Improving the safety award

[StevenB]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

...as a community, we should work toward fundamental reform of the safety award (given that I don't think we'd ever see it's elimination altogether).

That pretty much sums it up: given that the safety award and safety advisors aren't going to go away, what can we do to make the system more useful and the award more meaningful?

[PAR_WIG1350]

Originally Posted by StevenB

That pretty much sums it up: given that the safety award and safety advisors aren't going to go away, what can we do to make the system more useful and the award more meaningful?

Stop ridiculous safety surveys (NO, we DO NOT travel with a defibrillator) and obnoxious posters that are more of a fire hazard than anything else.

[GaryVoshol]

Bring the safety tokens back. But whenever a team is seen doing something solely for the purpose of getting the safety award - something that doesn't actually contribute to anyone's safety - a token is taken away from the team rather than given to them.

OK, that's in jest. But somehow we have to make the award correspond to actual safety, not just to meeting some rubric. Teams don't get an award for creativity or innovative programming just because they come up with a good idea. The awards go to results, not to concepts.

[PayneTrain]

Give the teams tokens to distribute to other teams for the Safety Award. If a team does something that really stands out as a safe practice to other teams, they give them safety tokens.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Give the teams tokens to distribute to other teams for the Safety Award. If a team does something that really stands out as a safe practice to other teams, they give them safety tokens.

That existed for years and was totally worthless.

As long as there is an award there will be teams that are obnoxious in their attempts to win the award.

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

Bring the safety tokens back. But whenever a team is seen doing something solely for the purpose of getting the safety award - something that doesn't actually contribute to anyone's safety - a token is taken away from the team rather than given to them..

Am I correct in observing that judges were not giving out safety tokens this year? Maybe last year as well, but I didn't notice until this year. I miss coming to the pit on Saturday morning and finding a stack of them sitting on our table, worthless or not. Even though teams should have been doing it already, it was an incentive to keep their pits clean.

I was slightly annoyed when I was asked by one of the safety judges, "Do you do anything special or pass anything out at the event to promote safety to other teams?". Personally, I've always found those actions really annoying. I don't really appreciate getting flyers from every team saying "don't forget to wear your safety glasses! don't forget to be safe in the pit! remember, safety FIRST!" I honestly just throw them away at the first opportunity I get. I'm not going to post them on my pit, and they just clutter up our work surface. The same usually goes for small items passed out (I kept two things at West MI - a package of hand wipes, and the grease from 1918). We don't post signs on the walls, because then people slow down and read a sign that tells them information that they probably already know. That's pretty bad for crowd control, especially in narrow hallways (such as at MSC).

The safety award should be presented to the team with the best overall safety program that has solid results year-round, not to the team who tries to shove it down my throat over the span of three days.

[Tristan Lall]

I see a couple possible approaches to recognizing safety. You could recognize good contingency planning, and/or you could recognize an actual history of safety. I wonder if an emphasis on the former in the award structure causes teams which have achieved the latter to be just a little resentful.

In industrial practice, it's common to highlight achievements like "400 days without a lost time accident". This sort of milestone is notable, because plant workers and management are aware of the risks of their work, and take pride (or profit, if you prefer) in their success in avoiding mishaps. If anything is truly deserving of recognition, it's demonstrable success in achieving more favourable safety outcomes than would be expected in a similar line of work—while still getting the job done.

But are our schools ready for that kind of thinking? I doubt it. To count days between lost time accidents (to pick a metric arbitrarily), you have to acknowledge that such accidents are reasonably likely. Even in activities that enjoy the unreserved support of school communities—high school football, to use the obvious example—the risk of bodily harm is downplayed or perhaps misunderstood. And I would be very surprised if school boards systematically collect and analyze the rates of injury among different teams, in order to correlate coaching strategies with degrees of harm (even though it's very possible that doing this would improve safety across the board).

Much more likely, the policies are driven by significant traumatic events, like a kid being dropped on his head during a wrestling match, or a robotics student losing a fingertip. That sort of reactionary approach to policy tends to either drive people to unsustainable extremes ("no power tools, ever, that way nobody will lose a finger"), or induces people to downplay incidents ("this could be the incident over which the school board shuts us down—so keep quiet").

So having said that, what would I do about the safety award? Maybe start by having a conversation (right here, for example) about what the right metric is—and make no mistake, I presuppose that this award should be about an ongoing and measurable statistic, rather than the number of tokens accumulated over an event. However, I'm concerned about the huge practical difficulties of obtaining statistics about team mishaps. I'm just not sure how to make the award relevant in the big picture without this kind of data.

Let's assume, however, that we've established statistical criteria and can therefore offer the award. I'd open the award only to teams that share the data needed to judge them fairly against their peers. (I would mean for a little bit of shame to be implied when your team is listed as ineligible for the award.) I only hope that there are enough respondents to present the award at the regional level...if not, that's a way to shave 8 min each from fifty-something closing ceremonies.

It seems my hypothetical safety award is hinging on some perhaps-unreasonable assumptions about being able to collect meaningful data. Given that I don't think the status quo is doing all that much good, I'd say that regretfully, the next best thing to an improved safety award is not to present it at all.

Finally, if a team had a particular safety innovation that, while fascinating and unique, wasn't shown to be measurably effective in increasing safety (yet), there's always a judges' award for that (whether or not a safety award exists).

[Cynette]

We had some new Safety Advisor experiences at FLR this year.

First off, several of our Advisors were actually safety professionals. That was refreshing!

Gone are the safety tokens. These are replaced by a written recommendation form that the team Safety Captain can use to recognize another team's efforts, making it more like the GP nomination form.

The Safety Captains were also asked at their Captains' meeting on Thursday to sign up for a 10 minute time slot to talk to the Safety Advisors on Friday about their team's safety program. Our Safety Captain took our safety manual and reveiwed our year-round safety program with the advisors. His efforts resulted in 1511 being recognized as one of the Top 4 Safety Teams. That was done without gimmicks, without annoying the other teams, based on the strength of our year-round safety program and with our pit crew and drive team just doing what they know they are supposed to do. That to me was a HUGE improvement over the past years' experiences.

I also know the team that won the UL Safety Award at FLR has a very strong year-round program. They do use give aways to promote safety to all the other teams, but they have a very specific focus at the regionals they attend to make sure each team has access to a kit to contain / clean-up a leaking battery.

I liked the new emphasis at FLR! The change gave promoting a safety culture within your team all year round more importance than promoting it during the competition alone.

[PayneTrain]

What if, instead of a single-team award, all teams at the regional can become "UL/FIRST Safety Certified"? You would get a small green banner to put on your pit, and a sticker to place on your robot. At the end of Friday, the teams who became safety certified are announced, and the awards are left on the pit for Saturday.

[Sunshine]

I find it ironic and a bit distressing that we have 98 posts about people hollering robot but only 9 posts on how to improve the safety award. I still have faith in the FIRST community and believe more will find this post and give suggestions on how to improve versus just complaining or suggesting that we just get rid of it all together.

IMHO
Safety has very little to do with your promotion of safety at the event and has more to do with what you do back home with the students.

1. Do you teach the safe use of tools and machines? do you really?
2. Do you take the time to teach/show the use of your first aid kit?
3. Do you take the time to teach/show the use of your fire extinguishers?
4. Do you take time to go over material safety data sheets?
5. have you ever explained the 5S Principles to your team? (industry does)
6. Do you know and use lock out/tag out devices?
7. How about Personal Protection Equipment or PPE use?
8. And yes, we actually do explain our emergency evacuation process to kids when we get to hotels and venues. And we hope we never have to use it.

The list could go on but I believe you get the point. Safety should be a part of your culture. If the award continues, FIRST should see proof that you actually incorporate safety back home when no one is watching.

Promotion is nice but don't just "talk the talk", "walk the walk".

[ratdude747]

My team won the safety award w/o ridiculous stuff. We got the award for:

1. requiring all members and mentors to pass a safety test before build season.
2. building a battery charging station that had outlets wired to industrial wiring codes and using it as the sole power source in the pits.
3. using "barbie" band-aids to remind people of their accident and increase safety accountability.

we never did this to win the award, we did it to be safe. perhaps attitude will be the new deciding factor... being safe to be safe is the goal, not being safe to win an award.

I personally believe the safety tokens was a bad system. you are asking people to judge safety from a distance where determining safety is difficult at best. this also assumes people know what is and isn't safe... i know that many teams at boilermaker regional had no idea on the new safety rules.

one team asked me for a soldering butane torch to do some battery cables... he did not know that open flames are illegal this year nor did he know leaded solder was a no-no. In the spirit of GP, I came over to his pit with my teams lead free solder and proper soldering tools and helped him legally solder the wires he needed soldered.

I really think that safety judges should consider motives and true effectiveness of a team's attempts to be safe. To me, safety is not just a skill, but a way of life.

[big1boom]

We won the Safety Award at Midwest Regional and was runner up in Wisconsin without any handouts, or having to yell "ROBOT" over a crowd of people. We simply talked about our year-round safety program, cleaned up the pit, and had baking soda/fire extinguisher/first aid kit/MSDS sheets on hand.

The safety judges really liked our year round program that begins with a mandatory safety meeting to start the season, through tool certification, and onto continued training with reminders throughout the season such as tool tags. Our safety program has worked so well in fact, that the worst injury in the past few years is a minor scratch.

That being said, I believe that the safety award has been significantly improved from past years. Its not about who can yell the loudest or who can post the most signs anymore. Its actually about having a culture of safety within your team. (or at least it was at Midwest, and Wisconsin)