Do you have one of those little voices in your head that tells you to take safety shortcuts on home projects? Like when you don’t turn off the breaker before replacing a plug, it says, “What could go wrong?”
In truth, that’s a pretty good question to actually ask—at work, or at home.
I’ll admit that most of us safety types recite this phrase like a hypnotist to a volunteer from the audience: “We want everybody to go some safe at night, with the same finger and toe count as they left home with that morning.”
It’s because it’s true! We’d like to extend that to home life—including home repairs involving electricity, extension ladders or slick bathroom floors. Because we want you to come back to work with everything working!
It’s surprising how much safer everything gets when, before you start, you take a couple of minutes to ask, really, “What might go wrong?” That way you can either take steps to prevent it (turn off the breaker) or, if some risk is unavoidable, to think about how to handle a problem of it does arise.
I’m telling you, preparedness is better than Valium as a stress reliever. Because preparedness makes you ready to see reality, take action and remedy the situation. Valium just removes you from reality. For awhile.
At work it’s the same. When everybody on a job site trusts their training and the system, it’s easy to trust each other because you know the person next to you has your back if he or she sees something before you do. That trust makes everyone that much safer.
Safety is one of our five core values. We word it this way: “Prioritize workplace safety” because the others, which are great, matter less than keeping everybody safe all the time.
Safety is unique among company values. In most other areas we have trade secrets and proprietary knowledge we feel gives us an edge—and we don’t share that with anyone outside the team.
But safety? I’m ready to share good practices in that category with everyone, because every person at every company is part of a family who loves and depends on them to come home.
Believe me, I’ve been in the oil and gas production safety business for 36 years, and I’ve seen just about everything that can go wrong. I’m going to continue to do everything I can to keep everything going right, whatever site we’re on, and whoever the customer is. That’s part of our culture, and what's makes Zedi stand out from the crowd.
