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Safety Culture

By Eduardo Lan When it comes to assessing an organization’s safety culture, we often look at the organization’s leaders, the behaviors of workers and employees, and the rules, policies and procedures. These are all important pieces of the puzzle, but they do not paint a full picture. According to Michael D. Watkins (2013), “While there is universal agreement that (1) it [organizational culture] exists, and (2) that it plays a crucial role in shaping behavior in organizations, there is little consensus on what organizational culture actually is, never mind how it influences behavior and whether it is something leaders can change.” When working

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D Improving safety culture should be an ongoing mission for leaders. In the last blog, best practices from the field were shared regarding minor injury reporting, employee input with rules, active caring messaging, proper incentives use, wellness, and mentoring. In this blog, “not so best” practices will be presented. These are pitfalls to avoid based on real-world examples, including misapplied blanket policies, complacency issues, setting poor safety examples, outcome-based incentives, and sapping personal control. Misapplied Blanket Policies Some corporate safety policies are critical to prevent SIFs. Others may seem frivolous and non-applicable. For example, one auto manufacturing facility over-reacted to

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Improving safety culture should be an ongoing quest. Leaders need to seek continuous safety improvement as an internal obligation. Previous blogs have addressed key components of safety culture to prevent SIFs. This blog will detail best practices from real-world examples that leaders may consider using in their own operations. Safety Culture Best Practices: Employee Input with Rules Managers and supervisors at one Pennsylvania steel mill were concerned about compliance problems with lock-out/tag-out (LOTO) procedures. Rather than immediately threatening employees to comply, managers went around and spoke with hourly employees running the equipment. They found out the LOTO procedures were overly

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. The Challenge Although workplace incident rates have steadily declined by 28% over the last decade, rates for serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) have remained virtually unchanged.1 Further, organizations often focus on “recordables” without adequately addressing, prioritizing, and communicating about incidents (and close calls) with SIF potential. As an example, someone spraining an ankle falling 20 feet from a telephone line is quite different than the same person doing so stepping out of a truck. Leaders need to reorient their thinking regarding SIFs. Recordables and first-aids should continue to be monitored, addressed, and discussed. However, overemphasizing these metrics does a

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By Eric Michrowski and Dr. Josh Williams, Propulo Consulting Too Many People Are Dying on the Job: Will a Focus on ESG Help Reverse this Trend? Larry Fink’s annual letter to CEOs has been observed and assessed in Boardrooms across America for many years. As BlackRock’s CEO, he steers an $8tn-plus financial behemoth, a major shareholder in most big companies around the world, that has the capacity to move markets and influence Corporate strategy. This year, Larry’s letter points a very clear focus on Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) themes, steering BlackRock into greener waters. While his poignant letter primarily focuses on

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. We are continually asked by leaders some variant of the question below: “We provide all the PPE and safety policies for our employees and they still get hurt. What else can we do?” One way to address this issue to use the HAT principle which involves Hearing your people, Addressing their concerns, and Telling everyone improvements you’ve made based on their feedback. Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, many leaders have not fostered a learning environment within their organizations. Getting and using employee feedback is simply not a cultural norm. As a result, important organizational decisions are often made in a

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