Tell employees how close they are to killing someone
In 1931, a man named Herbert William Heinrich noticed something odd about accidents.
Heinrich’s Law
An inspector for Travelers Insurance Company, Heinrich spent his days looking at clients’ accident rates and found a ratio. For every 300 injury-free accidents, there were:
- 29 minor-injury accidents
- 1 major injury accident
This ratio, now known as Heinrich’s Law, is now a key model for safety professionals.
Communicate ‘the next big one.’
Safety communicators can also tap this law by communicating how close we are to a major accident.
“The ratio of accidents for railroads in the U.K., is 12 to 1.5 to 1,” writes TJ Larkin, principle of Larkin Communication Consulting. “So if the UK railroads experience six near misses in six months, safety communicators can say:
“We are very near a major accident.
In the next 6 months,
we will probably kill somebody.”
Small accidents have similar causes to big ones. So, Heinrich learned, if you can reduce smaller accidents, you’ll can help eliminate the big ones.
Making sure your employees know “where we are” in the escalation to a big accident can help.
Get to the point faster
Because web visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold
Consider the numbers:
- Web visitors spend 80% of the time above the fold, or on the first screen of a webpage, and just 20% below the fold.
- Material near the top of a webpage gets 17x the attention of that near the bottom.
- The average difference in how users treat information above vs. below the fold is 84%.
But where’s the fold? Content that shows up above the fold on a 30-inch monitor can take as many as five screens on a smartphone.
Reach readers where their eyes are.
So how can you reach your readers where their eyes are?
At Writing for the Web and Mobile — our two-day hands-on web-writing master class on June 12-13 in Chicago — you’ll learn how to:
- Pass the 1-2-3-4 test to put your message where web visitors' eyes are. Tip: Try this simple test on your smartphone for best results.
- Make it a mullet — and 4 more steps for writing effective web heads. (No. 5 is the most important thing you can do to improve the ROI of your site.)
- Optimize webpages for Google and humans with our three-part test. Note: If you're still using SEO tricks you learned in the 'oughts, Google may be penalizing your pages.
- Don't drop the deck. Learn to make the most of the best-read element on your webpage.
- Steal headline-writing tips from the BBC — the source of the best news heads on the web, according to Nielsen.
Learn more about our
Chicago master class.
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Sources: TJ Larkin & Sandar Larkin, “Employees Should Know How Close They are to Killing Someone,” Larkin Page No. 56, February 2007
H.W. Heinrich, Industrial Accident Prevention — A Scientific Approach, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1959
Linda Wright and Tjerk van der Schaaf, “Accident Versus Near-Miss Causation: A Critical Review of the Literature, An Empirical Test in the UK Railway Domain, and Their Implications for Other Sectors,” Journal of Hazardous Materials, July 26, 2004, pp. 105-110
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