How to improve your hand safety programs

Maia: [00:00:01] Thank you to everyone. Joining us today. I'm Maia Foulis, editor of Canadian Occupational Safety, and I'm pleased to introduce today's webinar Tips to Improving Your Hand Safety Program brought to you by Superior Glove. So hand injuries are among the most common preventable industrial accidents worldwide. And this is why it is so important for employers and safety professionals to properly understand and put in place effective safety measures to reduce unnecessary risks. So to answer your questions on this essential topic, it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Joe Geng, Vice President at Superior Glove. So Joe is an industry expert and has consulted with top companies including SpaceX, X, Bombardier, Toyota, General Motors, Shell Oil and Honda. Geng is also the author of the hand safety book Rethinking Hand Safety. So just a couple of notes before we get started. At the end of the presentation, we'll be welcoming audience questions, so please feel free to type any questions you have into the Q&A box within the webinar software, which is to the right of your screen. And if you experience any technical difficulties or have any trouble hearing the audio, please use the chat box next to the Q&A icon. And just a note, because we always get asked this, we will be sending out a recording as well as a resource list to all attendees after the webinar. So with all that said over to you, Joe.

Joe: [00:01:24] Thank you very much, Maia, and thank you everyone today for joining. So as Maia mentioned a couple of years ago, we published a book titled Rethinking Hand Safety, and that book was really born out of the question of how do we help our customers reduce hand injuries more? For a long time as a glove manufacturer, we had the attitude that if we design the right glove, our customers will have no hand injuries. And we are just confronted by the fact that that wasn't true, that we had customers buying the best gloves we could make, and they're still having hand injuries. So faced with that question, we decided to dig in and find out why some customers are having next to no hand injuries and some were having a lot. And so we interviewed dozens of safety managers. We we did a ton of research and then eventually published a book with those findings. And so what I'm going to do today is present some of the most actionable tips and tricks that we uncovered. So these are really tactics that you could employ. This is not a substitute for a good safety program, and this is not a comprehensive strategy. These are just actions that that you could enact in the next two or three months and that would hopefully reduce your hand injuries. And my hope is that if you find one or two things among this list that will help you reduce hand injuries, then I would consider that a win. So I'm going to jump right into it. So the first recommendation or tip that I would have is around having a mandatory glove policy. So these are pictures from signs outside of two different construction sites. The construction site on the left does not have a mandatory glove policy and the construction site on the right obviously does. And I'd be willing to bet good money that the construction site on the right has a lower hand injury rate. And what I would base that on is a study done by Liberty Mutual, and this is one of the most comprehensive studies done on workplace hand injuries. And what they did simply is they interviewed hundreds of people that had workplace hand injuries and asked them about the circumstances around those injuries. And there's tons of interesting findings out of that study. But basically the kind of the study in a nutshell is that the companies fell into two camps or as companies that did not have a mandatory glove policy and those that did. And for those that didn't have a mandatory glove policy, the numbers are kind of shocking. About 80% of the time that an employee had an injury at those companies, they weren't wearing gloves. And and then the almost the opposite or inverse is true for companies that did have a mandatory glove policy. It was around 80% of the time that a hand injury happened. Employees were wearing gloves. So to kind of put it another way or just to simply put it as if you're don't have a mandatory glove policy, you might as well figure Monday through Thursday your employees are going to be working barehanded, exposing themselves to risk. And only on Friday do they wear gloves. And then and then the opposite is true. If you have a mandatory glove policy almost all the time, Monday through Thursday, employees will be wearing gloves 100% of the time. It's only on Friday that you have to figure out how to improve that compliance a little bit more. And the other finding that it's not really surprising or shocking, but from the study is that wearing gloves reduce the severity of injuries by about 60%. So if you're wearing gloves, you're handling sheet metal, you slip, especially if they're cut resistant gloves, you're probably not going to get injured at all. If if you're not wearing gloves, you're probably going to get stitches. It's kind of just as simple as that. So so gloves are effective way at reducing injuries. Now, the unfortunate thing is that if you're a safety manager, you just can't put up the sign on the right and then your day is done. It's a little bit more complicated than that. And I'm going to walk you through some of the best practices that we've learned, mostly by trial and error and maybe heavy on the error side over the years when we're when we're helping customers. Club policies or hand safety programs. So when you when you're looking at either implementing a policy or improving on the gloves that you're using at your facility, have a few kind of tips and tricks. And the first one is that you're going to want to do is you want to go through the facility, identify the main tasks that are being done and the main hazards and those tasks, and then figure out what you think will be the best glove, a better glove to to use for that task. And my recommendation would be to rely on your safety distributor for help with this, or a glove manufacturer that any good safety distributor or glove manufacturer will will do this free of charge. And you might as well rely on them because they have expertise. And and it just takes some work off your plate as well. So so you should go through identify. Okay, these are the different roles. These are the different tasks that are involved and then which which glove is best for each role. One question I had in a recent presentation that I did is how to know when you need to switch gloves for different roles. And that's a really good question. And we often get asked and my general recommendation on that is if you can get away with one glove for multiple tasks, that's much, much better that any time you're telling an employee, Hey, you've got to take your gloves off when you're switching between this task and this task, that's a likely point that people are just going to take their gloves off and not put a new pair on. So so if you can avoid that and and get away with one glove for multiple tasks, that that's generally the preferred route to go. And of course, there's, there's like anything, there's always exceptions if you're handling find nuts and bolts and then you're dipping your hands in caustic chemical, you're not going to really be able to find one glove for for that. But but as a general rule of thumb, try to try to stick to as few different gloves as possible throughout your facility, especially if your employees are having to switch between tasks frequently. And the other recommendation here is to get employee involvement as as much as you can as early as possible. So you you want people that are doing the job to have a say in which clubs are going to be traveling. You want them to understand the importance of this project and you want them to feel involved. And that's because the output is going to be better. And then also the compliance is just going to be so much easier if people felt like they've had a say in in the gloves that have been chosen. The opposite's kind of true if you say, well, I've chosen this glove and this is what you're going to be wearing, you're going to have a really tough time with compliance. Now, the next step in this process would be actually testing the gloves. So I'm going to share a few tips around this as well that we've learned over time. So this is a form that we would use when we're saying, oh, we're testing a new glove for a specific application. And my first comment here is that when we used to do this, we would ask way too many questions. We'd have something like 20 questions that we would be asking employees to rate gloves on. Being a glove manufacturer, we want to know all the details, like how does the pinky finger fit and does the cuff long enough, all this sorts of stuff. And and really it wasn't very helpful. People found the form confusing and, and the feedback we got back really, really didn't impact the final decision. So we simplify this over time. And really what you want to know when you're when you're determining whether to switch gloves is really two things is how does employee feel? How likely are they to wear the glove compared to the current glove that they've been using? And then how do they feel the level of protection is is it better or worse than what they're currently using? And I want to share this form in particular because I think it's a good example to bring up a point. And so this is this is a form, actual form that we did where in a mine we're trying to test out a glove for anti vibration purposes that they're using kind of like a jackhammer drill and having a lot of related injuries because of it. And and the feedback we got here is kind of interesting. Interesting and sort of instructive is that the employee in this particular case, they they said that they were less likely to wear the glove that we came up with. So their current glove was more likely to be worn than the glove that we had developed for them. And then and then the last question is says, how do you feel level protection is? And they felt that our glove offered significantly better protection. And the reason I share this form is because often in this case, if a safety manager that we're working with looks at this form, they said, well, the protection is much better. Let's switch gloves. In this case, I would strongly caution against that in that if you have a situation where somebody is less likely to wear our glove, that is not good. And and probably a case where you're going to be actually driving injuries higher because of it. And again, that goes to that Liberty Mutual study is that that injuries are happening when people are not wearing gloves. And that's and comfort is a really big factor in that. So you want to make sure that comfort is at least as high, if not higher for the glove you're going to be proposing, because that's going to make compliance much easier. And again, like I mentioned before, there's exceptions to this. If if people are used to wearing no gloves at all or or really thin cotton gloves and and you're getting all kinds of injuries and they need to go to something with heat protection or or a lot of protection. You're probably going to have to go to something more bulky and people aren't going to like it. But but those tend to be the exceptions rather than the rule. So so my point here really is don't underestimate the impact of comfort and how much that's going to impact injuries, injuries overall. And so to weigh comfort is a really big factor when you're choosing gloves. The other kind of specific comment here is that when you're doing a trial like this, what you typically do is get between five and at the low end and maybe 15 people at the top end to test a glove any any less than five. And, you know, you sometimes get one or two people that can really skew skew a trial. And so so you want a good number of people, but then you also don't want 50 people trying to glove because it's just managing the logistics of that gets unwieldy and will take forever. And then so what we typically do is we take these forms, we put them in a spreadsheet and you kind of get a rating of this glove rates better or worse than the incumbent glove sort of thing. Okay. So then the next thing kind of related to that is we created this kind of tree or decision guide and just this just to help illustrate why people wear or won't wear gloves. And and it really boils down to two things. It's around how comfortable are they that the physical aspect and the availability. So when it comes to the comfort, it's the fit. Are they hot? Are they sized properly? Are they itchy? That kind of thing. And so that that can be a barrier and then often not very considered factor is how available they are is like, do you have to walk half a mile to get a new pair of gloves or is there some sort of unseen barrier to getting a new pair? Is the store's manager or a purchasing manager giving you a hard time when you're asking for a new pair of gloves, that sort of thing? And so those if you can minimize those barriers, you're really going to drive compliance a lot. We also created this chart just to really present that same information in a different way. This is adapted from BJ Fogg, who's a professor at the University of Stanford, who specializes in behavior change. And. And so when you're trying to get somebody to change behavior, whether it's yourself or somebody else, there's kind of two major factors that that applies somebody's level of motivation. And then their ability and really ability means how hard is it to to enact that change. And so often when we're thinking about how do we change somebody's behavior, we often think about motivation. How do we show them how important this is in safety? It's kind of like we need to show them scary videos of people getting their hands cut off, that sort of thing. And motivation is important and it should play a factor. But the tough part about motivation is it's it wanes over time. So that's why you see gyms are full the first week of January and empty the by April kind of thing that are motivation doesn't stay stay the same day after day where as ability is something that safety managers you can have a lot more influence over and direct impact so how comfortable are the gloves to wear and how easy are they to get them again? And then lastly, the other part of this is what are the triggers that remind people to put on a pair of gloves? So are there are there signs in place? Are the gloves right beside the tools that they're going to be using, that sort of thing? So it's just that that trigger that reminds you, okay, I need to enact this action. And along triggers. We were talking to an interesting story. We were talking to a railroad car manufacturer. And one thing they told us that they had done was that each day when the the workers were going to their specific location to work on work on a car, car, they had a cart full of tools and bolts and that sort of thing that they would cart out to their work work zone. And they were having trouble with PPE compliance. So what they had done, which was quite clever, is they redesigned the cart. They had a very conspicuous spot for PPE. And if their if their PPE wasn't there, whether it's glasses or gloves, there's a sticker saying, hey, you forgot your PPE, go back and get it. And it was just that kind of trigger that reminded people to go go get their PPE and that helped to drive their compliance. So now when you're talking about comfort and fit, if you're walking around a facility, this is something you do not want to see. You do want to see gloves in the back pocket. You do not see them on their toolbox. If people are having to take their gloves off to do a job, that that's a bad sign. And again, it's because the majority of hand injuries are happening when when the gloves come off and when the gloves come off, it's people forget to put them back on in there. They're kind of at high risk in that situation. Much better is something like this where an employee can do just about any task with their gloves on. Ideally, the gloves are form fitting. Hopefully have some cut resistance that might not have been possible 20 years ago. But gloves have improved a lot. Material science has improved. Proofs of gloves continue to get thinner and offer better, better levels of protection. So kind of a general rule of thumb is you want to look for gloves where you can tie your work boots with them and maybe even they have a touch screen capability if if for some reason you need to use a screen for the job or something like that. So again, there's exceptions that if you're working at a steel foundry or something, you're you're not going to be able to wear form fitting gloves. But for more and more jobs, you're able to wear gloves that fit snugly and and you can handle fine tools and find parts with. Now when it comes to availability, I'm going to share a story just from my personal life to illustrate. This point is just before COVID I'd bought some fitness equipment. Luckily, because you pretty much couldn't get it during COVID, and I was putting it together in my basement. So I bought this squat rack and I unboxed it and I was looking at it and I did this quick risk assessment in my mind. And so there's these steel beams. And I looked at them and I thought, This is probably not too dangerous. And then I thought, How far away are my gloves? They're all the way up the stairs there in the garage. It's a winter time. It's cold. I don't want to go there. And so I quickly determined that I was safe enough doing the job barehanded. And so I got started assembling it. I was about 2 minutes into the job. I dropped a heavy metal beam right on my finger. Blood is gushing out, and the first thought that went through my mind was, this is not going to look good when I go into the office. Our company mission statement is to reduce workplace hand injuries. And so if you go into the office with a big bandage on your hand, people are going to ask, why did you get cut? And if you answer, I was too lazy to walk 50 feet to go put a pair of gloves on. You're going to be ridiculed by your coworkers, and rightly so. But kind of the funny thing is when I tell this story is I'm not uniquely lazy. A lot of people can identify with having done this exact same thing, performing a task without putting their PPE on because it was inconvenient. And the kind of the other funny thing, too, is that people have developed their own tips almost to fool themselves into putting their PPE on or force themselves so that they'll put their PPE in their work boot or put their gloves right on their their toolbox, that sort of thing, to prevent themselves from doing this. So as a safety manager, when you're when you're thinking about how to distribute PPE, just think about how lazy I am. And and that probably I'm not not unique in this situation. So if you design something for a really lazy person, then your, your compliance is going to be that much higher. So assume that everyone is super lazy like me and then you'll have a much easier time with compliance. So people should not have to walk really far to get their PPE, or there should not be other barriers that prevent them from getting that more and more common we're seeing in the workplace is vending machines, and that's just kind of a good idea, particularly if they're they're conveniently distributed throughout a workplace or construction site so that there's not this difficult barrier for getting a new pair of gloves. And one sign that you do have a problem with this is something like this. Sometimes we walk through manufacturing plants or construction sites and we see gloves that are like this. And that's often a sign that there's something wrong, that there's some kind of barrier. If you're wearing gloves that look like Swiss cheese, there's got to be a reason why you're not going to get a new pair. One time we ran into a guy and the gloves look like just like this or even worse. And we asked him, why are you not going to get a new pair of gloves? And he told us it was because he was trying to show his manager how hard he was working. And that's often not the problem or not people's thought process. But if you see this, you kind of need to question of like, why? Why are people not switching out their gloves more frequently? Now the next step I'm going to share is really just something that we learn from our own practice. And this was a training that we had done internally. So what we had done when we were doing a hand safety training with our, our own team and what what we did was we did a basically a hand safety quiz. We asked people about ten questions around hand safety and we designed the quiz that so was quite hard. We want to be able to get at least three or four questions wrong at minimum. So so some of the questions were really tricky and frankly, you couldn't get right. And the goal or what we said that for every question you get wrong, you're going to lose a digit for the rest of the presentation. So for every question you get wrong, you had to tape up a finger or a thumb or something like that. And then then for the next 30 or 45 minutes, you had to stay like that. And then we'd get people to do things like button up their shirts or write something, or we put out a bowl of candy and you had to unwrap them and it really drove home. How impactful losing a digit is. It's not just a painful one time incident. It's going to impact the rest of your life and and you're going to have to rely on your spouse to do common tasks. And it really is very debilitating and kind of emotionally scarring as well. So I just present that as kind of a one off training that can be impactful. And we have other companies that we've worked with that have done this same sort of training. Now the next step that I'm going to recommend is just to remember the hierarchy of safety controls. This is a picture shared with us from a construction company that we were working with. And and so what had happened was they shared this picture with us. They said an employee, he was trying to pull apart two pieces of plywood with his bare hands. It snap back and he got sort of a pinch cut there. Then it looks a bit deceiving. This picture of the nail did not go through his hand, but. But he was kind of cut by the snap back of the pieces of plywood. And then so he had asked us, what's the best PPE, what glove should this guy be wearing to prevent this from happening in the future? And right away, we're glove manufacturers. We're jumping into well, we need a glove. This got some puncture resistance. We need a glove that has some impact resistance. And we're kind of figuring out the best glove to recommend in this situation. Then somebody else are kind of more junior on our team said, Why is this guy doing this with his hands at all? Why is he not grabbing a hammer or a crowbar? And really, that was the right question to be asking is not what's the best PPE in this situation is why are you using your hands for this job is really the question that should have been asked. And we often find this with safety managers and really with our own team, is that that people often jump to PPE, sort of instinctively, despite knowing the hierarchy of safety controls. One of our sales guys, he was working with a pulp and paper mill and they had had this really bad accident that the the an employee was he was changing out of Dr. Blade. So this is heavy like £50 blade, razor sharp that's used for cutting giant reams of paper. And he had he had removed the blade and was carrying it across the plant floor to the shop where it was going to be sharpened. And he slipped. It went across his stomach and he had to have something like 30 stitches. So it was really pretty serious injury. And and the safety manager was asking our our sales guys, like, what can we do to prevent this from happening in the future? Can we make a cut resistant apron or what kind of gloves should we be using for better grip? And the sales guy just kind of took a step back and said, why is he walking across the plant floor with this against his belly? Why did you not design a cart? So so there's really no handling of it at all. And. And so really just the recommendation here is that when you're looking at at the injuries, like the first question should always be how do we prevent this from happening by not using our hands in the first place. And and sometimes that just means bringing in a team of people to look at it in a different way, or maybe even somebody from outside your organization or not directly involved that maybe has a different perspective. This is just a clip from a project done by U.S. Steel where they went through their whole facility and identified ways of removing hands from the line of fire. And they created all kinds of unique tools and and workarounds so that so that there really was no chance of injury or dramatically reduced the chance of injury rather than using PPE. Now the next step I'm going to recommend is around the use of signs. So this is an old Dutch sign and what it simply says is the guard was left to high. So my first comment on this is around the use of graphic, graphic images. I think graphic images frankly have their place. That's the reason you see them on cigarette cartons is because they are effective at changing behavior. I comment here was probably not to be using this as a as a poster where you put it beside a machine and then set it and forget it. That probably graphic images are more appropriately used in training where you might see one image and it's you don't have the chance to become desensitized to it. And the other comment would be that sometimes we've seen training where people are showing graphic images and it's not that related to the job that's going to be being done. So you might see a presentation of injuries that are happening at a construction site and you're working in manufacturing or vise versa that as much as possible you will if you're going to be showing graphic images, you want them to be from a task that an employee is going to be doing. And that's just because it's human nature that when we see an injury, when someone has an accident, we'll say, well, why did why did they do that? That's kind of silly. I'm not going to do that. That's not going to happen to me. And so the more you can make it related to to the actual job, the more effective. That is going to be an interesting project that was done around that was done by a professor from the University of Colorado, Matthew Hollowell, and what he and his team had done. They were working with an oil and gas company and they went off the premise that people are most likely to change their behavior and to become more safe when they've either had an injury or they've witnessed an injury. And so they did the next best thing because they weren't going to go around. Actually inflicting injuries on employees is they reenacted the most common injuries that were happening on the worksite. So a common injury at that oil and gas site was crushes between pipes. And so they they created these really lifelike mannequin hands. So these hands actually had sort of fake bones in them and they split it up blood when they were crushed. And then they they re-enacted these videos. And so if you want a YouTube, this is just if you YouTube Matthew Hollowell live demo safety, then you'll find these and they're really well done. And what they found is that they were quite effective. So once they, they had employees watch these videos and then kind of recommend the alternative best practice that there was a significant drop, something like a 30% drop in hand injuries and overall injuries not to be forgotten or underestimated. It's just simple signs that remind you to wear your gloves. So it's just a simple sign like this is effective. And again, going back to that BJ Fogg model of sometimes you just need a trigger to remind you to enact that behavior. Another option is something like this, where this is a sticker that you can put right on a machine and it just kind of makes you more aware in the moment. And and then lastly, are are things like this where there's just kind of more generic safety signs that try to improve your safety culture overall and some alternative this if you're working remotely, we're seeing this as kind of a more common practice of safety texting when you don't have that option of putting up that poster. So kind of the the nutshell with what we recommend with posters is using a variety of signs and rotating them out frequently, and that science will have a positive effect on reducing your injuries. This is an image shared with us by a construction company that we were working with. So this is kind of their before picture of their site. This is the after picture, before picture after picture. And so my recommendation here is around housekeeping. There was a large US shipyard and they done a really thorough study around and around housekeeping. They did a big housekeeping project at their shipyard. And and the main goal there was to try to improve worker efficiency. And, and it did work that the housekeeping project improved worker efficiency. But the side benefit that they weren't anticipating is that the injury rate dropped a fair, fair bit. So a clean workplace, an organized workplace will help you to reduce injuries. And it's one of those things not to be underestimated. Now the next step that I'm going to recommend is around using peer pressure. So this is one of our sales guys. He's working with a mine in northern Quebec. And the interesting thing that they did is if you notice, the board in the background is that they rolled out a safety campaign and they said to their employees, if you if you're bought in a hand safety, if you want to reduce hand injuries, we ask you to dip your hands in pain. Post, put your hand on the board and sign your name. And and so what they're doing there is they're harnessing the power of positive peer pressure. If you're if you're doing this, if you're you're posting your handprint, if you're signing your name, you're making a public commitment that you're committed to hand safety the next day. You're just that much more likely to be safe. And and you're going to feel that that pressure from your coworkers, whether it's real or not, that you should be acting safely and also just makes it that much easier to speak up if you see somebody doing something unsafe and they've signed their name and posted their hand on this board, that then it's just that much easier to say, Hey, you should be doing that. You shouldn't be doing that, or Hey, you should be wearing your gloves. A funny example in a story that I really liked that we came across when we were researching for the book is an oil drilling company in Alberta and that they what they did was a a hand safety campaign where they they went to their employees and said, hey, you guys, for the next three months, you guys are the safety managers. We're giving everybody here a pair of pink gloves. If you see one of your coworkers doing something unsafe with their hands, you can go tell them they're wearing their pink gloves for the rest of the day. And for every time somebody is wearing a pink gloves, we're going to donate $5 to breast cancer research. And and this worked really well in that they had a good culture in the first place. So you knew if somebody was going up to you and saying, hey, you're doing something unsafe, you need to wear your pink gloves, that that person had your best interests at heart. And you're doing that because you wanted to prevent them from having a serious injury. And and the results were really quite phenomenal. They had a 60% drop in hand injuries over the course of the campaign. And then after the campaign was over long term, they saw a 30% drop. So it was a really effective and kind of fun way that they they reduce their hand injuries. Sometimes when I'm giving this presentation, I get people kind of caught up on the pink gloves. Where do they source them or let's we shouldn't be using pink or something like that. My comment here would be, don't get caught up on the color of the gloves or even the gloves at all. Just the idea or the principle here is to try to gamify safety, particularly if you have a good culture to start with. If you gamify it, it can be very effective and you can have fun with it. Like you could even use jerseys that if you're in Montreal, you can make people wear a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. If they do something and say just something like that, to have to have fun with and to get employees involved and. And hopefully that works for you. No. My next step is really just a book recommendation. It was The Principles of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. And we we relied on this when we were doing or publishing the book, Rethinking and Safety. And the principle around this is that often when we're trying to get people to change behavior, we think right away we go to incentives like, Oh, we have to have a pizza party if people don't have injuries, or there has to be some kind of financial reward or something like that, and rewards are can be effective. They can also backfire if they're not done quite right. And so in addition to to some kind of reward, you can use things that are very effective. Like we talked about positive peer pressure. It's very effective for getting people to change behavior and there's really no incentive required. So sometimes those things can be much more effective than than offering a carrot. And so this book has has a a lot of recommendations around getting people to change behavior by relying on the factors of persuasion. So social proof, reciprocity and that sort of thing, and that can really affect a lot of change. Improve your safety a lot. Now my next recommendation or tip that we ran across was around mindfulness. We we came across companies that had done mindfulness campaigns and found that they were quite effective. New Brunswick Power was one where they did a year long mindfulness campaign and and really they train employees on how to be present in the moment. So if you're having a lot of injuries, say, like at the end of the shift or the injuries seem like those things that. Somebody did something stupid because their mind wandered like we all do. Then this is something that you might want to look at. And it's kind of becoming more common. So, yeah, again, if you look at your your the time of the injuries, like if it's a lot of injuries are having Friday at 4:00 right before the end of the shift or if the injuries are things people say like, oh my, my mind wandered or something like that, this is something you might want to consider. So as a recap, the my recommendations for reducing your hand injuries and actionable things that that you can enact are if you don't have a mandatory glove policy there might be a good reason for it but really question that and and wonder if you can act and enact a mandatory glove policy. Number two is to overcome the barriers to glove use. This can have a huge impact that if you're if you're looking at the comfort of your gloves and how hard are they to replace, how easy are they to get that can really drive your compliance. And if people are wearing gloves, your injury rate should drop dramatically. Again, looking at the hierarchy of safety controls and maybe take a unique look at that or get some side perspective on how can we remove hands from the line of fire in the first place, use safety signs and use a mix of them, and those could be effective triggers to get people to wear PPE. Don't underestimate the power of housekeeping that can be a very effective for for injury reduction, use, peer pressure, and to try to gamify safety, if you can, and then possibly consider mindfulness training as well. So I am going to pass it back to Maia. We're going to open it up for Q&A. My only comment around this is that, yeah, please give me many many questions you have. If you have specific love questions, I'd love to answer those. I learn a lot from the questions and when I'm doing this presentation. So I appreciate any kind of questions that you might throw at me. And and then my other comment, too, is that if you'd like a copy of this book, it just, just sent me an email and will send you a copy. We can ups you a copy and, and hopefully you'll find some valuable tips and tricks in there as well.

Maia: [00:34:38] Okay. Perfect. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Joe. That was really fascinating. Some great insights in there. And as Joe said, we will be opening up the floor to questions. So please feel free to to ask whatever's on your mind. We'll try and get to try and get to it. So and as a reminder, we will indeed be sending out a recording as well as a resource list to all attendees after the webinar. So big thanks to those who already sent questions. I'm going to start with the first one. So the first question, I have no control over what work is where. How can I have an impact?

Joe: [00:35:15] Yeah, that's a good one. We get that sometimes, particularly if you're dealing with subcontractors or something like that. Yeah, I think that impact you can have is going to be somewhat limited. I think the best you can do is is lead by example. So try to create that safety culture, try to if you can harness peer pressure, that that sort of thing. And. I think it's going to be limited to that, that if we run into cases where particularly when people are dealing with subcontractors and subcontractors, say, we're just not going to do what you say. If you have limited influence there and you can't hold people accountable, that is going to be tough. I guess the best is is lead by example to try to create a positive safety culture. And then and then just know that you can't get 100% change and that's going to be the best that you'll be able to do.

Maia: [00:36:13] Okay, interesting. And I guess maybe leading a little bit off from that, Ryan asks, what would be included in a mindfulness campaign?

Joe: [00:36:23] Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not an expert in that area. What we did see is that in in mindfulness there, people are going through typically exercises before a shift. So the way it was often positioned is like athletes are visualizing victory or they're visualizing how they're going to perform before a game or for a match, and that you would want to do the same thing if you're on a construction site or workplace and that. And you're trying to focus on your breathing. You're feeling how your body feels and your work boots and your gloves and that sort of thing. So it's, it's similar to, to non workplace mindfulness, but it's really to try to improve being present in the moment and prevent your mind from wandering.

Maia: [00:37:13] Okay. Fascinating. So next question. How do I know what gloves should be worn for what tasks, and how do I know what standards to put in place?

Joe: [00:37:24] Yeah, that's a great question. So my overall recommendation would be probably you want to rely on a glove manufacturer or safety distributor to help you with that, that you can't be an expert in all areas and that the glove manufacturers safety of distributors that we're dealing with this day in and day out. So we have experience or should have experience and knowing what the right glove is for a specific task and and kind of a bit more to that. My a question that we would get asked or we would ask people that, oh, how do I know if I'm wearing the right cut level or the right puncture level is that you should be looking at your injury data so that if you're if you have a lot of injury data and, you know, okay, you're getting a lot of cuts and people are wearing a certain glove, then it's probably not adequate. And and conversely, that if you're not having any cuts and people are wearing gloves than most likely it is. So so we have general recommendations for specific industries like generally for construction industry. We will recommend a certain cut level or generally for automotive manufacturer, I will recommend a certain cut or puncture level, something like that. But then but then it's really specifically to your application and then looking at your injury data as well. So kind of summarizes lean on a glove manufacturer or a safety distributor to help you and then kind of look at your injury data to guide you if if those standards are are sufficient or if you need to go up.

Maia: [00:38:51] Okay, perfect. So we have a question from Scott, who says we have challenges with our mechanics, injuring their hands as they don't have the correct glove for a task. So, for example, they will wear a nitrile glove to protect against oils, etc., but then complete a task that has sharp hazards or vibration. Is there a glove that will protect against all three?

Joe: [00:39:19] I think there's a glove that's going to protect probably against two of those three. So we have we have now fairly high dexterity gloves that offer liquid and oil protection that not vibration. So my comment here, Scott, if you wouldn't mind emailing me at this address, then I can send you a couple of recommendations of what to look at. We might be able to find a glove for all three, but maybe it's going to be two of those three. That's a good question.

Maia: [00:39:48] Okay, wonderful. So another question. How do you test gloves to make sure that it has the right protection?

Joe: [00:39:58] So, yeah, that's a great question. We have our own lab, so we there's a variety of ANSI standards for different levels of protection. So for example, for cut resistance, there's a there's an ANSI standard and everybody tests to that standard and same thing for vibration puncture impact. And those standards are over time are getting better and better that there's new ones being being added. And that really helps with the the testing and quantification of glove performance. And then sometimes when there isn't a standard, we we are designing our own test as kind of an ad hoc thing to help quantify performance as well. But for the most part, there's there's a lot of standards around all the glove attributes that you need to know about.

Maia: [00:40:48] Another glove recommendation question from Wendy. So we need hand protection from lacerations, from utility knives, but also ultra dexterity. Do you have any suggestions?

Joe: [00:40:59] Yeah, I do. Again, Wendy, I'd recommend if you email me, then I can send you a couple of suggestions that that a few years ago this would have been difficult. Now gloves are getting much, much finer. And it's kind of surprising how thin they can be with offering really high levels of protection. So I have a couple of recommendations that even can send you some samples if you're interested in looking at that. But this with glove manufacturers is getting better in the last few years significantly.

Maia: [00:41:24] Okay. Wonderful. And yet we still have some time. So if you have any questions, please feel free to put those in in the Q&A box. So another question. Is there a specific glove for the summer heat? So ones that don't make you sweat.

Joe: [00:41:42] Yes, there are. There's materials that are a lot cooler than others. So the material that we're often using for cut resistance is called. It's sort of a mouthful, but it's ultra high molecular weight polyethylene. A common brand name is dyneema for that yarn. And the yarn is very wicking. It's used sometimes in Tour de France jerseys and things like that. So it's really quite cool and sort of cool to the touch. So the there are gloves that that do feel cooler in the summer heat than others and that's improving as well. So for whoever asked that, if you want to email me again, I can I can make some specific recommendations to test out there.

Maia: [00:42:23] Okay, wonderful. So I can't see any other questions in the Q&A. I'm going to give it a couple of seconds, just in case anyone has has a last question they'd like to ask. Joe, I don't know if you have any any last comments before we kind of close out the presentation.

Joe: [00:42:41] Thanks a lot. Yeah. If you have any I think of any questions 5 minutes from now or tomorrow, just feel free to email me, happy to make recommendations or or answer any questions that I can. So I appreciate everybody joining. And hey, I'll pay off a good rest of your day.

Maia: [00:42:57] Okay, wonderful. Well, yeah, as Joe said, please feel free to get in touch. His contact details are on the screen and will be in the slides that will be shared. So I can't see any other questions coming up. So I think that's it for today. Thank you for everyone joining. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and thank you absolutely to Joe for sharing his insights. Don't forget to keep an eye out for our upcoming webinars. And again, yes, thanks everyone and have a lovely rest of the day.

Joe: [00:43:25] Thank you, everybody.