Safety Thought of the Week

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…...

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...