I know all you safety professionals out there love your jobs and love that you work so hard to keep people safe and productive, and you help improve the profitability of your companies. And I know that many of you have earned the respect of your colleagues and, perhaps more importantly, your superiors in the company such that when you speak about safety issues in the workplace, you feel like your are being heard.

[IMAGE CREDIT: Online Safety Community via Flickr]

[Image courtesy of Online Safety Community on Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Gloves have served as a cautionary tale for many companies who make the decision to ignore or at least be slow to implement safety recommendations by safety officers.

But even the most respected among us aren’t heard all the time. Every once in a while, for whatever reason, one of our great ideas (at least, we think so) fall by the wayside. Were you being heard and financial considerations got in the way of implementation? Was it considered unnecessary by the C-suite? Did you not get buy-in? Or was it something that actually went in one ear and out the other? We might not always get the answer to these questions, but you know that this kind of thing does happen. And while your superiors make the final decision and they have the right to refuse to implement your suggestions, you might warn them of potential trouble if implementation is not done, but you don’t really want to go back and say “I told you so.”

You want, as it is said in the Hunger Games trilogy, for the odds to be ever in your favor. But if you have some idea that you really, really, really think should be implemented and you think it may fall on deaf ears, bring up this case that is minor in the grand scheme, but can serve as a cautionary tale for those to dare to completely neglect or ignore a safety recommendation.

Stormguard, a manufacturing company in the United Kingdom, was forced to pay nearly 6,500 British pounds in fines and legal fees after being found guilty of negligence afer a worker was injured while operating a drill while wearing gloves. The key to the case was that the safety officer for the company had issued a written report to the C-suite a year before the incident, warning executives that the drill did not have adequate hand-guarding, and that there was a significant risk of gloves getting caught in the drill bit if they were worn by workers while using the instrument. Sure enough, the recommendations were unheeded, and a worker was wearing gloves while using the drill, the glove got caught and the worker suffered one dislocated finger and a second broken finger in the incident.

If there is a silver lining here, it is that ignoring this particular safety recommendation only costs a couple injured fingers and that it wasn’t something that killed anyone. But here is hoping that this particular incident and the result will serve as a notice to all companies out there to really not take recommendations of safety officers for granted or handle them lightly. If you don’t think you can implement all the recommendations, be sure to ask questions about the possible ramifications of not implementing certain recommendations, and then prioritize them so that the ones that are implemented will do the most good for the company and its workers.

At the very least, open your ears and eyes to your safety officer. Do not hope all the odds will be ever in your favor.