Safety Management System

A safety partnership is defined as: Leadership, managers, and front-line associates jointly focus on safety and proactively work together in a business entity to minimize the possibility of harm and maximize safety performance. (Cooper, 2016) Creating a genuine safety partnership means management and the workforce jointly working towards achieving common and understood safety goals, with…...

“Most adverse events have their origin in two places: the systems we design around the humans and the choices of humans within those systems The resulting harm and the human errors (slips, lapses, and mistakes) that may have caused it are really two forms of outcome—outcomes to be monitored, studied, and perhaps grieved. Systems and…...

Yesterday, I went to my local mechanic to have my oil changed and my tires rotated.  It took me 20 years to find this shop, and they hit a home run every time.  But yesterday was quite entertaining, and I could not help but think, “We are not alone” after what I witnessed.  A gentleman…...

This article applies to BOTH facilities practicing process safety and basic OSH.  Many of the facilities will declare they have and utilize a Safety Management System (SMS) in their efforts to manage hazards and risks those hazards pose to workers, the environment, and the business.  However, I have developed five (5) simple tests to determine…...

In the social media “safety sphere,” it is literally impossible to spend five minutes and not be bombarded by all the new approaches to “safety.” In many of these new approaches, they will almost unilaterally denounce the traditional approach to safety management and provide case studies to prove their point.  Maybe I am just an…...

The business benefits to be obtained from employee engagement are huge. Studies have shown that (a) where employee engagement was low, companies had 62% more safety incidents (Harter, Schmidt, Killham, & Asplund, 2006); and (b) where employee engagement was high, engaged employees were five times less likely to experience a safety incident, and seven times…...

A former client had an amputation accident, and an OSHA inspection followed, with several citations following that.  We were hired to help the company digest all that OSHA found wrong, and there was plenty that OSHA found, but there was even more that OSHA did not see or address with its inspection or citations. The…...

I have grown up in safety and emergency response and found that the tools used in both aspects can cross over to the other.  For example, I use the National Incident Management System (NIMS) Incident Command on accident investigations to bring structure to the team.  In that IC we have a “span of control” of…...

I am a proponent of accountability in safety; however, I also believe that accountability is necessary at all levels of the organization.  We tend to be very quick in identifying the ACTIVE failures by those who made the error, mistake, or violation, and a negative consequence was the result (vs. all those times, the outcome…...