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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Football coaches like the Patriots’ Bill Belichick make more than $10M per year trying to guide their teams to an NFL championship. Ridiculous sums of money? Maybe. But there are lessons learned from elite coaches that can be applied to safety culture improvement.   Coaches spend countless hours preparing their weekly game plans. This includes reviewing past game tape to identify strengths and shore up weaknesses and properly preparing for next week’s opponent. It’s an ongoing process of performance review, planning, execution, and re-evaluation.  Safety culture assessments and strategic planning are similar processes (minus the game tape and weekly schedules).

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By Eduardo Lan Many organizations seek world-class safety performance, which is the result of robust safety systems, effective safety leadership, and a safety culture that elevates individual safety awareness, accountability, and ownership. An important part of this, particularly as it pertains to safety leadership, has to do with both psychological safety and straight talk. Defined by Simon Sinek, “as an environment created by leaders in which people feel safe enough to speak up without any fear of humiliation or retribution (Sinek, 2021),” psychological safety is brought about through caring leadership. Psychological Safety Unleashes Discretionary Effort When we feel safe with others, particularly our leaders, we let our guard

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By Eric Michrowski The true implication for an organization that isn’t seeking every opportunity to learn is to accept to operate with a certain level of ignorance. Such comfort with organizational ignorance is one of the biggest barriers to success for businesses and is particularly dangerous when it comes to organizational safety. Companies need to, without compromise, learn from small events, near misses and injuries in order to systematically remove potential risks and reduce SIF potential. This is why leading organizations work to create an environment where workers are comfortable reporting close calls and incidents.  By focusing on using near misses and even

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By Eduardo Lan Safety moments are quite common in organizations with an established safety program. These begin some meetings with the intent of focusing on safety, elevating its importance and ownership. Usually, a recent safety incident is reviewed, statistics are shown, or a general message around safety is presented. Unfortunately, these safety moments don´t always generate the level of engagement required to make them meaningful, wasting a precious chance to drive the desired safety culture and sometimes even diminishing its importance in the minds of those attending. Call to Action: To elevate the importance and ownership of safety, we must involve people in a

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By Eric Michrowski As the new year rolls around, top safety leaders look for ideas to level up their safety strategy to ensure that all their team members come home safely to their loved ones. I recently sat down with Eduardo Lan, Dr. Josh Williams and Martin Royal on the Safety Guru Podcast to explore with them the top four safety megatrends that, in our collective opinion, deserve our attention in 2022.  #1 Returning to the Workplace while Factoring Mental Health, Stress, and Fatigue into your Safety Strategy The pandemic has caused immense pressure on mental health and sleeping patterns as 2 in 3

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Many years ago, we visited an Ohio steel mill to conduct safety culture training for hourly employees. To our surprise, people were excited to see us and anxious to get started on the training. This is not always the case with an 8-hour safety training class. I asked one employee why people seemed so enthusiastic and he replied, “30 minutes with Bob!” A Case Study in Smart Leadership: “30 minutes with Bob!” “30 minutes with Bob” was a program implemented by their new plant manager (named Bob). He replaced the outgoing plant manager who was recently fired. His predecessor was

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