Tag Archives: videos

General Safety Issues, Head Protection

IN DEFENSE OF WORKPLACE SAFETY THROUGH BETTER TRAINING (GUEST POST)

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By Kyle O’Brien

 Workplace safety is a paramount issue with any business.  Whether you’re a meat-packing business or a coffee shop, safety concerns abound.  Thus, having your entire staff up to speed with sufficient training on ways to prevent accidents, as trivial as one tutorial may seem, is something that should go beyond the basic written words inside the employee handbook.  That’s not to say a handbook is useless.  Far from it.  It’s how management discerns workplace safety, with how certain equipment is to be handled, what protective layers should be issued and worn at all times…the list should, and does go on.   

From obtaining better training videos to ensuring each and every employee has a firm grasp of what’s been shown, there are numerous points to follow through with regards to safety training.  

Understanding The Costs of Improper Training 

Before you begin to assess your company’s workplace safety policies and training, I’ll share one example of how some oversights in the electrical industry – specifically towards improper maintenance of electrical systems – can cost businesses in more ways than fines.  A Siemens report back in 2010 uncovered a list of violations of electrical maintenance with certain buildings.  Spanning 25 facilities, OSHA handed out more than $5 million in fines to employers who failed to train their employees on servicing electrical systems in the building.  Some of the violations were a result of not having the right tools.  More major violations were given to not putting up proper warning signs for specific areas, thus potentially endangering employees to shock, electrocution and arc flash. 

Putting aside the monetary issues, the heart of the matter is the safety of employees and all who would walk around the “hazard zones”.  The report stated that every workday, arc-flash incidents had hospitalized five to seven workers at those buildings in the U.S.  Around 30,000 arc-flash incidents in total, with around 7,000 of those incidents involving burn injuries.  And that’s just with regards to a specific industry.  Employers who don’t first research the risks/dangers of prior incidents are setting themselves up to repeat them.   

Creating Easier Ways To Engage Employees 

Safety training, computer training, compliance training — there’s more than enough areas for a business to cover with their employees.  Some choose to spend half a day, maybe less than that, sequestering entire departments for a training seminar.  There will be packets, referendums, company policies on what to do in an event.  And not to say that employees are prone to be disinterested throughout, well, there’s a good chance streamlined, succinct methods will fare better with how each employee digests the information. 

It’s why better-developed training videos can command more eyes and ears.  Many older training videos of the 1980’s were attempts to add humor and a storyline to someone operating the grill at a fast food restaurant.  The sad reality was that it was grainy, had cacophonous background music and took too long to define instructions and safety measures.  If that same effort was applied to a training video on how to operate a crane on a job site, you’d most likely have confused employees who’d just rather settle for a succinct video displaying the key statistics of operating with caution. 

Creating a video that has a clear and direct narrator displaying stats like the number of injuries reported on common job sites and whether they’ve worsened or gotten better, how certain “hot spots” of the site should be littered with warning signs, Safety hardhat requirements and ways to be better aware of one’s surroundings and other key points, your training segments would go much further to making safety measures more tangible to employees. 

Have Q & A Sessions After Each Video 

Once you’ve wrapped up the safety training video or session, the best way to make every safety measure mentioned stick is to have an immediate Q & A.  While it might be hard to get employees to chat after sitting through a lengthy training video (which is why you should cap your videos to shorter time limits, or break up meatier safety lessons into segments), it’s still important to at least entertain questions.  Doesn’t matter how obscure a question could be, no stone should be left unturned when it comes to workplace precautions.   

And Q & A’s should be a continual process, because you can’t expect every employee to reach expert levels once they leave the room.  Maybe it means having managers around the first time a chef starts to work with a new grill, or have someone supervising employees first go-around with heavy machinery types such as the Knuckleboom Loader, Feller Bunchers, Pipelayers and other rather complex and powerful equipment?   

Final Thoughts 

The main thing is your initiative to stay on top of important safety concerns with the workplace and that you and your entire organization understand that accidents happen every day, in every workplace across the country.  But it’s how you lessen the numbers through awareness, through training videos and whether they’ll be a continual process in education, through warning signs being posted in key spots around the workplace or job site, and most important, through a passion to stay on top of creating as safe an environment as possible. 

Author Bio:  Kyle is a frequent blogger covering the business industry on a range of topics from employee safety, business leadership, motivation practices and other themes.  He is a consultant for an eLearning company, ej4, which helps create informative and innovative training videos and business book summaries to help further increase employee knowledge of the workplace.

General Safety Issues

USED CCTV CAMERAS – A CRIMINAL’S WORST ENEMY (GUEST POST)

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There’s an argument going on in some circles as to whether or not CCTV cameras actually help to reduce crime or catch a criminal.  According to law enforcement officials, video of an incident is often played on local news channels to gather leads and identify individuals from the general public. 

Also, the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention reports that CCTV cameras prevent the theft of more than $35 million in merchandise a day.  They not only capture shoplifters, but are also effective in capturing murderers, rapists, child abductors and preventing various forms of violent acts across the country. They do this through the use of CCTV cameras. CCTV cameras record events to a CCTV DVR (Digital Video Recorder), which stores the footage for replay. CCTV cameras don’t carry guns or chase after the assailants as they flee, but what they do, they do well.  They give law enforcement officials video evidence of the act itself. 

When an incident occurs, police admit that the first thing they look for are security cameras in the area that may have recorded information on them that can put a criminal behind bars faster than fingerprints or other evidence left behind.  

In addition to capturing perpetrators in the act, surveillance cameras have become an eyewitness to car wrecks that can be played over and over again to learn how the accident occurred and which party was at fault.  In Milford, Florida, a multi-car accident that sent eight people to the hospital, including two with critical injuries, helped officials in determining the cause of the accident using a nearby security camera that was placed on top of the Milford Regional Medical Center.

Thanks to technology, a good video camera can record the title off of a book that someone is carrying using a high resolution CCTV camera with a varifocal CCTV camera lens that produces a crisp picture.  CCTV Cameras are designed to capture video in large areas such as parking lots to small corners of a convenient store, inside and outside and during the day or in the dark of night using infrared lenses.  

“Walking around in any major city, or even a midsize city, the odds are pretty good that you’re probably being picked up by one or more cameras,” said Christopher Ott, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. 

The CCTV camera isn’t a magical solution, but odds are if you commit a crime, you’ll likely make the evening news.

Written by Mike Hassebrock from The Security Product Depot 

The Security Product Depot is an established online provider of physical security products. As an innovative supplier of online security solutions, they are committed to offering the broadest array of CCTV camera systems, door hardware, locks, and safes for securing government, school facilities, commercial businesses and residents.