Safety Thought of the Week

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…...

The dismissal of people and their behavior concerning risk as idiotic really doesn’t help much… Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View Membership LevelsAlready a member? Log in here...

I am never disappointed in social media’s ability to tell me daily just how bad traditional safety practices are. I am also wondering if there is an aspect of business management that gets beat up and denounced more than safety. It seems we are never without so many new options/directions in safety, and unfortunately, many…...

When a person responds as if the worker has become stupid, that response is more about the organization than the worker in question We must battle the need to believe that when a worker has some type of bad outcome, that adverse outcome happened because the worker became momentarily incompetent. Our thinking is driven by…...

When a person responds as if the worker has become stupid, that response is more about the organization than the worker in question We must battle the need to believe that when a worker has some type of a bad outcome, that adverse outcome happened because the worker became momentarily incompetent. Our thinking is driven…...

To improve safety performance, coherent action is required in three (3) areas: 1) technical aspects, 2) safety management, and 3) human and organizational factors These different “pillars” all influence the safety culture. It should be emphasized that, in any given company, safety priorities have undergone several phases of chronological development, with each new area of…...

Safe and reliable performance is a process to be guided, not an outcome to be managed. Safety is wisdom. We create safety, or more importantly, we co-create safety in the RELATIONSHIP between workers, planners, managers, and the tasks being accomplished in real-time. None of those components mentioned above involves the scoring and tracking of work…...

“People are actually very reliable, but there are many opportunities for error in the course of a day’s work, and when handling hazardous materials, we can tolerate only very low error rates (and equipment failure rates), lower than it may be possible to achieve. We may be able to keep up a tip-top performance for…...

“People are actually very reliable, but there are many opportunities for error in the course of a day’s work, and when handling hazardous materials, we can tolerate only very low error rates (and equipment failure rates), lower than it may be possible to achieve…. Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View...

The value of a Root Cause Analysis and Corrective Action Plan process to a business If the critique process is effective and an organization successfully determines why the event occurred, the appropriate corrective action can be achieved. The avoided cost associated with recurrence and improvement in performance is the organization’s dividend…. Membership Required You must...

Most organizations espouse a variety of values, some of which are intrinsically contradictory, so new employees must figure out for themselves what is really rewarded – customer satisfaction, productivity, safety, minimizing costs, or maximizing returns to the investors. Only by observing actual promotions and performance reviews can newcomers figure out what the underlying assumptions are…...