Page 38 - Occupational Health & Safety, February 2018

HAND PROTECTION
Redefining Comfort: The Key to Understanding Non-Compliance
If we are going to truly redefine the comfort zone of today’s worker, it will require technological advances to gloves along with improved education around safety practices and a far more thoughtful, proactive approach to changing behavior and breaking counterproductive habits.
BY STEVE GENZER
Statistics on hand injuries can paint an inter- esting, if incomplete picture. When consid- ering risks in the industrial workplace, non- compliance is among the most common and dangerous. Too many workers either don’t wear gloves or wear the wrong gloves for the job, and there are three common reasons: (1) Comfort, or more accurately, discomfort; (2) poor performance—the gloves don’t provide the grip or dexterity needed to do the job well; and (3) ingrained habits.
These are powerful disincentives. Whether it’s an un- comfortable chair or a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit quite right, discomfort leads to change – new shoes, a differ- ent chair or, more relevant to this discussion, removing or choosing a different pair of gloves. Now imagine try- ing to work with tiny nuts and bolts while wearing thick,
stiff gloves. Even if those gloves protect the hands from cuts, mounting frustration from dropped bolts could eventually lead even the most safety-conscious workers to doff their gloves in exasperation.
And then there’s habit—a time when our mind downshifts, doing actions unconsciously. This can be a dangerous practice, especially in industrial environ- ments—how many serious accidents have been the results of workers mindlessly repeating tasks? How ingrained are habits related to hand protection?
This all matters because workers make these sorts of choices every day. They decide either to wear gloves or remove gloves for some reason or another. Their com- fort zone when it comes to PPE is formed over time and determined by familiarity and habit as much as objective data around performance and safety. To drive meaning-
32 Occupational Health & Safety | FEBRUARY 2018
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