Active shooter incidents are scary. These stories flood the news and make us worry about the safety of our children. Yet despite its overwhelming presence in the media, active shooter incidents are not the highest cause of death in schools.

They are extremely serious matters. Schools should take steps to prevent active shooters and train staff on how to respond should an incident occur. But it is critical not to overlook the often quieter, more frequent causes of school fatalities such as school transportation, homicides, and suicides.

Fall protection for the construction industry has topped the OSHA list of most frequently cited standards year after year. In fact, falls are the leading cause of death in the construction industry with 294 of the 796 fatalities in 2013 being attributed to falls. Yet these fatalities can be prevented. What can you do to protect your employees from fall hazards?

A few weeks back I was getting my hair done. Multi-tasking like it’s a fashion statement, I was working and talking on the phone almost the entire time. Without going on a tangent about how annoying this must have been for my stylist, I had a great conversation with John Booth at Quintain.

We talked about end-of-year reporting and analytics, logo gifts, shopping portals, inbound tactics, Hubspot strategies, email funnel messages, and growth projections for an expanding office location. When I got off the phone, a few people around me had very confused looks on their faces.

Where is today’s property & casualty market and where is it headed in 2015? According to the Insurance Service Office’s (ISO) industry 6-month 2014 results:

• Insurer net written premium growth slowed to 4% from 4.3% in the first-half of 2013.
• Commercial lines insurers’ combined ratio rose 1.8 percentage points in the first-half of 2014 to 95.4%.
• Policyholder surplus rose 9.5% in first-half 2014 keeping it at record levels.

What does this mean in 2015 and what can insurance consumers expect from the marketplace?

The threat of violence is a reality in the modern workplace. Every organization is vulnerable to it. From 2000 to 2010, there were an average of 588 work-related homicides each year and 18,000 assaults per week. That is over 936,000 workplace assaults annually. Wow.

The demand for construction is increasing across the nation. This is great news for an industry that was hit hard by the recession. But is there enough labor to meet the needs?

Pinterest is typically seen as a site for promoting cooking and crafts to women, so it may not shout “business” to you. But many businesses have found Pinterest to be a place to connect with consumers and generate traffic to their website. In fact, Pinterest drives 7.1% of web traffic that sites receive, making it second only to Facebook at 21.25%, as reported by Business Insider.

Ill-fitting personal protecetive equipment (PPE) endangers your workers. Are you helping your employees find the right fit?

If PPE does not fit properly, it does not function as it should. It can therefore expose workers to health and safety risks. It can also negatively impact a worker’s ability to efficiently perform their job. If a worker’s gloves are too big they may put them at risk to getting a glove stuck in machinery or perhaps the loss of dexterity will prevent them from doing their job as well. Likewise, if their hard hat is constantly falling off as they look up, that not only endangers the worker’s head but slows them down as they keep putting the hat back on or use one hand to hold it. 

Acts of violence, acts of terror, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, fires. Crisis happens. And these emergencies ignite anxiety. Preparing plans for crisis communication and how to reunite families before an incident helps you from further complicating the chaos.

Though this discussion focuses on schools, these strategies can also be applied to incidents in the workplace.

Crushed hands and arms, severed fingers, amputations, burns, blindness. Machinery-related injuries are numerous, and their impact on a worker’s life can be catastrophic. Most often these injuries are preventable with the use of safeguards. OSHA shares a good rule to remember: “Any machine part, function, or process which may cause injury must be safeguarded.” What are the methods for properly safeguarding machinery?