All posts by Jordan Bell

As a safety professional, I have a crucial question for you: What is your biggest safety sin or workplace hazard? Before I reveal mine, let me provide some context. Winter Walking is the largest manufacturer of ice cleats in North America. We take immense pride in helping hundreds of companies and thousands of employees reduce the risk of slip and fall injuries while on the job. But imagine the embarrassment and devastation if I were to personally experience a slip and fall injury on ice or snow. That would undoubtedly be my biggest work-related sin.

I have young kids at home. Every night, they eat dinner. Sometimes they eat their dinner early and sometimes it’s late. But every night they eat. So what would happen if I waited until they were starving to feed them. And at that point I said, “Okay, just spot me a few hours. I have to go to the market, buy some ingredients, come home, look up a recipe and then cook you dinner. Sound good, kids?” Just the thought of the ensuing tantrums is enough to ensure that this scenario never unfolds in my home.

If you’re bored one day, type “ice cleats” into your preferred search engine. How many results do you get? Hundreds of thousands. So why does this matter? Well, it means ice cleats are popular. Would they be as prevalent today if they didn’t work? Interesting question. Let’s look into this: If you analyze the 800,000 results you’ll find from your Google search, you will quickly uncover two major obstacles that make investing in ice cleats a difficult decision for any safety professional:

If a fireman asks you to check your smoke detectors, would you consider responding with: “We haven’t had any fires this year, so I’ll test them the next time we do.” Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? What if I told you that I hear tales of similar scenarios when I call a new contact and ask if they’ve tested their ice cleats yet? What many people don’t realize is that you don’t actually need ice and snow on the ground in order to conduct an ice cleat test. All ice cleats are built to increase traction on ice and snow – that part is easy. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t exist.

I once read an article about a boy who referred to himself as an expert juggler. And that got me thinking: What does one have to do exactly to be considered an expert at juggling? Soon after, I was reminded of the “10,000-hour theory,” created by K. Anders Ericsson – and made popular by Malcolm Gladwell and Geoffrey Colvin. If you're not familiar with this theory, it states that after 10,000 hours of practice at anything, you will have reached a level of expertise.

If you’ve tried to introduce a new piece of PPE to your workforce, you know how hard it is for humans to change their ways. I talk to a lot of safety managers to discuss ice cleats and traction aids for shoes and they all tell me some version of: “I know my guys. They’ll never bother to put them on.” But if you’re a safety professional who knows that wearing ice cleats will reduce the number of winter slip and fall injuries (and, in the process, increasing your company’s workers comp claims), then you owe it to your company, your work staff and yourself to find a way to introduce an ice tracti[…]