Do you feel like you are constantly rushing to get your work done? You’re not alone, and safety experts point out that this endless “hurried working” can massively elevate risks and lead directly to injuries.
They also point out that many people say, after the fact, that the reasons they were rushing were not all that important. They seemed important before, but, after someone ends up in the hospital with serious injuries, they seem trivial.
For instance, two men were working to clean up on the job. They worked in a warehouse, and one man prepped containers with a label before the other man picked them up with a forklift and put them away.
The problem is that they had decided they wanted to get the whole job taken care of before it was time for their lunch break. The man doing the labels was too slow, so the man driving the forklift kept rushing and yelling at him to hurry up. He got dangerously close to the other man. He drove faster and faster, even in the enclosed space.
Predictably, it eventually led to an accident when another worker came into the area and got hit by the speeding forklift while the driver was busy looking at the man putting the labels on the bins.
What was the point of those dangerous decisions? They had made an arbitrary deadline. They could have adjusted their expectations and come back to finish after lunch, but they instead tried to hurry through for no reason and put other workers in danger.
Have you suffered a serious injury on the job? Make sure you know all of your rights to workers’ compensation.
Source: Safteng, “Hazards of Rushing,” accessed June 01, 2018