"The employees didn't care for the safety knives -- they want to use folding razor blades."
No, really, I'm not fabricating this quote -- an end-user company actually just emailed me the above statement.
If a company doesn't have a dedicated Safety Professional I often have no choice but to work with someone who doesn't have the training, knowledge, or authority to enforce whats right for their organization vs. what's popular internally.
Whenever I hear the response, "I gave them to my warehouse guys to see if they like them" it's like the Kiss of Death --
Of course they're not going to like change -- no one likes change. And if our safety cutters aren't the right tools for the job then please, I beg of you, go out and find the safety cutters that ARE the right tools for the job vs. letting your employees use weapons of mass destruction to open boxes in your warehouse.
Because the next time we chat the conversation is always the same -- remorse for having taken the path of least resistance now that your employee just lost a finger on an exposed metal blade. It's not a matter of IF that will happen, it's only a matter of WHEN it will happen when you're not cutting with safety in mind.
If our products don't solve your challenge I'm happy to refer you to our peers in the safety industry that also make excellent safety cutters -- because each of my competitors makes tools that are all different from one another and solve different tasks at hand.
And at the end of the day the important thing is we all solve a SAFETY issue -- and shouldn't that be the end goal for all of us? Making sure your employees get home safe to their loved ones, fingers and hands intact?
So let's hear it for the Safety Managers - the ones that make it happen and don't fall under pressure to do what's easy or popular. The ones who enforce the "unpopular" decisions to implement what's safe using their experience, knowledge and training vs. taking a poll of what everyone "thinks" ----
Mr. TJ Scimone
founder and CEO
Slice, Inc.
