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Safety Culture

By Emily Wood Many high-risk industries have carefully studied thousands of near miss, accident, and incident reports, finding most were very similar. Investigations found the same causes of error influenced people to make mistakes, and if they changed the date, location and employee names, the same accidents and incidents were seen again and again. This blog speaks to five of the most common preconditions for human error (in no particular order) and identifies some countermeasures various industries have identified to combat such error. The American Institute of Stress found 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress and US businesses lose $300

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Leaders demonstrate true safety ownership by spending time in the field asking safety questions with employees. This practice should be formalized across leadership groups, from supervisors to the C-Suite. These “listening tours” involve two-way dialogue to better understand employees’ safety suggestions, concerns, and opinions. The purpose is to bolster relationships and actively listen. It is not an enforcement activity or traditional safety audit.  When done effectively, these tours create more frequent and higher quality leader-field engagement. This leads to better relationships with workers, improved overall communication, better decision making with safety, higher morale, and additional discretionary effort with less division between the office

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By Eduardo Lan In my work as a safety culture and leadership consultant with Propulo Consulting, I often hear clients complain about how busy people are with meetings and paperwork and how little time they have for other things, such as getting out in the field. In this complex and fast-paced world of ours, it is normal to feel like this. At times, it seems like the number of emails, meetings, deadlines, and projects people are responsible for is never-ending. Dealing with it is a fact of life. However, there are things we can do to prioritize and act on what

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Musicians like The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and even the Beatles put out greatest hits albums. This 100th blog represents a compilation of key themes from the first 99 blogs I’ve written with Propulo. Hopefully a few of these summaries will spark ideas to help you improve your safety culture and prevent serious incidents and fatalities. Here are a few snippets from the vault:  RIP Paul O’Neill: Executive Safety Commitment Recently, the world lost a great safety champion in former Treasury Secretary and Alcoa Chairman Paul O’Neill. O’Neill was a fierce advocate of employee safety and took big

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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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