Page 32 - GBC Summer ENG flipbook 2024

James Cronk
James is Founder of the consulting company, Cronk Group. He and his partner, Scott Masse, operate Golf Industry Guru, an online training platform for owners, managers and front-line employees and The Toolbox, a web-based safety and OHS platform. To learn more visit www.cronkgroup.com and www.golfindustryguru.com and www.thetoolbox.tech.
If you work in this business long enough, then you know that at some point you are going to deal with an ‘incident’. This might be anything from a worker injuring themselves, to a customer tripping on a loose patio tile, to a flood in the clubhouse caused by frozen pipes. If you are lucky, no one is seriously injured, and your insurance rates do not skyrocket.
Golf
At last year’s conference in Montreal, I presented a session on workplace safety, and in doing my research, learned of many terrible, but possibly preventable incidents that have happened on golf courses in Canada.
In my thirty years in the golf and hospitality business, I have never come across a manager that chose not to care about safety. No one wants to intentionally put people at risk. That said, I recently heard a bang-on phrase about the challenges we face in creating a safe work environment, which is that safety is “strategically critical but not operationally convenient”. Meaning that sometimes the mandatory scheduled safety committee meeting gets delayed because we have a full tee sheet and are short-staffed!
Unfortunately, if you do have an incident, the inspector or lawyers that show up will not care how busy your tee sheet is, and if you
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“Strategically critical but not operationally convenient.”
are found responsible, you and/or the club can face significant penalties and fines. For example, failing to ensure that workplace equipment is properly maintained can result in a fine of $25,000 up to $100,000 and up to twelve months in jail, while failing to report a workplace incident can cost $500,000 up to $1,500,000 and up to twelve months in jail.
Of course, it is impossible to protect ourselves from every possible scenario. However, we can do everything within our control to limit our liability, reduce our risks, and implement processes and procedures to keep our staff, our customers, and our facilities as safe as possible.