Robotic mode health & safety

I often wonder if I am alone in the world in my belief that obviously not all, but very many work place accidents happen when people go into what I decsribe as robotic mode?

My definition of robotic mode is to give you one example from within the building industry, A bricklayer who lays bricks day in day out for arguments sake knows his job so well that he can fall mentally into a world of his own and instead of concentrating on his job in hand his mind is maybe far away thinking about the pool match that coming evening or maybe taking his girlfriend out to the Friday night local disco, whilst he is in this state of mind even though his body is functioning and laying bricks perfectly his mind is far away. While in this dangerous state of mind if he is working high up on scaffolding and someone as left a trip hazard in front of him he may well not see it or realize that it is there and trip over and seriously injure himself if not tragically fall to his death! Some people may well call it daydreaming but I like to refer to it as robotic mode.

The point that I am trying to make is that when you are writing health & safety policies along with risk assessments and method statements how can you cater for the robotic mode? In my company one of my risk assessments that I have wrote asks for workers to stay alert at all times, but from my own experience this is nie on impossible for workers to do, especially when they are doing repetitive jobs. Can anyone come up with a realist answer? Other than spraying them with cold water every five minutes or so! We do have a responsibility for our own health & safety as well as other and across the board it is doing what is seen to be reasonably practical, but I believe many work place accidents are down to robotic mode and if a cure could be found to this problem it could well save many lives and 1000s of injuries.

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Robin Harrison is the managing Director of Dolly Char (UK) Ltd. Dolly Char (UK) Ltd is one of the fastest growing domestic cleaning franchise companies in the UK today giving people the opportunity to work from the comfort of their own home.

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Tags: bricklayer, building industry, daydreaming, Health & Safety, laying bricks, local disco, method statements, risk assessments, robotic mode, scaffolding, work place accidents

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Health & Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.