Page 59 - OHS, October 2023

and sometimes dangerous. Often, it’s also very boring. Stare at the water long enough, and it can feel like watching paint that never dries. Suddenly, the water seems like a nondescript feature in a nondescript landscape, even though it’s just as deadly as ever. Very real hazards can stop appearing dangerous. And if you’ve been in open water for a long time, it can become easy to forget just how cautious you have to be in shallower areas. The same can be said about HazCom labels. When workers have to handle the same materials every day, the relentless grind of familiarity can turn people’s attention to danger into dust. And then the hazard seems much less hazardous, even though risk is just as present as before. The words on the label say the same thing every day, but after a while, they become both literally and metaphorically less legible. Workers become more apt to overlook them and, when noticed, more inclined to ignore what they have to say. And then the haz- ard is suddenly ambiguous, in that it’s open to multiple interpreta- tions — there’s what the safety data sheet says, and then there’s what workers remember (or don’t remember) it saying. You can’t blame someone for making a mistake; people are naturally fallible and captains need to offset the prevailing winds of human error by trim- ming the sails with clarity, context, and effective communication. The risk of HazCom incidents depends on a workplace’s abil- ity to make risco — the physical hazards that are unseen but close at hand — more visible and understandable. Putting it on a HazCom label or a nautical map isn’t enough. In Six Leadership Skills for Improving Safety Climate: a Hu- man Factors Management Perspective, safety researcher Pandora Bryce argues that, “the existence of acceptable technical systems and processes isn’t enough; people have to use those systems safely and follow the processes consistently to achieve the desired safety and performance... and that requires effective communica- tion that accounts for human factors in reporting and analysis.” \\ HazCom procedures are only as good as the people who fol- low them, and often, those people need a great deal of support to ensure they clearly and unambiguously understand what to do. The human brain has a habit of filtering out unchanging ele- ments of its surroundings, whether it’s a rock in the water or a label for hazardous chemicals. And whatever you call it — the complacency curve, habituation, desensitization to risk, inatten- tion blindness — it’s a problem for HazCom. The solution is to look back to the ancient Mediterranean sail- ors and their attention to risco. So often, HazCom is treated as an issue of individual compliance — once standards have been implemented and training has been conducted then it’s up to each worker to comply with requirements and ensure they attend to the hazardous material they’re working with. (With that said, HazCom violations were the second-most cited OSHA standard during workplace inspections in 2022, and it’s no sure thing that an employer’s hazard communication program meets regulatory PIG Microbial Oil Stain Remover Visit newpig.com or call 1-800-HOT-HOGS®. One Pork Avenue • Tipton, PA 16684 ww w OCTOBER 2023 | Occupational Health ety U . o h s o nl ine.com n t itl ed - 2 1 8 & S 9 /1 6/ a 2 f 3 12:40 P 5 M