I have been preaching one simple approach to safety management my entire career after having learned it from the master himself… Claude Bloom. BALANCE is the KEY. There is no one magical approach to managing safety in the workplace. These days the big catchphrases are HOP and Psychological Safety. I am a believer in both approaches, but with a BALANCE! Maybe I’m just “old school,” but I still believe that we can’t just encourage workers to be safe. We, management, must first provide for a safe working environment AND THEN encourage workers to make good decisions in that safe working environment. This approach is based on the HOP approach… create paths of safety success for the workers rather than just hoping they avoid failure. But while we are creating this safe workplace, we also have to work on the culture so that once we have the physical risks under some control, the workers will begin to think more about their decisions and begin to VALUE their safety.
