Beyond the Workplace: How Safety Training Makes Home Life Safer

Think about it: just as the organisational or project-management tools can be of help running a household, so too can the habits and awareness developed through professional safety training. 

You’re not going to lift well at work and then hoist up a heavy box at home any old way! Nor would you leave trip hazards in place in your living room when you are in the habit of spotting and removing them during your workday. 

Beyond those obvious cases though, it is also worth thinking about how a safety mindset can be positively applied to the place where, after all, we spend most of our time: at home.

How can we amp up our safety game at home and make life for ourselves and our loved ones safer and more satisfying? Read on to find out!

The modern home calls for a modern awareness

Home of course is place for relaxation but nowadays even a small apartment can be so packed with features and amenities that there is, despite the calm atmosphere, heightened risk potential.

Just to take one eye-opening stat, a widely cited Swedish study⁽¹⁾ found that home/leisure environments were almost nine times deadlier than transportation when it came to fatalities resulting from unintentional injury, which completely upends the common perception.

As the complexity of modern life has increased, the complexity of both workplaces and our homes has increased: for most of us, our living spaces now incorporate a combination of appliances and conveniences that are designed to be both safe and user friendly. Our kitchens in particular involve the harnessing of powerful forces such as electricity, water and heat that, ordinarily, we do not think of as hazardous. 

However, with fallible human beings involved, the risk of unexpected incidents can rise quickly, especially when we are tired, distracted or have our judgement impaired by the likes of alcohol intake or (it can happen in even the best families!) high levels of emotion. 

The key takeaway here is, at the next opportunity, look around your domestic surroundings the way a safety professional might: what accidents might be ‘waiting to happen’ given the fact that the occupants might not always be behaving in the most rational way? 

The unexpected can be around any corner

Let’s look at some everyday scenarios to show what we mean: 

1. Relaxing over a glass of wine with dinner it can be easy to forget that the stove is still extremely hot. Add to that the possibility that a younger member of the household, tasked with tidying the dinner table by a busy parent, placed a stack of newspapers dangerously close to the forgotten source of heat. In no time, a vague awareness that something is burning could turn quickly to panic as the scorched paper escalates into a nasty fire. 

Sadly, more than four in every five European deaths from fire happen in the home: to learn more on how best to protect yourself and your loved ones from this sourge, read our recent article on fire-safety.

2. In cold weather, not long out of bed and hurrying to work or school, it can be easy to forget that the ground just outside the front door might be newly treacherous after a sharp temperature fall while you slept cosy and warm in your heated bedroom.

3. Pets too (rarely a feature at the average workplace!) can present a whole other set of unforeseen challenges. Are there extension leads that could electrocute a teething puppy with no knowledge of the danger lurking within an apparently inert coil of rubber that your four-legged friend sees as just another 'chew toy'?

‘Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans’, as John Lennon once sang: that is how we are made and how things go in this world. The trick, as we shall see in the next section, is to pre-empt the unexpected by way of a correct understanding of health and safety that will work for you around the clock, wherever you happen to be. 

The four ‘states’ behind the scenes of most accidents in the home 

So, how exactly would your health-and-safety training at work help with such diverse and completely unplanned-for situations in the home? The reason is the omnipresent human factor. 

Look closely at why mistakes or accidents happen, and you'll almost always find the person involved was experiencing one or more of these four states of mind or body:

1. Rushing: When we are in a hurry, we not only risk getting hurt, but we can damage our relationships too. For example, when we show up late and stressed, others might think we don't care or can't manage our time well.
2. Frustrated: Think about getting annoyed while waiting much longer than usual in the queue for your morning coffee. You might snap at an innocent barista whose actually been super-helpful to you before: not a good way for you to start your day – or his! When we’re fuming over something, we’re more prone to accident.
3. Tired: We all know it to be true: mistakes accumulate when we’re weary. That’s particularly relevant for life in the home, as most evenings of the week we have already spent the day working hard. 
4. Complacent: This last one is tricky. When we do something many times, our brain ends to go onto autopilot. The more skilled we get at something, the more likely our mind is to wander. But this is exactly when we need to pay extra attention.

Homes and workplaces might seem very different, but when it comes to risk calculus they have a common denominator: the human being!

Safety mindset to the rescue

The great thing about the risk profile being so similar at work and at home is that the remedy too can be essentially similar. This is why we said above that your health-and-safety training can be so powerful if you apply it as well to life outside your working hours. Why not try these techniques?

1. Notice when you're in a dangerous state (like being tired or rushed), and stop yourself before making a big mistake. We call this ‘Rate your state’, and our YOUFactors platform has a handy digital tool for just this purpose.
2. Learn from small mistakes and near-misses, whether your own or your loved ones’: this is the very data you need to pre-empt the more consequential accidents! 
3. Watch how others do things around the house: you might be doing the very same thing if you’re honest, but it is often easier to spot risky behaviours when they are being demonstrated by someone else. One big one is leaving the gas-stove cooking away while you run a quick errand in another room; a clear-eyed witness would be quick to point that you are in fact leaving a naked flame unattended – never a good idea.
4. Build better safety habits into your daily routine. Sooner or later in life we come to understand that routine is a superpower if you can learn to harness it!

Safety isn’t something that stops when the workday ends. It’s a mindset and habit that can benefit all areas of life, including at home with family and friends.

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