is not a good idea to stand up in a rowing boat, no matter how festive you are feeling on Midsummer’s Eve.
To be able to enjoy our free time with the people we care about the most, we must be passionate about safety: safety is caring. At the workplace, we can politely remind a colleague about replacing their scratched safety goggles with new ones. We can ask our work partner whether their safety harness is appropriately attached. We can ask others to wear hearing protectors when we are planning to cut an aluminium bar with a circular saw.
Let’s keep our promise and make safety our first priority. Let’s enjoy life to the fullest!
The writer is Safety Manager at Are. He finds summer barbecues to be much more enjoyable if you do not need to use crutches.
