Four Seconds To Reduce Your Chance of Injury

Perhaps the very best tool to come along in industrial construction (at least as much as safety is concerned ) is that the Field Level Risk Assessment or Job Hazard Analysis. Whatever it is that you call it, this can be a tool that will make everyone stop and think in regards to the different risks related to the task. Crews normally gather and write out the JHA or FLRA before doing a job. This exercise greatly reduced the amount and severity of injuries where this was accomplished.

A similar principle of those risk assessments could be done in your shops. Simply take a four-second “reset”. Take four seconds before starting some new familiar task. This act of refocusing is shown to decrease the probability in an injury incident by greater than 90% versus not disassembling the four seconds. How hard is? You could have done the task you‘re close to perform thousands of times before. In your thoughts, you will know which you could do it right along with your eyes closed. It‘s usually not the task itself but some small thing you did not anticipate that causes the incident. You didn‘t notice the debris in front from the tool you had been going to get. You didn‘t notice somebody placed something upon the part you had been about to get. You didn‘t realize how heavy a piece is which you were asked to assist carry.

It is effortless to imagine the various activities we do daily and just how this applies. For instance, getting inside a forklift and keeping a fast look around. We change our thinking from where we will focusing upon the area, road conditions, other vehicles etc. This is actually the “reset” We‘re referring to.
Surprisingly, four seconds is all it will take. Fall into this habit of taking four seconds and you also significantly reduce your chance of injury. Should you get straight into the habit of taking chances or just cruising from job to job, you‘ll eventually become injured.

This four second reset was initially instituted on CN Rail. It was section of a technique to scale back the amount of very serious incidents they had been having including many amputation injuries. Whatever they found was that their employee knew the rule or procedure to get the job done without getting injured but were not focused. Even well rested employees were getting caught up inside the routine from the day and located themselves daydreaming or considering other activities. Losing an arm or leg is an rude awakening.
We highly recommend this four second “reset” as a good method to refocus at work available. So we believe that it is definitely very effective method to avoid injury on and from the job.