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Safety Leadership

By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Company leaders frequently use videos to showcase their support for ongoing safety efforts. These efforts are often well received but sometimes miss their mark. If the leader lacks empathy or seems out of touch these videos can actually do more harm than good. Here are some tips for creating executive safety videos that hit their mark: Drive your message home. Stay on message and keep reinforcing it. No other medium grabs attention like video, but you can quickly lose your audience if you lose message focus. Above all, keep it simple.Keep it short. Long videos put people to sleep.

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. In Part 1 of this blog, active steps were addressed to reinvigorate your behavioral safety program with BBS 2.0. This included transitioning from lengthy (often pencil whipped) checklists and quotas to a more robust program focused on: Conversations over cardsPeople over paperQuality over quantityHigh leadership and employee engagementFixing problemsAdvertising improvementsShowing appreciation for involvement Setting up BBS 2.0 involves shortening and redesigning your card to promote better safety conversations and to address identified problems, involving employees in process design to increase discretionary effort, simplifying how cards are managed and analyzed (more focus on SIF potential), and creating or rebooting

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By Eduardo Lan Organizations and their leaders often work on improving safety culture and safety performance by means of tightening up safety systems and providing both technical and non-technical training. They also engage in safety coaching focused on observing and correcting unsafe behavior and conditions. Although all of this is necessary and important, it is insufficient to generate a safe workplace. Ultimately, it is people who choose to follow rules and procedures and engage in safe work. Thus, no amount of safety training, system improvements and/or behavior management will be sufficient if people don’t want to work safely. Making a Safety Connection:

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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. Effective communication is a cornerstone of strong safety cultures. Leaders who provide safety feedback with empathy and respect create a true learning culture centered on trust. Unfortunately, some leaders develop maladaptive communication patterns which weaken their leadership skills. Four key communication patterns for leaders are explained below. Only one, empathic communication, is ideal. Dominant Communication Style The Dominant communication style is characterized by overbearing, inconsiderate feedback. Dominant communicators often believe: “I am seldom if ever wrong,” “My opinions supersede yours,” and “People who disagree with me are either disloyal or misinformed.” These beliefs lead to these negative behaviors from

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