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March 2003 — Employee Safe Work Practices Studies show that the immediate cause of most accidents is related to employee behavior. Approximately 80% of all injuries and incidents are the result of employee substandard practices or what is often referred to as unsafe acts. Tasks that continue to be performed unsafe or substandard will most likely result in an incident or accident if not recognized and stopped. Therefore, in order to improve your safety performance you must observe the actions of your employees. To really zero in on the problem, you must have a systematic program in place that concentrates on identifying and eliminating these acts or practices before they result in an accident. If you have such a program where regular formalized task observations are conducted, you may want to evaluate whether the frequency of the observations are sufficient to monitor employee behaviors. If you don't have such a program, you should establish one so unsafe work habits or acts can be recognized and corrected before they cause injury. If you have written work instructions, safety rules, personal protective equipment requirements, or other safety policies and procedures, your observations should be comparing the employee's actions/work practices to the written documents. Otherwise, you can only observe the employee performance against established best practices or sound industrial standards. No matter what your situation is, an employee observation program is a key element to improved safety performance.
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