Safety Awakening – “Not Enough Employees”
October 3, 2014 No Comments
“Not Enough Employees”
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An under-rated cause of employee accidents is employers not having enough employees to do the job.
Management of course always wants to hold down the number of employees as much as possible to reduce this operating expense. Often in their push to control head count, they go too far and end up with not enough employees to safely do the work that is required.
Here are a few examples of how not having an adequate number of employees can impact safety:
- having too few employees working highly repetitive jobs (e.g. a meat-packing boning lines) can result in cases of cumulative trauma disorders (such as carpal tunnel syndrome)
- more accidents occur during overtime then during straight time – some companies would rather have massive amounts of overtime rather than hire more employees
- not having enough employees results in employees getting fatigued because they often work through their breaks and lunch periods
- because of excessive production demands, housekeeping suffers
- over-worked and hurried employees take short cuts, by-passing job safety requirements
- workplace moral suffers greatly because employees are constantly pushed to do more with less
- not enough maintenance employees results in safety critical repairs and updates not being completed
- not enough supervisors results in inadequate employee safety training
- not enough supervisors results in inadequate enforcement of work and safety rules (one case un-supervised employees smoked drugs in the warehouse, another case un-supervised employees were sniffing solvent vapors in the flammable liquids storage vault)
Given the choice, I prefer to work for a company that is “growing profitably”. These types of companies will usually have the resources to hire a sufficient number of well-qualified employees, maintenance technicians, and supervisors.
Awakenings