Yesterday’s Advisor reviewed common hand hazards as well as provided some hand safety do’s and dont’s. Today we’re conducting a brief “hands-on” exercise (no pun intended) for your training.
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Discussing the various hand hazards your workers face and describing the safety procedures in place to protect them are both important parts of your training. But sometimes, physical demonstrations of just how hand injuries would affect workers’ lives may pack the biggest punch, so to speak.
In other words, here’s a brief training exercise to run with your workers either before training, to ensure full attention to safety instructions, or after training, to leave workers with a vivid impression of how important hand safety is to their everyday lives.
One-Handed Shoelace Tie
To emphasize the importance of these safety rules, conduct a short exercise with employees at your next hand safety meeting. Ask workers to try to tie their shoelaces with only one hand. It can be done, but only with a lot of practice, a special technique, and incredible patience.
Remind them after they’ve spent a few frustrating minutes trying to tie their laces that if they lost a hand in a job accident, this is what they would have to put up with every day.
Also point out that in the most recent year for which statistics are available there were more than 100,000 hand and finger injuries that required days away from work. That’s more than 270 a day! And that’s just the lost-workday injuries. The actual number when you add in all the cuts and scraps and unreported accidents is much higher.