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Workplace Safety: How To Survive Working at Jurassic World

Most businesses have one aspect or another that could lead to employees being injured, maimed or killed. Nurse attendants must move heavy loads, zoo attendants brave cages filled with lions, medical laboratory assistants handle dangerous chemicals, and construction zones are filled with potential hazards. Despite the hazardous conditions, many business and employees fail to take the proper precautions.

The Jurassic Park franchise is the quintessential example of a company who insufficiently planned for the safety of their employees. The Jurassic theme parks, islands, and businesses don’t have a good employee safety track record. The original movie, Jurassic Park, opens with the mauling of an employee. As the movie commences, the parks power fails, the dinosaurs escape, and one by one, the unprepared employees are hunted down by ruthless velociraptors and a ravenous tyrannosaurus Rex. By the end of the movie, only seven of the eighteen employees escape with their lives.

Twenty-two years after the original movie, the geniuses at InGen are at it again. Jurassic World, is around the corner, bigger, better, and with a genetically modified T-Rex (The Indominus Rex). What could go wrong? The fact that the trailer opens with a mother telling her child, “Remember, if something chases you, Run,” does not give me much hope for the park attendants making it through the inevitable escape of the dinosaurs alive.

Their imaginary loss of life and limb is our gain. Let’s take a moment to explore what you and your company should do to ensure you go home each day with your life, limbs, and only minor injuries.

How To Survive Working at Jurassic World

Step 1: Ensure Workplace Safety Protocols Are In Place

Disaster plans are important to prevent damage to monetary assets, raw materials, and personnel. Every company should have disaster preparedness plans to ensure they will be able to stay one step ahead of any potential danger to their company and their employees. The number of safeguards put into place should be dependent on how many dangerous situations you, as an employee, happen to be placed into.

As the disaster plan is put into place, ensure that it is does not sacrifice employee safety to protect the company’s monetary assets or raw materials. InGen owner, John Hammond, led his company and employees to disaster when he refused to purchase the appropriate heavy artillery to deal with any dinosaurs when they escaped their pens. Better, he decided, to protect the million dollar dinosaur than his replaceable employees.

When Jurassic World was opened, InGen learned from some of their mistakes. In order to protect their dinosaurs, their staff, and their visitors, they created over 150 emergency protocols and safeguards” to deal with all of the potential dangers the carnivorous dinosaurs could create.

Over 150 safety protocols. That is the dream of any employee that works in a hazardous field. 150 safety protocols means that the managers spent thousands of hours brainstorming potential problems and developing solutions to deal with those problems.

Step 2: Reevaluate Workplace Safety Protocols Constantly

Safety is not stagnant. Every change in the company, business, or work flow presents new hazards. Jurassic World has a very sophisticated disaster plan, but disaster strikes the path when they engineered the I-Rex without truly understanding the danger the dinosaur posed. Really, it shouldn’t be that surprising when a dinosaur with the size of the T-Rex and the intelligence of a Velociraptor figured out how to climb out of its pen.

Workplace safety is dependent on the constant reevaluation of how new additions to the business and workflow effect the safety plan. As an employee, you should pay attention to if your managers are updating the safety protocols when they should. If they aren’t, bring the problem to management. If they refuse to update the plan, you might want to find a safer place to work.

Step 3: Stress Risk Management

Disaster plans are worthless if you or your co-workers cannot push past the fear and stress that the experience creates. The lawyer from Jurassic Park, for example, decided in his panic that a bathroom made of feeble wood was an ideal place to hide from a T-Rex. Even Dr. Grant, the main character, faired a little better. He kept his cool and discovered that T-Rex can’t see objects that don’t move.

Businesses can deal with equipping co-workers to deal with stress by ensuring that most of the workers hired for high stress positions have a high emotional intelligence (EI). People with a high EI are able to “understand and manage [their] emotions” more effectively. This means that when faced with a T-Rex attack, a fire, a chemical spill, or an injured colleague, they are more likely to keep their cool than their colleagues with a lower EI.

Ohio University Master of Business Administration professor Chris Moberg, who specializes in disaster preparedness, presents another strategy to ensure employees can put aside their panic long enough to keep to the disaster plan. In “Improving Supply Chain Disaster Preparedness” he suggests that management teams should “simulate disaster scenarios.” Repeated exposure to simulated scenario allows all personnel to “develop the critical decision-making and team skills needed to perform effectively during disasters.” At the end of the training period, the individual would be able to keep their cool during the disaster long enough to stick with the plan and get everyone out of the dangerous scenario safely.

Every company faces potential disaster. A Jurassic theme has a higher chance of a high employee mortality and injury disaster. This makes the Jurassic franchise a good case study to determine where problems that put employees into dangerous situations occur, how the disaster plans fail, and how individuals can ensure their own lives are not put into while carrying out their duties. With proper preparation, employees can ensure that they can effectively navigate most of the dangerous situations their work can throw at them. One last word of advice: Remember, if management doesn’t take their disaster planning seriously, run before it’s too late.

Photo Credit: Big Stock Images

Keeping Staff When Your Employee Benefits Don’t Cut It

Attracting good employees as a small- or medium-sized business can be tricky. To get around it you hire inexperienced graduates and train them yourself, only to seem them walk off to a larger company with shinier benefit packages as soon as you give the qualifications they need to get in. It seems to be the way things are: you train fresh talent, and then bigger, wealthier companies with life insurance, an incredible insurance plan, and more paid vacation than you can afford poach them. The costs of training new employees and the constant hemorrhaging of your best employees drives down the quality of your work and prevents you from becoming a major player. So what can you do to hold on to those people so that you can grow your business?

Screen Your Hires

Big businesses can offer better pay and better benefits than your business. They offer stability and great wages to people who are trying to maximize their income, but they also tend to be rigid and very unadaptable. As a smaller business you should focus on hiring people who are unlikely to fit well into a large, slow-moving organization. Ask interviewees about their future plans, and take in those who are well qualified but also planning on pursuing further education, gathering new skills, taking care of children, or possibly even moving.

Be The Most Convenient Option

Offering work to these individuals makes you a convenient option for skilled workers who might otherwise be forced out of the job market. Accommodate them by offering flexible work hours and telecommuting options, in conjunction with a steady paycheck. This creates a favorable work-life balance for employees and makes it easy for them to stay on board while also putting them in a position where they would have to give up a lot of freedom if they wanted to work at a more established business.

Maintain Good Morale With Great Leaders

Running any team of professionals is tricky, and doing it with employees who have flexible schedules, or who work from home, is even more difficult. This puts an incredible strain on your leadership team, who will have to work very hard to keep their respective teams cohesive and on the same page. There are a lot of important characteristics that go into an excellent manager, and it’s especially important to screen potential leaders for their communication skills, their ability to motivate people, and their ability to inspire good cooperation and coordination between employees.

Work To Keep Individual Employees

Every employee has different needs, and when someone is looking for greener pastures it’s important to know why, and what you could do about it. Have an answer ready for what your employees can do to earn raises or promotions, offer training to develop employees professionally, and deal with interpersonal conflicts in the office. Never try to bully an employee into staying, and always be the one to offer solutions to a potentially departing employee rather than getting defensive.

Small- and medium-sized organizations have an uphill battle to retain skilled employees, but it is a battle that can be won. By carefully screening potential new hires, offering flexibility, maintaining good leadership, and determining why individual employees are leaving, you might be able to hold onto employees a little longer. Chances are they might leave down the line, but the company will have at least recovered the money spent to hire and train the individual.

About the Author: Samantha Stauf works in the marketing department of a start-up. She recently became a regular contributor at Ms Career Girl and Social Media Today.

photo credit: Reaching via photopin (license)