It’s 11 AM on a Saturday, and the supermarket is packed.
A lemon falls down, the cashier reaches down to get it, and slips on a wet tile. Now they have a twisted ankle, and someone might be responsible for that. Who, though? Nobody told her to move faster, nobody mopped the floor and left it wet just now, it’s just bad luck that the lemon fell down, and that there was some random patch of water down there, too.
The problem is that, if you say this is bad luck or if you say that something went wrong, you can be right both times.
So, how do you tell the difference?
When Something Really Is Nothing More Than Bad Luck
When it comes to the workplace, ‘bad luck’ is a real thing.
That term has actual meaning, believe it or not. When something happens because of bad luck, it means that nobody could have predicted or prevented it. There’s no way to get trained for it, and there’s no procedure on how to handle it.
It simply… Happened.
Random things DO happen, but the issue is that things that are truly random are rare.
One person reaching for the box at the exact same moment as their colleague sneezes and bumps their elbow because it is random. But if a machine has been making weird noises for weeks and now it has electrocuted someone, that’s an incident, and someone will be blamed for it.
In the real world, however, managers are quick to call something bad luck because it’s easier than dealing with the aftermath of an actual incident.
You say it’s random and move on. No questions, no paperwork. And, most importantly, no consequences for the company or for the management. But if you were to investigate what’s called ‘bad luck,’ you’d need hours to go through the documents, and you might also find out that there are some other problems there, too.
Too much mess.
How Decisions People Make Every Day Cause Problems in the Long Run
So, how do incidents even happen? There’s training, there are rules, people have common sense, so why do companies end up tangled in lawsuits and employees actually get injured?
In theory, training prepares you for whatever can happen.
In reality, training can often get cut short, so a new hire doesn’t learn everything they need to. Someone notices there’s a small leak near the sink and they report it, but it’s nothing dramatic, so nobody bothers to fix it. Until the day finally comes when all the little things create the perfect storm, and someone ends up in the E.R.
If that happens to you, what you do next depends on the jurisdiction you’re in.
If you’re in Illinois and hire an Illinois workplace injury attorney, you can’t sue your company, but you can still get benefits. Illinois uses the no-fault workers’ comp system, which is why.
But if you happen to live in, say, Texas, your employer isn’t obligated to compensate you, so you can sue them.
How to Be Sure It Was More Than Bad Luck
Some things are glaringly obvious; others aren’t.
Here’s how you can differentiate bad luck from an incident.
The Same Thing Keeps Happening Over and Over
You really don’t need to think about this one too much. If the same accident happens more than once or twice, that can’t be bad luck.
Let’s say that someone bumps their head on a low beam, then someone else does the same thing a week later. That’s no coincidence; it’s obvious that the beam has to be padded and marked, otherwise people will keep bumping into it.
Corners Are Cut to Keep Up
Shortcuts are never a good idea, no matter how much you’re strapped for time.
If someone is always forced to rush through what they’re doing and take shortcuts, it means that the job is too much for one person to handle. And if that one person has an accident because of it, how can that be bad luck? It was bound to happen.
Training’s There, But It Doesn’t Stick
A lot of safety training is superficial and done as a one-time thing to avoid fines. Nobody checks back, and after a while, most people start to ignore the training altogether because it’s easier like that.
And then someone has an accident, and everyone wonders how it happened. In all honesty, they should be surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner.
Conclusion
Some accidents are bad luck, and others are because of bad management, right?
Truthfully, no.
It’s not as simple as that. Most incidents are a little bit of both. The point is not to rush and label everything as bad luck because that’s the easy way out. That’s what weak people do. Listen and pay attention, especially when you see the same ‘bad luck’ happen more than once, because, at that point, it’s not bad luck anymore.
It’s a pattern, and someone needs to deal with it.
