RETHINKING HAND SAFETY

A glove salesman offers advice for improving worker safety.

In this debut business book, Geng draws on his experience selling work gloves in a variety of industries to advocate for making employee safety a top priority. The volume reviews the reasons companies should take hand safety seriously. Geng then explains that safety is a matter of both having the right equipment and cultivating a strong corporate culture. The author guides readers through how to develop such a culture and evaluate progress toward keeping workers free from injuries on the job. He makes it clear that establishing a culture of safety requires a clear understanding of how employees do their jobs and the obstacles that make it difficult to practice safe habits, offering numerous suggestions for making concrete and actionable changes in the workplace. Geng is clearly knowledgeable about the intricacies of protective gloves, and readers without experience in the field will learn plenty about the subject. But the book’s real strength lies not in its narrow applicability to high-risk industries but in its approach to employer and worker psychology that has broad applicability in organizations of all kinds. Managers who will never encounter a conveyor belt or a vat of molten metal will find just as much useful information in the volume as those who work in those industries. The author explains how to understand the underlying causes of major problems—for instance, workers may fail to wear necessary protective equipment not because of laziness or ignorance but because they have been given gloves that provide padding while hampering movement. He shows how readers can effectively evaluate and respond to both the immediate and more fundamental causes of workplace problems. The book discusses the roles of empathy and effective communication in the workplace, particularly at the management level, and helps readers to understand and solve the problems caused when departments fail to communicate and have differing financial goals. While the volume does a good job of addressing hand safety specifically, its real value is much broader, as it is a comprehensive guide to developing safe and functional workplaces of all kinds.

A thorough and effective guide to establishing safe work environments.