Here’s an interesting idea: Call your corporate safety director into your office Monday morning and inform him that for the next 30 days he will no longer be a safety director, but rather whatever trades person you happen to decide that day. He will become a common laborer and assigned to daily job-site tasks – menial, repetitive, straining, dangerous, ugly, smelly, endless, thankless jobs — whenever available. The former safety director should hold a rank that answers, but does not command. No foreman or supervisor positions, please. He is to report to you 30 minutes early every day so that you can select the next destination. As a matter of fact, tell him that pay will also be commensurate with duties as laborer, truck driver, tradesperson, etc. This is a very important feature, as the amount on the paycheck always bears directly on the worker’s work attitude, quality of performance, and productivity. If, at the end of the month, he wishes to make extra credit and a possible bonus check, ask him to submit 20 daily logs in which he has recorded his own personal safe and unsafe work practices in starkly honest detail.
He needed some help right now and thought I might know of someone. So, I packed some jeans and extra socks, sprayed some Lysol on my ratty old tool belt and in four hours was standing on his doorstep with my lunchbox and bottle of Advil. When he stopped laughing at the site of an ancient, “husky,” mouth-breathing geezer at his desk, he told me to be at the job site with coffee and fat-pills (donuts) for the crew in 30 minutes. He told me what he was paying for “meat” as I drove away, and the thought of driving home again crossed my mind. That was six weeks ago.