It's coming! The next TT&S Annual Conference & Vendor Showcase takes place on February 17-19, 2026, at the Bismarck Hotel & Conference Center.
We've finished the schedule. Although a couple of small details are still in the works, the conference schedule and session information are now available on the TT&S website. Links to the schedule and session descriptions are here:
Registration is open for exhibitors and sponsors as well as attendees. The announcement emails have gone out with a sampling of our packed schedule of sessions, socials, and more. Early bird pricing for attendees cuts off on January 16, 2026. Save $50 by registering early!
Exhibitors can find more details on the Exhibitor and Sponsor information page.
After you've registered, be sure to set up your profile in the Event Access area of the website. If you don't already have an account on the ttsafety.com website, you'll need to set up a login and password and wait for approval before you can do this. Instructions can be downloaded from our website by clicking here.
The day is almost here! For those who have a little spooky in their hearts or just long for the day's sweet treats, Halloween is a day to anticipate.
However, did you know that children are twice as likely to be fatally injured by a car on Halloween than on any other day of the year?
There's no need to stop the fun to prevent these incidents, though. Here are some tips from safekids.org on how to stay both spooky and safe on Halloween:
As we lose more visibility this time of year in the mornings as well, be extra cautious in school zones. In Bismarck just this week we just had a high school student struck by a car at a cross walk during low light conditions at the start of the day. A little vigilance and slowing down can help prevent incidents like these, especially when it's harder to see this time of year.
So don't forget to slow down and have a fun and safe Halloween this year!
Last week TT&S had the fantastic opportunity to coordinate with DCN, NISC, and Light Brigade to educate students throughout the state on what the broadband world is all about.
Approached by technology teacher Lee Gullingsrud, all organizations worked together to provide students with a hands-on demonstration of fiber splicing and OTDR use, a tour of DCN, and an overview of NISC with equipment demonstration.
Thanks to all who came together to make this event possible! TT&S was thrilled to play a part, and we hope to help provide more students with exposure to the broadband industry in the future.
The numbers are in -- OSHA's top ten violations for 2024 are available. Amazingly, these violations rarely change. Fall protection tops the list for the fifteenth year in a row. The rest tend to shift around the top spots.
If you're just starting out taking safety a little more seriously, seeing how many of these hazards might apply to your company is a great start.
If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to TT&S.
This is an oldie but a goodie -- Check out our post about safe driving around school buses. We might have missed the boat a little with back to school, but it's still fresh in our minds.
Last blog post we discussed how a popular mainstay of measuring safety effectiveness isn't all it's cracked up to be. Incident rates, longtime make-or-break measure for how your safety program is doing... don't do what we've long thought they do.
So what now?
Safety has long suffered from a data problem. As more of the world moves into gathering and analyzing data, the traditional way of measuring data in safety means there is less data available.
Think about it -- the safer your company becomes, the less incidents happen (which, obviously, is great!), and then the less information you have about what might go wrong.
As time goes on, you can become blind to risks that might be bubbling under the surface. New risks that you haven't recognized yet, and older risks that may be increasing again.
This is scary but manageable. The solution isn't to throw up our hands and give up: we just have to be smarter about what data we measure.
The more traditional way of data gathering in safety is called "lagging indicators." This is because we measure something after the fact. Common lagging indicators include:
- The big baddie we already talked about: Incident rates
- Worker's compensation number of claims and costs
- Fines from regulatory agencies (OSHA, etc)
- Lost workdays
- Property damage costs
There is nothing wrong with measuring these, but it is important to recognize their limitations. These are all "rear view mirror" perspectives. Once you've addressed the root cause of the kinds of incidents you are seeing, there will be less of this type of data available. Congratulations, you're moving toward safety success! But, unfortunately, your work is not done.
The next phase is managing those risks that you don't necessarily see. You need a "forward view." This can be provided by intelligently measuring what are called "leading indicators." Most of these relate to measuring proactive actions taken toward identifying risks and preventing incidents. While you will never know for sure that you've prevented a specific incident, this data will show how proactive your company is being in reducing your risk.
Some examples of leading indicators include:
- Rate of action items identified during incident investigations closed vs. open
- Rate of safety inspections completed on time
- Rate of employee attendance at safety trainings
- Number of toolbox talks completed
- Number of job safety analyses (JSA's) completed
- Number of risk assessments completed
- Number of near misses reported (while near misses themselves are lagging indicators, the fact that employees report them are leading indicators!)
- Rate of equipment inspections completed as required
Measuring this data opens up several important possibilities. First, it gives you an opportunity to assign SMART annual safety goals to employees, if your employees already have annual performance management goals. These goals are in their control, as they are not tied to incident rates. Did they attend all assigned safety meetings? Did they complete their equipment inspections in the correct timeframe? This gives employees ownership of the safety program as well.
Second, this data is invaluable to help with that "forward view." While we cannot ever know the future, these measurements help defray those unknown risks by demonstrating that your company is proactive.
Third, this is a great source of data if you ever do come under investigation by a regulatory agency. You can absolutely show all the proactive actions taken by your company in an attempt to make your company safer.
You don't need to start out measuring each leading indicator above -- why not pick a couple for this next year and start there? The constellation of leading indicators you choose must make sense to you as a company.
If you have any questions at all, reach out to TT&S for consultation on what type of indicators might make the most sense for your company to measure.
Have you ever considered ways to measure your safety program for effectiveness?
Many companies decide to use their incident rate as a safety measuring stick. After all, it's a metric commonly used in contractor vetting processes, and it's reported in the aggregate by industry under the Bureau of Labor Services (BLS). Must be a good thing right?
Well... this is one of those cases where the 'official' metric is not the best fit, especially for smaller companies. Turns out, your incident rate is statistically invalid unless you happen to be calculating with millions of work hours. Check out this quote from the April 2021 Professional Safety Journal:
"Unless hundreds of millions of work hours are amassed, the confidence bands are so wide that TRIR [incident rate] cannot be accurately reported to even one decimal point. The implication is that the TRIR for almost all companies is virtually meaningless because they do not accumulate enough work hours." (https://www.eei.org/-/media/Project/EEI/Documents/Issues-and-Policy/Power-to-Prevent-SIF/PSJ---TRIR-Paper.pdf)
This whole article is pretty down about incident rates in general. First, they do not predict or show any correlation with fatalities, which means that companies with higher incident rates are no more likely to have a fatality than a company with a lower incident rate. This is a topic of active study in the safety world, as it's becoming more apparent that the strategies to prevent lower-impact incidents are not always the same ones that are helpful in preventing higher-impact incidents, such as fatalities.
Further, incident rates are sometimes embedded into performance management systems for employees. For many companies, it is a requirement that one annual goal for each employee be safety-related. This is a good step in general, but incident rates have a way of sneaking into these goals. For frontline employees, this can mean "no incidents or near misses," which discourages honest reporting, and for managers the goal is often "an improved incident rate." However, as the article discusses, the improved incident rate is subject to random variation much of the time.
The article also says that incident rates are not helpful in gauging program effectiveness over the short-term. It might be easy to infer that because your incident rate went down over a couple years, you must be doing something right. Incident rates are popular measures for current safety initiatives for companies for this reason. However, as the article discusses, incident rates are not useful for evaluation unless there's 100 months of data -- that's over eight years. There's no room for gauging shorter-term initiatives if that's the case.
Well... what now?
Over the next couple of weeks we'll be discussing better strategies to measure your safety program. If you want to get a leg up, you can go ahead and search up "leading and lagging indicators" -- but it's a wild world out there, with lots of information. We're hoping we can break it down into manageable pieces for our member companies in the next few posts.
For employers with CDL drivers, things just got shaken up a little with changes to medical card filing requirements. In short, med cards have gone fully online, and while paper copies may be used by drivers as a backup documentation, everything will now be confirmed online. Let's break down the new process in terms of how it affects both employers and drivers.
Employers
So far employers have kept a current copy of drivers' med cards in their driver files. With this new change, this is no longer a requirement, but it also makes it so employers need to keep an extra close eye on annual driver motor vehicle records (MVR's), which will list the CDL expiration date on the document. While this is nothing new and has always been a requirement, make absolutely sure to request those records annually as this will now be the only way to verify drivers' CDL expiration dates.
With this change employers are also released from checking that the medical examiner is on the national registry for CDL medical examiners.
Drivers
Your med card doctor is no longer required to give you a paper copy of your medical card record, as they submit this information directly to the state. However, it's recommended that drivers still ask for this paper copy for their own records and to have a record of their expiration date.
While this is a pretty small change in the grand scheme of things, it's still one of those things to keep on top of. If you have any other questions about DOT compliance, feel free to reach out to TT&S for help.
It's construction season, and tempers can flare high when it takes longer to get where you need to go. We've reinforced that it's important to respect work zone employees (always give the green and orange some space!), slow down when there's a lot of work going on around you, and to refrain from distractions inside your vehicle.
Here's a phrase that might not be as familiar, even though every driver has almost certainly been affected by it: Don't Block the Box.
This is talking about when you have a green light but traffic is moving slower than molasses. It's our instinct to keep close behind the car in front of you, but in an intersection that could spell trouble if the lights start to change. If you don't have clearance to make it through an intersection, remember:
Don't block the box. Stay behind the intersection until you have clearance to make it through.
Here's a video that goes over this in more detail.
This is something to always keep in mind, but it can become more common when construction limits traffic down to one lane. Ignoring this rule impedes traffic moving the other way, and could spell real trouble if emergency vehicles need to make it through.
We're so excited to have spent another year partnering with our member companies to keep your employees safe and provide them with tra...
