Okay, back again, talking about one of my favorite professors and programs.

Jan Watcher, associate professor of Safety Sciences, who is currently researching how management needs to engage workers if they want them to follow safety guidelines, is a busy guy.

In addition to this work, a full load of classes, and advising students, one of his articles was selected for one of the most prestigious national safety journals, Professional Safety. His article is titled “Ethics–the Absurd Yet Preferred Approach to Safety Management.”

Any academic article that has the word “absurd” in it captures my attention.

As I’ve noted in a previous post, Dr. Watcher is a very articulate, well-rounded guy, who puts doing the right thing first. So I guess I’m not surprised by his topic. He is trying to tell management that yes, “the Golden Rule” (you know, we learned it in Sunday school, “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You” ) can be used as the basis for developing and implementing safety programs in the workplace without negatively affecting the bottom line.

 But Dr. Watcher goes a step further. He puts this responsibility on the safety professional. “Safety professionals need to have the moral courage to embrace ethical, not just regulatory, standards,” he says.

Let’s face it. Big companies are not always known for caring about the “little guy,” and sometimes, Dr. Watcher says, unethical managers try to enlist safety professionals as advocates for cutting corners when it comes to safety. If this happens, he says, safety professionals need to stand their ground and show their bosses how safety programs based on the more ethical basis of doing the right thing is a better and sustaining basis for managing safety programs in the long run.

I really liked this particular idea from the article: Laws and regulations are all about what people CAN’T  do, but ethics are about what people (and companies) SHOULD do.

Or, more simply put, ethics are about doing the right thing.

Dr. Wachter supports a “safety management systems approach” in the workplace: that is, recognizing the unsafe acts, unsafe conditions, and accidents are all symptoms of problems in the organizational management system. Safety should not be a “sunk cost,” but an integral function of doing business, just like quality.

But why would management adopt this approach, especially in light of challenging economic times?

“Perhaps the greatest economic reason to support an ethics-based approach to safety management within a capitalistic system is that prosperity generates an environment where continuing improvement and reduced risk are affordable,” Dr. Wachter says.

Pretty smart thinking.

But Dr. Watcher is a pretty smart guy. Here’s his professional training: a bachelor’s degree in biology, master’s degree in environmental health, Master of Business Administration, a doctoral degree in hygiene from the University of Pittsburgh, a Master of Divinity degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and a Master of Applied Theology from Wheeling Jesuit University. Before his academic career, he was employed by Fortune 100 companies and the federal government as an environmental safety and health administrator and researcher. His safety science accreditations include certified safety professional, certified industrial hygienist, certified hazardous materials manager, certified quality engineer, and certified reliability engineer.

I really like the idea of a Dr. Jan Wachter training the next generation of safety professionals. I feel a lot safer already!

I don’t really think much about safety in the workplace. Maybe because the most dangerous thing that could happen to me in my third-floor office in Sutton is that I get overly caffeinated (I love coffee and have my own personal Keurig).

But thankfully for people at job sites that have dangerous chemicals and machinery, there are people who do think very strategically about workplace safety.

I really enjoyed a recent meeting with Jan Wachter, associate professor of Safety Sciences. Dr. Wachter has a very diverse past, including study at a theological seminary. He’s not your typical safety professional, but he’s incredibly knowledgeable and has extensive experience in many different work sites. What intrigued me about his current work was that he was looking at safety from the perspective of the worker, not management.

Dr. Wachter got a $90,000 grant from the Alcoa Foundation to study “worker engagement” in the safety process.

WAIT! Don’t click away just yet. I promise, it’s interesting.

Here’s what that means. If workers have an accident, even if it’s because of a mistake that they make, it might not really be their fault, Dr. Watcher argues. It might be that they just aren’t buying into safety protocols and guidelines.

So the fault, dear reader, is not in their stars, but with management.

Here’s what he says: “While human error has been associated with the majority of incidents in the workplace, motivation and worker engagement may be the keys to human-error reduction.”

Dr. Wachter hopes that the outcomes of this research, once instituted in the workplace, could reduce lost workdays due to accidents by 20 percent.

The key difference in this study, as opposed to other research on safety in the workplace, is that Dr. Wachter will investigate how well–or how poorly–workers are engaged, or buying into, a shared accountability for identifying at-risk situations and responding to them.

There’s more about Dr.Wachter on the Research at IUP website, and I encourage you to stay tuned. I expect some very out-of-the-ordinary results from his research.