Every year the major safety magazines put out so many great articles that it’s hard to stay on top of it all. Publications like Safety Decision, OH&S, Professional Safety and Safety+Health have all featured articles from our expert safety writers.

Here are four of our favorite safety articles from 2016.

Locking Out Decision Fatigue

Lockout/tagout is one of the most pressing issues in many workplaces. The potential consequences for failing to comply with LOTO procedures can be devastating. While the outcomes of LOTO noncompliance are generally understood, the reasons why people fail to follow lockout procedures are less well known.

In this article, Ray Prest notes a study that is particularly relevant to how workers make decisions on whether to follow the lockout/tagout process:

In experiment after experiment, they found that the ability to think through a problem can be severely compromised by both an individual’s state of mind and the number of decisions he or she has had to make earlier in the day.

If you’re struggling with LOTO at your organization, you should reach for your highlighter, because this is a crucial and woefully overlooked contributor to workplace deaths: Decision fatigue plays an enormous role in a worker’s ability to carry out the proper LOTO process.

Ray goes on to discuss in detail the debilitating effects of fatigue on decision-making and notes how fatigue can compromise not only LOTO but almost every single safety procedure.

Safety From the Shadows: The Problem of Informal Social Power in Industrial Safety

Safety culture and engagement are one of the most pressing safety concerns for many EHS managers. The article “Safety From the Shadows” takes a close look at what informal social networks in the workplace. In the absence of a strong safety culture, these networks can quietly influence the safety culture at work and often do so in negative ways. The end result is employees who are disengaged from safety, poor safety attitudes, and higher injuries rates.

The article outlines how and why this happens, and then proposes a few steps that safety managers can take to improve safety culture. It’s a must-read for health and safety professionals who struggle to engage employees or feel like their company’s culture is beyond their influence.

The Habit of Safety

Tim Page-Bottorff takes a deep look at how to build and maintain safety habits in this article from May 2016. Safety habits play an important role in determining people’s overall chances of getting hurt. Because the power of safety habits can be so enormous, organizations that are serious about protecting employees should invest in training programs that can help establish stronger habits.

To that end, Tim summarizes the latest research on habit formation. He also provides a few useful tips for helping employees build safe habits. Chief among them is positive reinforcement (or at least avoiding negative reinforcement), as it will encourage employees to stick with new behaviors for long enough for them to transform into habits.

Knowledge Retention: Workplace Solutions

All too often it feels like the knowledge that workers acquire in safety training evaporates when they walk out of the classroom. The reason, as Dennis Carnrike points out, is that safety trainers aren’t sufficiently taking the four steps required to sustain safety learning.

Practice, repetition, motivation, and support are essential elements of knowledge retention. This article provides insight into how safety trainers can support employees’ ability to learn and remember essential safety skills by including each of these four elements.

Bonus “article”: Re-thinking Back Injuries

It’s not technically an article but the release of SafeStart’s guide on back pain and preventing back injuries at work warrants a mention on any best-of-2016 list.

The guide breaks down the anatomy of a workplace back injury and provides a few innovative techniques that health and safety folks can use to prevent back-related incidents among employees.

If the run-of-the-mill advice of teaching proper lifting techniques hasn’t eliminated back injuries at your company then this guide is a must-read.