Why Relying on PPE as Primary Protection is Hurting your Safety Performance

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Safety First Journal.

Many managers and business owners treat Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as the worker’s first line of defense. It seems reasonable after all, PPE is designed to protect workers against hazards. But relying on PPE as primary protection is actually counterproductive to keeping people safe and could be hurting your company’s safety performance.

The Mistake

Imagine a scenario where an industrial worker gets ready for the day by putting on his hard hat, safety glasses, work boots, gloves and hi-vis vest and then walks straight into a work area that is poorly lit, disorganized, full of tripping hazards and forklift traffic. Is that worker safe because they put on their safety glasses? Of course not.

Yet this is the mistake that businesses across the country make on a daily basis. They provide and mandate PPE, as they s…